Britain's Steve Jobs.
Not really. That would be Herman Hauser.
Sir Clive Sinclair has died
61–70 of 455 posts
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#62The Spectrum and ZX81 are (rightly) the computers for which Clive Sinclair is remembered. But it was his unsuccessful follow-up, the QL, which inspired a certain Linus Torvalds to write Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Legacy
Reading QL BASIC source code was the first time I was exposed to structured programming. I really liked its BASIC dialect.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#63RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.
Still today when I see picture of old computer, I get memory of the smell and the glow of the screen (Yes, computers at that time had electric smell).
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#64The Spectrum and ZX81 are (rightly) the computers for which Clive Sinclair is remembered. But it was his unsuccessful follow-up, the QL, which inspired a certain Linus Torvalds to write Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Legacy
Has anyone ported ucLinux to the QL? Shouldn't be that hard.. here it is on a minimal system:
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#65RIP
I had a hand-me-down spectrum although I don't remember learning to program on it, just the games. Was probably too young at the time.
So I guess I can credit it for starting my life long love for computer games :)
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#66We 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…
Looking back, maybe the lesson is that there are some occasions when giving up on quality in order to make a cheaper product is an excellent idea, and 8-bit computers in the early 80s was one of those occasions. (While, for example, electric road vehicles in the mid 80s was not.)
Yes. Hooking up with Timex (a very stodgy, cheap product company at the time) was a big move. Ultimately commodore did for them, but it took Sinclair to the US.
The Sinclair car would sell well now the market for escooters is established.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#67The excellent Micro Men docudrama ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men ) has somehow been on Youtube since 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (1h24m) Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by A…
"Games! Games! Everywhere I go games! This is what my lifetime of achievement has been reduced to! Clive Sinclair the man who brought you Jet Set f**ing Willy!" -- Clive Sinclair (fictional), Micro Men
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#68I didn't grow up with the ZX Spectrum, but I managed to buy one (actually a few) a number of years ago, and had a lot of fun playing around in BASIC and then writing programs in assembly. The computer's design is so very simple, it was a nice introduction to low-level computing and I now do that for a career. It's no surprise to me hearing about how many careers started on that system, I somehow think that -- in the age of CodeAcademy and endless free JavaScript courses -- computing is somehow so much less approachable.
Sad news, rest in peace Sir Clive.
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#69RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.
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. Also, they were the first computers for the general public so software had to be invented every single day.
I'm truly grateful to have been part of that, it gives such a perspective...
Re: Sir Clive Sinclair has died
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't particularly surprise me. His computers weren't aimed at middle aged adult engineers. The early calculators weren't all that sophisticated. They were convenience devices rather than serious tools. There's nothing wrong with designing products aimed at people other than yourself.
> His computers weren't aimed at middle aged adult engineers. Maybe not Clive Sinclair's products specifically, but you'd be surprised with what professional engineers could use these 'toys' for. Keep in mind that machines with comparable featuresets could sell for huge prices well into the early and even the mid-1960s, and were used for real, sometimes critically important work.
Turing's Pilot ACE, that Turing considered didn't have enough memory for real work, had 32 mercury delay lines with 1024 bits each: that's four times as much memory as the ZX81.