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. This is good; _you cannot harm the computer in this way._
Be bold. Experiment. If you get stuck, remember that you can always reset the
computer to the original picture with the copyright message by taking out the '9V
DC IN' plug and putting it back again. This should be the last resort because you
lose all the information in the computer.
"You cannot harm the computer in this way."
That single sentence started a life long journey. I doubt I would have been bold enough at that age to mess around with one of our most valuable possessions.
My story is so similar to yours (and I’m sure many others).
Santa brought my house a Spectrum 48k Lo Profile when I was a kid with a cool KnightRider style keyboard.
Over the years I haven’t seen it talked about much if at all, so I always assumed it was a fairly niche model. After hearing about Sir Clive, I looked it up to find out how many sold and was surprised to learn that it never actually existed as a standalone device.
My dad must have bought the add-on kit, and an 81, and quietly upgraded it and just never told us kids. I’m gonna call him when I’m done typing this.
All I ever wanted to do on it was transcribe the programs from my magazines and try to learn how to make something of my own someday. I’m not sure what I’d be doing now if he had just brought home an Atari, but I almost certainly wouldn’t be in tech.
Cheers, Clive. I hope I see you down the road when the last of my cyan and red bars have run out.
There were many 3rd party add-on keyboards for the 16K/48K Spectrum. I got the Saga 1 Emperor keyboard the Christmas after I got my 48K. You opened the case of the Spectrum, removed the ribbon connectors from the board and then attached the new keyboard and screwed the bottom plus board to it.
There was some magical feeling back then that I think is hard to capture now. The manuals were really good for teaching you - I learned sine and cosine from the diagrams in the manual years before we covered them in maths. The memory layout and system variables were documented, as were all the Z80 opcodes. The first time I used LDIR to transfer data to screen from off screen memory was magical.
You really could master the whole machine and I feel that the limitations actually helped. I would spend summers writing large assembly language programs. Before I had an assembler (HiSoft DevPac) I would hand assemble programs by writing them out on paper and then figuring out the opcodes and calculate the jump relative offsets.
> 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.
Same! I had the Spectrum +2A model, which had a bunch of issues running older software. The OCP Art Package didn't work at all, so I ended up writing a really awful drawing program in BASIC. Figured out how to poll the mouse, detect button presses etc. I drew a toolbar on the left of the screen depicting squares, circles etc. If the mouse button was pressed within one of those, the drawing mode was changed. That would let me draw the objects on screen. That was also where I learned what sin and cos "really" did. Never got the bucket fill to work 'properly' - didn't know if BASIC 'gosub' supported recursion, and I can't even remember if I tried.
Genuine question: I had a 2a+ too, it crashed all the time. Really frustrating. I believe it was because amstrad bought spectrum and started building them cheaper. Did your crash all the time?
Yeah. My friend had a +2 and it was solid. Didn't crash that much, worked with the older 48k software. The +2A was junk but it definitely taught me to be patient and persistent with shitty tech. Seems like my whole career has been based on that.
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 spectrum programming manual with me to all our vacations - using it to hand "assemble" assembly programs into machine code (I had never heard of an assembler - and I won't have had any way to get my hands on one even if I had known about them) so that I could type them in when we got back home.
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.
sin and cos come from trigonometry (from Greek trigōnon, "triangle" and metron, "measure"). But they can be used for lots of other things, including calculating how to rotate an object or draw a circle.
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 language.
And we did program a lot with those machines.
With a CP/M machine or a DOS PC (there were about 2 people in the world with PCs without floppies ;-) ), you boot into an OS. It's not a programming environment, but one designed for starting applications someone else wrote. While most had a BASIC interpreter you could run, it was a standalone program and not THE language of the machine. And experimenting COULD harm the computer - you could delete files from your DOS boot disk, as many of us discovered the hard way.
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 writing.
Later on, we saw models with two floppy drives, so you could leave the floppy containing DOS and BASIC in drive A: and save your work onto the disk in drive B: Eventually, PCs began to come with hard drives and these naturally became drive C: So if you've ever wondered why Windows typically refers to the hard drive containing the OS as drive C: it's because drives A: and B: were the floppy drives.
> 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.
EDIT: I should clarify I meant an Atari game system.
I was just talking about my own experience, but since you ask (and I’m certain this will bore but you did ask):
I got into tech due to having access to that computer, at that time, in an environment that otherwise wouldn’t have been amenable to learning about it at all.
In my case - our family Spectrum was later replaced by a SNES and after that a PS1. After the 48k, I didn’t have access to a PC at home for another decade, and wouldn’t have seen the point of saving enough to get it if not for having the Spectrum.
If I had gotten an Atari to begin with I wouldn’t have had those experiences. I guess something else inspired you along the way - for me it was this.
Thank you for clarification, as other commenter pointed out, Atari computers (like 800 XE/XL) were quite popular in central europe and I haven't seen a game system (like 2600) around, even didn't know until much later that something like that existed.
