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Sir Clive Sinclair has died

theguardian.com

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Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#431

Post by rbanffy »

fipar wrote: post #417
rbanffy wrote: post #393

In Brazil we had only clones, as the military dictatorship wanted to bootstrap a local industry. The only exception I remember was HP-85, which was classified as a scientific instrument or something other than a personal computer. The first computer I had at home was a CP-200, a ZX-81 clone with an inverted video signal (white on black) and calculator keys made by Prologica (who also cloned the ZX-80, the Intertec Su…

Here in Uruguay we had the original Spectrums, but Microdigital's clones were more affordable. The TK-90 was my first computer, upgraded a few years later to a TK-95. Those are the computers I learned to program in, so I'm grateful both to Clive Sinclair and to the folks at Microdigital for helping me get into my career!

The TK-95 was pretty neat - a Spectrum that looked like a Commodore Plus 4. Brazilian cloners had the most remarkable design mismatches, such as the TK-2000, a Microprofessor II clone that looked like an Atari 1200, the CP-400, a CoCo clone that looked like a Timex-Sinclair 2068, and that later got an Apple //c like keyboard, and an (improved!) Apple //e (the MicroEngenho Pro) that looked like a PC.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#432

Post by rbanffy »

loudmax wrote: post #412
rbanffy wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge difference between these 8-bit computers and PCs that came later, or even the CP/M machines contemporary to them. When you booted a ZX-80, 81, Spectrum, a VIC-20, a PET, or an Apple II+, you went straight into a BASIC interpreter (or REPL, for the initiated). You could enter a program, or issue commands at will. We rarely think about this, but the first UI you see in those machines is a programming lan…

The first IBM PCs I was exposed to as a kid in the early/mid 1980's booted into BASIC if you didn't insert a disk into the 5.25" floppy drive. I think if you booted in this mode, BASIC had no access to the floppy drive at all so you couldn't save your work (or we kids didn't know how). Better to boot from a floppy, then after it finished booting, swap the floppy for another one to save the silly BASIC games we were w…

> booted into BASIC if you didn't insert a disk into the 5.25" floppy drive.

That's true. The PCs had a BASIC in ROM and a cassette port. That was dropped starting with the XT, which gave the puzzling "NO ROM BASIC" message in 80-column text when the hard disk was not bootable.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#433

Post by GekkePrutser »

renaudg wrote: post #385
GekkePrutser wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I (or rather my parents) got an Atari 800XL and it totally got me in tech. But yeah Atari was much better known for its having consoles (5200 and 7800 I think). I was never interested in those. Especially because the Atari was very unpopular in Europe. The C64 was king. That also made it more expensive which was why I got the 800XL. But it also meant much less software around which is how I started programming.

I grew up in France and the Amstrad was king (same in Spain I believe), the C64 a very very distant second, and nobody had ever seen a Spectrum (thankfully, if I may add : the C64 was special and in spite of its terrible palette deserves all the praise it gets. The Spectrum is a mediocre and incredibly overrated machine compared to the others. It was decent and affordable in 1982, but by 1984 both the C64 and Amstrad…

Understood.

I totally forgot how Europe was not really one thing but totally different countries back then. Not to mention the eastern countries.

I remember when the guys that kidnapped Heineken fled to Paris and they couldn't be extradited back because there was no extradition agreement yet between France and the Netherlands.... :X Such different times.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#434

Post by becurious »

ghoul2 wrote: post #401
antod wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned sine and cosine from the diagrams in the manual years before we covered them in maths. You too? I didn't fully understand them, and thought they had more to do with circles than triangles, but yeah that circle drawing code in the Spectrum manual was my first exposure to sin and cos.

Oh wow. Memories. Sin/Cos were just the gateway drug. To do interesting stuff on the computer, I ended up learning matrix algebra (for rotating things on screen) and even simple calculus (filling out areas) years before they were mentioned at school. When school math caught up, my math grades shot thru the roof - while remaining a below-avg student on everything except math and science. I used to literally bring the…

Wanting to do my own 3D graphics after playing Elite was a strong motivator. I figured out all the rotation maths just by drawing triangles on paper and figuring out what the angles were and therefore the formulas. You might be able to find fragments of graphics math in library books and then photocopy it - I remember reading about hidden surface removal by calculating the normals to the faces and their direction to the viewer. I know I had a rotating cube written in BASIC at some point. I don’t remember learning the cross product in school until A levels though!

My dad took the day off work to take me to the PC show at Earls Court in I think 1988. I spent my hard earned paper round money on the assembler and it massively improved my productivity.

I figured out how to do multiplies and divides on the Z80 while doing my paper round. In retrospect it was just long division but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time!

There were lots of other little math tricks that having a slow processor taught you. If you tried to draw circles by calculating sine and cosine it was too slow. Instead you rotated each point by a fixed angle and then used reflections to use that to plot eight points at a time.

All this stuff is still super useful. I drop down to look at the disassembly of x64 code all the time. Large code bases don’t scare me. You have source code! I had to disassemble games and ROMs to figure out how they worked - printing out fragments and then annotating them. The disassembler took 5KB of space so you’d have to load it in at different addresses to get at all the code.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#435

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ggm wrote: post #18

We had one of his op-amp home hifi kits from before his computing days. I'm not going to gloss things up here, it was shit. Noisy, bad circuit design, bad instructions. Delivery was often fraught: he had no supply chain and always went to market before stocks built up. Sinclair is notorious for overpromising and under delivering. The calculators were highly approximate trig functions, the Sinclair e-car was a joke. I…

If I recall, it was the "micro penis". The 28 days to come was based of then then rather standard 28 day (4 week) delivery time for much of this mail order stuff.

