Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81.
His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness. Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices.
One of the greatest.
Clive Sinclair was often referred to as Uncle Clive by the UK computing media of the day. He is reported to have hated this.
He was also a poker player and made appearances on the UK’s Late Night poker. He was very good at calculating the odds of his hand but played the maths not the people so everyone could see him coming. Nonetheless he was entertaining in his own way. The UK introduced an amazing innovation to televised poker by placing cameras underneath the table so viewers could see the hands the players held. Of course I was rooting for Clive but he couldn’t play poker to win to save his life! For those unsure who Clive is he is the man with glasses with the constantly shrinking pile of chips.
This is the only video I could find with Clive Sinclair playing poker so it will have to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35nZJVmZbH4
End of an era.
Agree, I feel this way.
A man who changed the world and was an interesting character. Never played games on computers but spawned a computer gaming industry. Obsessed with cheap. Not obsessed with quality. It’s been mentioned here before but Micromen is well worth a watch .. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/
The British were very different and creative innovators but don’t seem to do it any more. Maybe ARM was the last bastion.
@lapx432
There’s too many empire building pen pushing I’m Alright Jacks. I’ve reached the point where I’m not even going to discuss anything because of closed minds and greed.
Back then the entry barrier for building your own factory for computer electronics and chips was lower. Now you thousands of millions. It was also easier to tinker with electronics, now the components are very small and the things are protected and more difficult to do reverse engineering.
Something has changed, but I don’t think it is ease of tinkering. Microcontrollers come in standard DIP formats for breadboards and you can skip all that if you buy a single board computer with I/O headers. I think the oligopoly of operating systems and the web spurned an era of apps and sites, i.e. pure software approaches to innovation. This has left hardware to the giants and kept it very uninnovative for the most part. I suspect we need another breakthrough to liberate gadget creativity and it is not just smaller computers. It will be an AI chip, ambient energy computing, a dispersal of the cloud to the edge, user controlled information, or something else very new that opens a floodgate of possibility. Just like the transistor, IC and microprocessor did. But more of the same won’t cut it.
Getting back on point, Sir Clive’s first foray into consumer electronics were those DIY transistor radios you assembled at home. He rode two waves and got stuck being too early to the EV space. Or too cheap. Tesla got that right.
lapx432,
I agree with you that the tech oligopoly has had some negative impacts on innovation. It seems like most new innovation we see is driving us further under their control instead of liberating us. There’s a lot of local innovation that we’ve missed out on because corporations steered the industry away from technology at the edges. Nowhere is this clearer than with “the cloud”, where innovation has largely come at the expense of local & P2P solutions. Most of us can remember when P2P technology was making huge inroads at a time when media companies were dragging their feet on streaming. Ultimately Hollywood killed off decentralized networks by suing their developers & users into oblivion and tech companies eventually came in with centralized services like youtube and netflix. Similarly the IOT innovation has shifted towards proprietary solutions that keep us tethered to vendor locked services. There’s no inherent reason things need to be this way. Opening these up would create tons of new innovation from unexpected sources, But our industry today isn’t setup to promote innovation, it’s setup to promote corporate control. And that makes it really hard for someone to come in with an innovative idea or product that goes against the interests of corporate giants.
The thing that changes was complexity. The ZX80 barely worked. The ZX81, just about worked. The Speccy was a marvel, as it *still* had absolutely no dedicated graphics hardware. It generated everything using the processor. You can’t do that anymore. No one would accept a computer with very low power and capability. It’s like, for example, taking something like the PICO-8 fantasy console vs the PS5.
I would love something like the PICO-8, I would play with it constantly, but mainly because I’m a programmer not because it is technically amazing. Most kids would probably like it, but also want a PS5 or XBox whatever. The barrier of entry to writing games (the thing most of us used on our 8-bits) is just massively skewed away from a layman these days.
C/C++ is a horror and the compilers and tools aren’t much fun either. Back in the day basic or assembler were the go-to and they were much less complicated.
It’s also not just sealed united with massive frameworks to just get started but outsourcing basically stripped the West of a culture of making and repairing things. Now it is rare that anyone does anything or knows anyone who does and there’s no popular media shows or anything to spark interest. Then social media came along and floored everything and sucked everyone’s time.
@HollyB the closest we get these days is embedded devices. But, whilst Arduino is cool, there is no comparison to what we had in the 80’s. It was a golden age. Arduino suffers from over complexity – but it is a single platform. Add in a screen and some buttons, and you can easily make a simple console (and this is a solved problem with a few variants that already exist.)
Raspberry Pi continues in the same spirit that the early UK microcomputers brought to the world, and they’re based in Cambridge. Even the SoC that powers them is designed in Bristol and Cambridge.
I was going to mention the same thing.
You can get a Rpi 400 with an entire keyboard computer (like the old Amiga style), and just hook up to a TV to get going. They are so versatile, it is enabling all kinds of ideas for everyone.
Yes it might be a waste to have a fully fledged computer to monitor your plants’ water levels. But it can be done by any amateur tinkerer. And that is the good thing.
The Raspberry PI also has an expansion port you can do stuff with. Laptop interface to docks, or ExpressCard/Thunderbolt PCI bus stuff not so much.
Yes, the pi is very versatile. You can get a board for HDMI input + use the USB as a keyboard mouse emulator, and you have a network KVM (https://pikvm.org/). Connect the I/O ports to a relay to control the power circuits as well.
Open source, and much cheaper than commercial ones, and runs better, too:
Ex: https://www.amazon.com/Geekworm-Raspberry-Supports-1080p25fps-Compatible/dp/B0899L6ZXZ
sukru,
After reading your post I signed up on kickstarter to get a unit for myself. Coincidentally there’s half a day left in the campaign. Alas, it was declined. The last time this happened I had to spend 90 minutes over two calls during work hours. So it’s not going to happen 🙁
I’ve never done kickstarter before, but I can imagine they get a lot of declined backers because the banks don’t trust them.
https://tobolds.blogspot.com/2020/01/kickstarter-credit-card-declined.html
More than 35 years ago my father bought my brother and I a Spectrum 16K and it determined me pursuing a job in IT and more or less the main road of my life!
Not sure if I should thank him though
Same here, same model. The 48K upgrade was the next year (as in the computer was upgraded, not a new machine)
When I was young I got a ZX81 while my friends all had VIC20 or even C64. So I at first hated it.
But seeing it now with age of 50, I need to thank Sir Clive, as the ZX81 really got me into programming.
The 1980s UK computer scene was wonderful, sometimes chaotic, always exciting. The first computer I ever used was a BBC Micro (at school), but my parents bought me a ZX Spectrum (16K) for Christmas 1983 and I was hooked on computers for life, and a committed Sinclair fanboy too 🙂
I have nearly all of the Sinclair computers (with a Spectrum Next v2 on order), but of them all, the quirky QL is my favourite – it’s still got a thriving if small community and even a modern (ish) FPGA based remake (the Q68).
Lords of Midnight, Ant Attack, Knight Lore… the Spectrum could do amazing things in 48K, in the hands of the master games makers of the time.
Thanks for the good times, Sir Clive.
It’s a shame the Sinclair QL never took off. Delays and quality issues didn’t help but I thought it was fantastic. It looked nice too. With decent standards like OpenGL and ppen document standards there’s no real reason why this type of computer or similar like the Raspberry PI couldn’t become the stadard business machine any small company could make. The needs of a business class versus gaming/art pro class machine are wildly different.