For a lot of us Brits Sir Clive's machines were our first glimpse of the future. If that doesn’t sound like you, then just stand aside while we mourn our hero.
I respect that. Atari computers for me and Commodores for some were a first glimpse of the future as well. I didn't expect downvotes for honestly asking how would having Sinclair differ from my experience.
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 CPC were wiping the floor with it, and there was no longer a rational reason to prefer it. A bizarre love affair the UK has had with this machine...)
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.
It depends on your definition of "Europe" ;-) The 8/16-bit Atari was (and still is, in some circles) extremely popular in Germany, Poland, and former Czechoslovakia.
Ok I'm from the Netherlands. The C64 was the computer and Atari was a very distant number 2 (or even 3, after the MSX). At least in my circles :) It was much more difficult to get an idea of the whole community back then.
But the C64 was 600 guilders at the time and the Atari was 'dumped' on the market at one point for 200 so it was an easy choice :)
speaking of the atari st, sometime in the late 80s a mail-order atari st software/accessory retailer in the us (i think it was w. brown enterprises or something like that) used to distribute their catalog monthly or quarterly in newsprint had a throwback sinclair special one year at christmas. for $40, you could get an unassembled zx-81 kit where everything had to be soldered in place by hand.
as an enthusiastic eight year old, i was perhaps not as good at soldering as i would have liked. good thing i was lucky enough to have the st to start with.
It's a bit strange to compare the C64 with the Atari ST : the latter was a 16-bit computer, one generation after the C64. It had much better graphics. But it didn't match the Amiga :)
The mainstream 8-bit machine with the best graphics was probably the Amstrad CPC. Here's a comparison with the Spectrum for example : https://imgur.com/a/D7Ocd
When it comes to arcade-style gameplay though, the C64 was often ahead because of its hardware accelerated sprites (and a legendary sound chip that was ahead of its time)
FYI since I've seen this mistake a few times in this discussion: Sir Clive or Sir Clive Sinclair. "Sir" and "Dame" are attached to the given name, never the surname. I don't know why it's different from other titles, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to explain, just states the rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir
Formal surnames attached to a family are a later invention than aristocratic titles. In fact, surnames were originally introduced for the sole purpose of identifying individuals for the purpose of taxing them. When the English tried this on the Welsh, they mass rebelled by all choosing the name "Jones."
This was especially the case for commoners, or non aristocrats, who only had first names, and had to be uniquely identified by their professions, the names of their fathers or a well known relative. If Bob the Builder got a knighthood for exceptional diligence in building siege engines for the noble and perennial cause of annoying the French, then the only real name the title could be attached to would have been "Bob."
The reason it is different for other titles is that those titles belonged to the landed aristocracy, and were generally titles to the fiefdoms of that territory, so titles like Lord Acton, Lord Dunsany, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, referred to actual places. If a higher title is awarded to a commoner who does not possess a hereditary fiefdom, then a fiefdom will be invented for them such as when William Thompson became Lord Kelvin.
Along similar lines, the name of the famous renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci is "Leonardo". He was born in the city of Vinci, so calling him "Leonardo from Vinci" was an easy way of distinguishing him from the other Leonardos around. Nobody during his lifetime would have addressed him as "Da Vinci".
By the same token, it is strange that one of the pioneering visionaries of computing is commonly known as Ada Lovelace, even though her actual surname was 'King' (née Gordon) Her full title was 'Ada King, The Right Honourable The Countess of Lovelace,'
It's one of those "how important is the title" things. According to an article in the workplace magazine at a (now very) former workplace, to celebrate the honours doctorate of Princess Christina, her full title (with doctorate) would be "Princess Christina, Dr Mrs Magnusson".
The explanation given is that the princesshood attached to her, personally. I suspect it is the same with a knighthood.
And the "dr" comes before the "mrs", as it is more prestigious.
But, as with many things, don't think TOO hard about it.
Foreigners get honorary knighthoods: Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Dwight Eisenhower etc. Apparently if you take up British Citizenship it automatically converts.
That seems to be a US rule [1], not a condition imposed by the knighting jurisdiction. Maybe some other countries have similar no-titles rules, but I couldn't find any (might be searching for the wrong terms).
Knighthood is not just a title, it also means you are servant, subject to the monarch. My understanding is you have to become citizen for this.
And while Britain allows dual citizenship, most countries do not. So in most cases you need to rescind your other citizenship in order to be come an actual knight.
Not quite true. If you wished to be addressed by the title of 'Sir' or 'Dame,' you would have to be a British citizen, but a non citizen can add letters after their name, e.g. Bob Geldof, KBE, remains a citizen of the Republic of Ireland.
I believe Commonwealth citizens (at least, those from countries that share a monarch with the UK) are entitled to use 'Sir' or 'Dame' as well: though Canada, for one, seems to take a dim view of its citizens accepting British honours.