Yeah, some Sinclair products were solid, and others were flakey, but all were cheap and seemed very futuristic at the time.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#436

Post by jacquesm »

richardjdare wrote: post #421
Chris_Newton wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the availability of tech like the Pi now, I wonder what it would take to build a modern, child-friendly device in the same spirit around it: something that offered a fun and instructive introduction to programming, in a box that was self-contained, safe and practically indestructible. Design a case with a sealed keyboard? Expose standard power and display connectors with robust ports? Write some child-friendly…

I'd like to see such a device, but unlike the Pi, or specially contrived educational environments, the 8-bit home computers were the centre of a growing market for games and software, seemingly only a few steps away from your first attempts at working through the manual that came with your computer. This was a huge motivation for many of us who started programming in the home computer days. I remember games that had…

Great points. The gap between the current crop of huge team produced eye candy infused games vs the machine they run on in its bare state is enormous. There are a few exceptions, but unfortunately they only serve to confirm the rule.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#437

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

dboreham wrote: post #429
Wildgoose wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. The BBC was based on Acorn's "Proton" computer which was intended as a successor to the Acorn Atom.

Sounds like you folks weren't around at the time! I mean the whole idea of making a computer in the UK for educational purposes wouldn't have happened. We would have had the Apple II. Acorn was founded as a result of Clive's activities. Go read the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

The whole personal computer market was growing explosively back then, in the UK as well as the US. The first British computer magazine was Personal Computer World which made it's debut in 1978 with the British NASCOM-1 (Z80-based kit) on the cover. Sinclair's SC/MP-based MK-14 had come out the year before. The UK was only slightly behind the US, with the Apple I and KIM-1 having come out in 1976, then Apple II and Commodore PET 1977.

Acorn's first venture was a microprocessor-based fruit machine controller, but back then it was a no-brainer for anyone in the electronics business to get into computing, so pre-BBC we have the Acorn Atom and Sinclair ZX-80 both introduced in 1980.

We can really think the BBC for the foresight in coming up with a national computer education program, and doing it the way they did - by asking for proposals from British companies to build something to their specs (including a color display).

However, even without the BBC no doubt Sinclair and Acorn would both have developed follow-on products to the ZX-80 and Atom. The Apple II was revolutionary in having a color-display, but it was certainly pretty basic, and screaming for someone to do better, which of course Acorn (BBC micro) and Sinclair (ZX Spectrum) both did.

I got my first job out of college at Acorn. I just wrote to them and said I'd like to work for you, and after a token interview they said yes. I guess I can thank the BBC for that since it was the sales of the BBC micro that was causing Acorn to grow so fast. At that time they had just moved out of the Cambridge marketplace location to the old water works on Cherry Hinton Road.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#438

Post by poetaster »

jacquesm wrote: post #80
wiz21c wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started with Apple 2+ but back then there were many computers to be fond of. There were Vic 20, Dragon 32, Amstrad, Thomson TO7, TRS-80, BBC. All were different, all had their capabilities. But what was fun is that everyone had access to the whole thing : hardware, software. Nothing was hidden behind layers of security. You could relate software and hardware in a very natural way. Everybody was fiddling around. Als…

Yes, and today such a perspective is almost impossible to achieve outside the embedded space. Even a Raspberry-Pi is many orders of magnitude more complex than say a Dragon 32 (Color Computer clone, by the way) or a BBC Micro.

Kids and arduinos belong together.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#439

Post by poetaster »

dragonsky67 wrote: post #215
Chris_Newton wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the availability of tech like the Pi now, I wonder what it would take to build a modern, child-friendly device in the same spirit around it: something that offered a fun and instructive introduction to programming, in a box that was self-contained, safe and practically indestructible. Design a case with a sealed keyboard? Expose standard power and display connectors with robust ports? Write some child-friendly…

TLDR - Kids who want to learn to program already have access to the tools to do this... It's just that most kids don't want to learn to program. Wasn't this what the One Laptop Per Child (OTLP) project was trying to achieve? The problem is that when the ZX, C64 etc were around there was no alternative. If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridg…

Ach. I only programmed on the c64. I never enjoyed playing games. Programming sid! Radio shack computers also had a role. Radio shack.

Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died

#440

Post by poetaster »

srcmap wrote: post #218
ghoul2 wrote: post #101

RIP Sir. I was gifted the 48K when I was 6 yrs old - it changed my life. I am here because Sir Sinclair built a machine whose setup instructions said: Now that you have set up the computer, you will want to use it. The rest of this booklet tells you how to do that; but in your impatience you will probably already have started pressing the keys on the keyboard, and discovered that this removes the copyright message. T…

My first compute was ~1984 Timex_Sinclair_1000 $99 and with 2K RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000 It definitively the gateway drug that hook me into computer. Bought $6 book on how to program Sinclair computer and copy the Basic Code from the book into that computer and record that program into audio cassette tape and output to analog TV. Now I working daily with systems that have 128 cores, 256 t…

Me too! Astounded to write sprites to a screen. Objects. Collision detection.
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