Mine was smuggled into the country due to currency crises and import/export controls. I owe thanks to my mother for arranging that so that I could graduate from writing programs using paper and pencil to using an actual computer.
Thank you Psion's Horizons cassette for teaching me about computer architecture. Thank you Toni Baker for teaching me Z80 assembly so I could program x86 with no problem.
But, thank you Sir Clive, above all, for making such an affordable and approachable computer. What I learned on the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum is still with me.
In my country, there weren't any originals, even smuggled. Clones were built and sold by local engineers, using smuggled schematics and photocopies of circuit board layouts.
The one I first get my hands on as a kid was built by my elder brother, an electronics engineer. I was so fascinated, I remember secretly sneaking into his house when he was at work to play the games.
He taught me electronics and encouraged me to understand the schematics and build one for myself. And I eventually did, but I got something wrong, and it worked unstable. I never got patience to find the cause and get it right.
But I definitely got charmed by electronics and programming because of this. Thank you, Sir Sinclair. And thank you, my brother.
Mine was a second-hand smuggled ZX Spectrum 48k. The first computer I ever saw was Galaksija, at the school where my mom and dad worked. The school later got a Lola 8, but by then my mom and dad bought me a used Spectrum and I was happily plugging the depths of BASIC, and later assembly.
Farewell, Sir Clive, and thank you for some of my best memories.
> "You cannot harm the computer in this way. Be bold."
What an empathetic, caring, tactful way to teach tech to kids. The whole instruction is like that, a really well composed message. No hypes or overpowering, just guiding children to quiet explorations.
It's also an important message to parents, telling them that it's OK to let their kids play with an expensive piece of tech without the danger of them breaking it.
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 threads, 256-768MB of L3 cache memory, 1TB DDR+ 8xGPUs each with 32GB of HBM.
I still think I got more "High/Rush" from the sinclair 1000 37 years ago than the latest 128C/256T CPU. Now is a job, back than it was an adventure, exploration to whole new world!
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, too. That keyboard was too much, but you kept at it! And if you even looked at that memory module funny, it would short out and you'd have to stay up all night and re-key everything back in by hand. We got more use out of the TRS-80s at school, but having a machine to ourselves at home was influential.
I had a Timex/Sinclar 1000 with the 64K memory module that sort of worked half the time. Zot, there it goes again and I have to type everything in again because I didn't save it to tape.
Same here, but it also reminds me, the first programming lesson in school (not on a Spectrum but on an IBM PC), our teacher told us "there's nothing you can do with code that will harm the computer in any way" (these computers did not have a hard drive so you could not wipe anything).
This immediately set us on a quest to find ways to prove him wrong - the basis of hacker thinking. Not that we did find anything with our limited knowledge but it was a nice thought exercise (our best bet was to create a program that constantly switches between graphics mode and text mode. The monitor would make a clicking sound when this happened, so we figured if we do this enough times we'll probably burn some circuit, but we never tried it).
There was a way you could burn out a chip in the C64 with a poke command IIRC. And you could break the tape advance relay in the MSX by switching it on and off rapidly.
It's much harder with early 80s hardware (and no internet to learn this stuff) than with modern hardware. These machines were stateless beasts. You could either damage the BIOS with writing to it somehow, or fry some hardware. I suppose you could damage the floppy drive head with very intensive seek commands in a tight loop, or something like that.
I managed to kill one PC floppy drive by switching the motor that rotated the disk and not switching it off (because my crash handling was nonexistent and floppy read routine I was writing crashed somehow). I guess the disk rotation motor (or its switching circuitry) overheated (after all, it was supposed to be used with a reasonably low duty cycle): the drive would no longer rotate the floppy (so I could also not tell if the rest of the drive still worked).
Oh the MSX had it too for sure.. The TRS-80 was almost not sold here in Europe. We had some Radio Shack shops (called Tandy) here but the TRS-80 wasn't a big thing. We only got the LCD model.
But it was exactly the same thing yeah.. Jiggling the relay super fast would fuse it. One of my friends had this happen to his MSX 1, I think there was some early 'malware' in a copied game or something. But at least a relay replacement is not difficult or expensive.
Remember this well. Though my three line programs were a little more mischievous. When Boots the Chemist weirdly started selling computers I thought it was fun to go in on a Saturday afternoon and type:
10 PRINT "Boots is rubbish, shop at Dixons.";
20 GOTO 10
I thought I was a genius. Probably should have got a slimy career in adtech after that, but thankfully I didn't.
the WHSmiths shops had some of their computers sound amplified through the cassette players
a mischeivious program of
10 pause (big number)
20 beep
30 goto 20
it would sit there for ages until a key was pressed, then beep very loud when a person - who's very first touch of a computers keyboard, would seemly set an alarm off.
the faces of the customers thinking they've broke the computer is still etched in my mind
This seems quite likely to have been inspired by some of the intro documentation for the Apple ][, apparently written by Jef Raskin. Short comment about it from a few years ago:
Dad bought a ZX Spectrum. I was very curious and wanted to play with it. Dad gave me the huge manual and told me to study that first. I didn't. Instead i tried every key and this started my huge computer adventure that will probably only end when i'm dead.
Amazing to see the amount of similar comments here. I too grew up with the ZX (and later an Atari ST), and made my first program (a game, of course). It felt very zen to write it, play it, and then being okay with not saving it when I cut the power.
I've long suspected that Star Trek trained people to be fearful of pressing the wrong key, as it would always send a huge electric shock through the hapless keyboardist and send him flying across the bridge.
I've said before on HN that fear of what may happen stops many people from experimenting with computers, coupled with locking everything down and hiding the non-consumer-friendly aspects out of site.
Starting with a blinking cursor, the worst you could do was format a floppy disk with your work on it - or blow a fuse because you were tinkering with the internals.
It works on that generation of machines, but when I was young I carried that philosophy into learning Unix in the early 90s, and some of the results weren't as positive. It was a net positive, though.
It's fascinating how empowering knowing just how safe you are can be.
I used nearly this exact phrase the other day with someone who appeared fearful of a dashboard tool and once they realised they could basically do no harm whatsoever it freed them up to experiment and learn.
Well, it's not strictly true at all that you are totally safe, I think, but you have to behave as if you are or you get nowhere. That's quite a metaphor for life in general.
I grew up with a PC and that already wasn't as straightforward; we were Told in no uncertain terms that we should make sure to use the 'shut down' option in the menu or else Bad Things would happen (= disk parking). And changes in the system were permanent, so I never really experimented with the computer until my mid-to-late teens when I went to school for computer stuff - my dad was the expert until then.
I saw something similar with my gf in uni. She hadn't had a computer at home and she was really intimidated by the computers there. It wasn't just because she was unused to them, but she was petrified of breaking them. It wasn't until I let her use mine and got her to relax about breaking it that she really started to learn how to use them properly.
I love that attitude and I totally agree with the sentiment. Just experimenting is how you learn best.
Especially in those days it was a unique sentiment. Most devices came with long instruction manuals which people would actually read, and even schematics. Until the home computer came, only educated professionals were allowed to go near computers. I think Steven Levy called them the IBM high priests in his book "Hackers". It's old but a good read.
Now nobody reads the couple of pages that come with their new phone. Good.
I try to keep this in mind with my kids. I try to not worry too much about them breaking stuff, and where possible put them in situations where they can experiment and try stuff without risk of screwing something up. Although I also like to repair stuff, and I think there's something nice about them breaking it and then us fixing it.
It's why things like the RPi and the Micro-bit are so cool for education, you can experiment with them and if it all goes wrong just reset them and carry on.
However I'm also concious that I and my kids are lucky to be able to absorb any financial/time cost from them breaking something. Not everyone can.
It was easily the most popular home computer in the UK at that time, though I imagine a large number of people started with the BBC - via the school integration.
I still have my manuals, and recently paid for a print of the keyboard to hang on my wall. (I almost bought a dead 48K model, and framed it, but getting a poster/print was slightly cheaper.)
I had a similar experience with a ZX-81 (and a TS-2000). What's interesting related to your "You cannot harm the computer in this way" quote is that I see that experimentation embodied in my kids (who grew up with a PC in the house) but also the anti-pattern in my mother and my in-laws who clearly didn't have a computer in the house until middle-age (note that I left my dad our of this category as he was an EE building embedded systems for instrumentation for much of his career).
I'm curious how a generation of us grew up curious what a computing machine could do, just because it had all those fancy keys to press. They pushed us into creating stuff.
But these days, we have smartphones with a hundred times more computing power, but it fails to trigger any creative curiosity into kids these days.
Maybe I'm wrong, but is there any co-relation with how many ways the device could interact with the operator vs the level of creative curiosity it triggers?
I'd bet it is, because I did the same (in a 240V country). I knew it wouldn't end well and did it anyway because, I guess, as a kid I was used to the world not letting bad things happen so didn't really believe it would. There isn't a switch on the toaster or TV that bricks it after all.
Anyway got a spark and the magic smoke, and bought a new PSU from a guy at school for $15.
But your soul dies slowly as you have to reload your program from tape cassette. I remember learning machine code on my Spectrum and having to reload the assembler several times an hour.
The most dispiriting day of my childhood was when I discovered that the write connection to the tape deck on my Spectrum +2a had failed and the day's worth of code I'd written had been lost and I had a blank tape.
heh. I fortunately did not know things like assemblers existed. I hand-assembled my assembly to machine code using the mnemonic table provided at the end of the programming manual. I had an entire diary full of columns of hand-encoded hex numbers (and a decimal column - you needed the numbers in decimal to "poke" them into RAM).
The keyboard itself was almost the Spectrum's own manual, listing all the BASIC keywords - because to enter one of the keywords, you just typed the key with that label. That made programming possible for a preschooler.
The 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:
Whilst my first programs was on the acorn atom, Zx80 and zx81
the zx spectrum hold a special place in my memory because the manual was fantasic - I learnt almost everything from it.
and then progressed on to typing the monterous (using the aweful rubber keys) blocks of programs from magazines - THEN I learnt how to debug and rewrite the games that I'd just typed in from the magazines, because they never worked first time.
Oh wow, it turns out the QL hardware was reused in the ICL One Per Desk. We had one at home growing up (for some reason?!). Kind of funny to read that it's greatest success was in networking hundreds of bingo halls together across the UK.
The QL failed because (amongst other things) they had outsourced the basic interpreter to another company for the ZX series and decided to bring it in house for the QL :(
I attribute the decline of the UK’s domestic computer industry (including Acorn) to the scene as-a-whole being either uninterested or unwilling to embrace PC-compatibility. Had they done that, I think they could have secured better distribution deals, especially in education, but eve more-so overseas. What if Sinclair, Amstrad, and Acorn were able to establish themselves as a third-way (like Amiga and Be almost did) alternative to both IBM PCs and Apple Macintosh?
I know that being PC-compatible would automatically make them commodity, but if they had positioned themselves as a value-added “PC+” platform and focused on competing in areas where PC clones at-the-time sucked and alternatives like Amiga reigned (e.g. Video Toaster), could they have succeeded? What if they merged with Quantel and made their Paintbox more affordable sooner? That would have taken the wind out of Adobe’s Photoshop sails.
———
I feel the UK computing scene suffered from a lack-of-ambition. The world is too small for each medium-sized country to have their own computer-makers, so it’s important to go-big early and establish footholds in all the major markets - which isn’t something anyone in the UK except ARM (and to an extent: Sinclair) has done.
Various people tried the PC+ scheme in the US and had limited success. Tandy probably came closest.
Sinclair and Acorn were extremely ambitious. Acorn even sold an NTSC conversion of the BBC Micro in the US for a short time. My theory is they were undercapitalized.
Acorn attempted this but suffered from various US "regulations" that seemed designed to keep non-US companies out of the USA, or at least make it difficult for them to operate.
One example is the RF rules that hampered the Acorn Archimedes.
No: The BASIC on the QL was one of the best BASICs ever. What killed the QL was imho those fucking awful microdrive cartridges. Unreliable, slow and quick to fail.
Yep, the retelling I heard from the David Karlin (I worked with him after Sinclair went bust) was the micro drives didn't meet the spec that he designed the gate array to.
The only real hardware bit that we could rib him about was the serial port design, but I can't even remember what was wrong with it now (handshaking?)
I do wish I'd snaffled the QDOS listing that got thrown away during an office move.
I remember at university writing a couple of little programmes that allowed the swanky BBC Model B (with no floppy drive) to use the Spectrum as a file server, over the serial interface.
Someone did eventually bring out a floppy-drive peripheral for the QL, but it was basically too late to save the platform. Also, iirc, you needed to be drop-dead rich to afford one.
Many people did, and the drives were not expensive at all really, not if you ever popped over to a swapfest (I had one, and money was very tight in our family at the time, but Dad was adamant that we have a computer to play with--- forward thinking, plus he wanted to play with it too).
But you're right-- it was too late to save the QL by then.
Of course, that wasn't the only problem with the machine, not by a longshot. I did my very first commercial hardware hacking in high school building/selling plug-in 'spiderboards' to protect the oh-so-fragile ZX8301 chips, and got my first oscilloscope in college to chase down all the ground bounce that was still occasionally killing the NMOS ROMs...
There were long delays in delivery if you ordered a Sinclair QL, to the point that people speculated that 'QL' stood for a long 'Q' and an 'L' of a wait!
Sinclair made computers which a kid like me, not from a rich family, could afford. Yeah the computers were of cheap quality with a crappy keyboard - but he changed home computers from being a plaything for the rich to be available to everybody. A lot of clever design went into making them as cheap as possible.
Hero worship because he brought computers to the masses. The cost cutting was the point - there were already computers that cost the same as a nice TV, this was a computer a kid could get for Christmas. For many of us that oppertunity was the start of a lifelong passion.
This isn't the time and place for polite shallow mutterings either. We're not at the funeral here, or barging in on the bereaved. If we're going to have a discussion thread about his legacy, it should be a fair one.
Yeah it is. The guy had a rabid cult following much like Musk does today. He had many financial victims with poorly engineered products.
He made a very valuable contribution to the industry however.
People have rose tinted glasses about it but the reality was products not turning up, not shipping, not working and a sour taste for many against technology.
He even bought faulty RAM in which was discarded for the Spectrums and sold the ones that booted.
The only reason it worked out for a lot of people is we have pretty strong consumer protection laws here!
He brought faulty RAM that had errors just in a single half and then he used just the other (correct) half - nothing wrong with that.
Such cost cutting made it affordable to a large number of people - had it costed a couple of time more it could be a hard sell for my Eastern European parents. Fortunately, that didn't happen and now, 40 years later, I have a nice career and I'm still enjoying dealing with computers just as when I was a kid with ZX Spectrum.
Actually that’s not strictly true. Test methodology was “see if it worked and ship”. Many many of the computers were returned and replaced immediately. And a lot of the new ones you got were the broken ones which were sent back and the chips replaced. I’ve seen a new one which still didn’t work which had been reworked at least once and sold as new again.
My father had a nice business for a few years doing adhoc repairs and then started his own PC import business in the end with the cash he earned fixing people’s stuff. That was a world of difference.
Agree with your comments about affordability. As you say about Eastern Europe, even the clones were more expensive I understand.
It's not that unique in the computer business. I used to build PCs for a shop during the 90s internet craze. When we got a box of Quantum Bigfoot HDDs we'd be lucky if half of them worked. Someone who cared about quality wouldn't put that crap in a computer. But it was cheap. The soundcards we sold were so cheap they were cut diagonally to save on PCB material.
Though this shop just did it for profit margin. Sinclair did it to make computers available to the masses.
Yes, it's very common. Even companies like Intel sometimes test a CPU at umpteen GHz, then retest the ones that fail at umpteen/2 GHz and sell them at a lower price if they work reliably at the lower speed.
Yes and no. The 48k was a bit of a disaster to start with. Lots of failures, bugs galore, a full recall due to power supply shock hazard. Not to mention the horrible keyboard.
When you look at the microscopic view of owning one computer from him that worked it does somewhat rose tint the overall view of things which was not good.
these are extremely minor issues when you look at the bigger picture - you could argue that Clive kick started the multi billion pound games industry by getting young people interested in computer games
sure it would have happened anyway, but he definately made it happen earlier
almost 100% of the people who work in IT (in the UK) over a certain age had one of his affordable computers
Yet the commoditization of computers he brought forth was a genuine gift to the people that opened a lot of doors for many. He has positively influenced the lives of many.
My Dad had a QL at home and even had a small business selling software for it back in the day. It was a bit of a daunting machine for me as a child (I got more mileage out of the BBC Micro), but I have fond memories of playing around with it, and loading games off of microdrives.
I have memories of my father using a QL. also, he was very lucky as he got a late version with many bugs fixed.
He like it too, that when got a IBM PC compatible with a 8086, he thought that the QL was better.
After the first couple of biscuit-tin amplifiers and some bare board products like the Mk14, design became a Sinclair USP.
He was a kind of proto-Jobs. While most of the competition made boring-looking devices, Sinclair hired some of the top people for the time and made products that stood out because they looked exciting.
The ZX series are the best known, but there were precursors like the Black Watch and the Sovereign Calculator.
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 Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro.
The Centre for Computing History videoed Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser watching Micro Men and chatting for the tenth anniversary of its broadcast:
My father knew Clive Sinclair thanks to the Cambridge tech/hifi scene at the time, and we also used to live near him in Madingley. Somewhere in my dad's shed there's a ZX81 with a single digit serial number (amongst a lot of other similar machines: Jupiter Ace, ZX80, various Spectrums with weird and wacky keyboards, Dragon 32, Commodore 16 Plus/4, etc).
A bit later we also lived next door to Franni and Geoff Vincent who were part of the Acorn team that designed and built the BBC Micro. They used to let me come round (aged 8 or so) and use their Model B whenever I wanted.
Sir Clive Sinclair had a HUGE influence on my life. RIP.
"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
Micro Men is so good. I met the director once at an event and asked him if it would ever be released on DVD or equivalent and it sounded like that was unlikely, so it's great to see it available on YouTube.
It is interesting to watch the video of the actual interview that they recreate in the movie. The movie Sinclair seems a bit upset while the real life one was smiling a lot and being very friendly.
Very sad. For American readers it may be difficult to explain quite how much Sir Clive and his products shaped tech and a large number of British engineers. So many of us found a love of programming from Sir Clive's computers.
The beautiful thing about Sir Clive's products (particularly the ZX Spectrum) was that they were cheap. Basically a Zilog Z80, a ROM, RAM, membrane keyboard, and a single asic. No sound chip, no video chip, no disk drive, bring your own tape deck (connected directly to Z80 IO pins).
By designing for cost Sinclair Research were able to make a home computer that working class families could afford. Rather than being an enthusiast purchase, kids could bug their parents for one - and millions did. Thousands of these kids turned their programming experiments into businesses and careers.
When I went to college in Canada, my hosts where I rented a room had a ZX81 that they weren't using and I was allowed to put it in my room. What a fun world to come home to explore the inner workings. It had a printer and I figured out how to print graphics. I was overjoyed with my success. What a fun machine to hack around on! RIP
As an American with British ties I will say a legend has passed away. My British side has a better recollection of computers than my American side from that era in large part due to his innovation.
RIP. 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...
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.
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 software that might be flashier than what we had but was still in essence a guided programming environment with a simple but effective language? Maybe include some sort of USB connectivity, primarily so that older kids could also control external devices like light boards or robot arms or turtles? I haven’t come across anyone trying to do this that I can recall, but I feel like there’s an entire ecosystem’s worth of startup ideas in this space just waiting to be implemented. Maybe the next Sir Clive is out there somewhere to get it started.
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 cartridge, or you could type them in from a magazine (several times) and hopefully save them to a cassette.
These days, if you want to play a game, you reach for your phone and install a free one that is far more capable than anything you could develop yourself.
The real trick would be to create a development environment that will run on a phone. Apple have gone somewhat down this path with their Swift Playgrounds and you could always work with Scratch and similar systems or you could even do something in html/javascript, but none of these really give the same imperative to learning how that the original home computers did. You really need a system that lets you develop a full program, share it with your friends and modify (and break) it.
You know the reality is that we do have these systems, and kids that are interested in doing anything other than just playing games can access them with a minimum of problems. I wonder how many of those ZX Spectrums, C64 etc were given to kids, who on finding that they had to actually do some work to make them do anything useful relegated them to a shoebox under the TV. It is possible that for every positive story about "kid learns programming from ZX Spectrum" you would have a hundred stories of kid calling ZX Spectrum a piece of crap.
> If you wanted to play games, you could either shell out for more hardware and purchase the games on disk or cartridge, or you could type them in from a magazine
There was a third possibility: you could figure out how the game worked and write your own version from scratch. I learned so much about programming by writing a Pac-Man clone on a ZX Spectrum simply because I didn't have the pocket money to keep feeding the arcade machines, or even to buy someone else's knock-off version on a cassette tape. I quickly got bored of typing in other peoples' programs from a magazine, much more fun to write your own.
My memory, it was generally true about the C64/ZX split being about gamers vs coders; however I did know some "Speccy" owners (generally with slightly-better-off parents) who had lots and lots of different games on tapes and did nothing but play games on the machine. Yes, I "borrowed" a lot of games by copying the tapes on an Amstrad dual-cassette stereo system (thank you, Sir Alan!) but I'm really glad that generally, scarcity of an "easy option" forced me into a place where I had to write my own code.
I was like that too. Kids with C64 had plenty of games, and having better sound and graphics they just played games. I always advanced in coding when playing games became unrewarding/boring.
>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 cartridge, or you could type them in from a magazine (several times) and hopefully save them to a cassette.
I agree. When there is no shortcut you find much more motivation to go the hard way. I was in that exact position when I was 10, and I kept messing up copying the basic lines from books so I got a book for kids that teached me basic, this way I was making my own code and could debug it. I made simple games completely from scratch that way it was how I got into programing.
I can understand that now with so many shortcuts available for kids the same motivation is not there anymore. It's like once you get access to cheat codes in a game that makes you invincible and gives you infinite money, the challenge is not there and you lose interest.
> I wonder how many of those ZX Spectrums, C64 etc were given to kids, who on finding that they had to actually do some work to make them do anything useful relegated them to a shoebox under the TV.
In my experience, that tended to happen more with the kids who got the C64s. Those were the ones with color TVs and Betamax at home, too.
I had a Spectrum (couldn't afford a C64), but my friends had C64s. I was the only one I knew who ever did coding though. The C64s were still used lots, but just for games.
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 a note on the back of the box asking for programmers to send their work to the publisher's address for consideration. Magazines advertised commercial software obviously sold by one guy out of his house, and featured interviews with programmers who were only a few years older than me. If you owned a home computer and could program it, you imagined you could access this growing and exciting world, and maybe make some money.
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.
The 400 isn’t quite what I had in mind. I was thinking more of a device usable even by the under-10 group, with a simpler and more robust physical design and, crucially, the kind of instant-on, guided programming environment the early home “PCs” had.
With early Sinclair systems, each key on the keyboard would act like modern auto-complete: you would start typing and keywords would appear almost magically. On the BBC Micro, you powered on and heard the trademark beeeeep-beep and were instantly presented with a prompt where you could start typing a program or other commands. Everything in those systems was geared towards immediate responses and inviting you to start programming them straight away.
It's a very interesting device in a very Spectrum-like form factor. It also has its limitations, much like the Spectrum itself - you're not going to code comfortably in resource-intensive languages with it.
I started with an Amiga 500. Wonderful machine, but the lack of a built in compiler/programming language that allowed you to access the power of the machine was a lack that limited your learning. I think it resulted in me taking a very wide path to my current programming job than would otherwise have happened. Looking back, there is a lot of power in having to work hard to get a program from a magazine entered and working. You are forced to learn something about programming.
When I was about 15 me and my friends put what little money we had together and send it out I think to England or Germany to buy a license for the Amiga C compiler. 3 months later it arrived in the mail. I could not wait so I actually learned C in those 3 months, straight form K&R, without access to the compiler. It was all so gloriously magic back then. I do not think I ever enjoyed a piece of software as much as that compiler.
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.
Indeed. After I saw this sad news and your comment, I was reminded of an earlier HN comment¹ I had written about the joy I experienced as a young child learning to program on a ZX81 and my regret that my children’s generation are not growing up with the same opportunities. I’m not sure there is any analogous device I could give my kids when they reach the same age any more. Any device they do eventually get when they’re older seems more likely to have preinstalled social media apps and regular security updates than a preinstalled programming environment and a line in the manual reassuring you that nothing you type will break your computer. Something certainly has been lost.
I had to give a talk on coding a few years back. I brought in my Acorn Atom to show people what I started on. 12Kb of memory, no hard drive, no sound card, no network, monochrome display. The BASIC language it knew had maybe 10 keywords, and the Assember had another couple dozen commands. Everything in the computer was simple, easily understood, and robust (turning the computer off wiped everything except the ROM - essentially a factory reset every time).
I compared that to my phone - 256Gb of storage, 32Gb of memory, plus sound, graphics, wifi, and the kitchen sink.
Learning on the Atom was easy because it was so simple. And as I mastered it, so computers became more complicated. It was, in many ways, the perfect method of teaching tech. A new programmer nowadays has to learn so much so quickly to be able to write anything useful, it's often overwhelming. Trying to teach my gf how to code was painful because we were always bumping into rabbit holes of complexity, which we could either go down and waste whole days, or avoid and leave an area of ignorance that would bite later. I never had that problem. It's humbling - I wonder if I would even be a dev if I hadn't had that advantage?
Agreed. I taught myself to program on my Acorn Atom, I still remember the "Aha!" moment when I finally understood what I needed to make a simple "Space Invaders" program on my (minimal) 2K Acorn Atom, (later sold by "Bug Byte" software).
I wrote a version of Missile Command that I got reasonably working, until we got called down for tea and my cousin "helpfully" turned the computer off.
What a great learning tool the early personal computers were.
It's a pipe dream, but I would have loved to have given my children a simpler device and restricted the internet until they were capable of assembling the hardware/software to get connected.
These devices exist today as VMs. But, what I think we've lost is the boredom and free time that drives that type of learning and discovery.
My 8 and 10 year old kids have just discovered the Roblox editor. They are building mutiplayer 3d worlds.
The 8 year old is the most enthusiastic about it. He is second grade at school and knows addition, and subtraction, and his times tables but has not started multiplying more than single digit numbers.
Right now they are mostly placing blocks around and decorating the world, but they are very interested in the lua scripting. I have no doubt that they will soon be attempting to read that read the Roblox API docs. Actually, they'll be watching youtube video tutorials.
Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that while the old 8 bit days are gone, there are plenty of ways kids can build things and tinker with computers and software.
People have different expectations to computers nowadays. They aren't isolated curiosities any more, you can't capture the environment of the 1980s home computer revolution.
If you do want a similar experience (at least superficially) to a spectrum 48k, get a Pi 400, don't connect it to a network, but don't expect the same outcome as you had -- the world is different, there are very different things competing for attention, and different rewards for time spent.
Started with a ZX-81 clone. The factor I liked most was the attention with the manuals, they really cared to teach the basics of programming, even low-level things, to the layman.
I memorized the ZX81 (and Spectrum) manuals back to front. Around age 11 I used to write out assembly long-hand and "poke" the OpCodes into memory to write programs and drivers. I really credit what has now been a long and happy career in software development to the affordable computers Sir Clive developed. (My family was pretty poor growing up, but I convinced my Dad to spring the 80 pounds or so for one after I borrowed a friend's and took to it).
What you could do was limited enough that you could master it, and I really think that's a good thing for education and motivation. When I think about teaching my kids to program today, I effectively get "choice paralysis" from all the paths I could go down and the options within easy reach.
Same here - writing code in assembly, on paper, then looking up the opcodes in the back of the orange manual.
Having to write out the bytes and using DATA to store them, and POKE to put them in-memory. Calculating the JMP offsets by hand, and taking the time to SAVE to cassette before running it for the first time.
I didn't write much assembly, but I spent a hell of a long time removing protection from Spectrum games, and patching the code to give me infinite lives/time.
Same here, I owe him my whole career. One day I came to my house at nine years old and saw that metal with ruber thing and lots of colours that my father bought. Wonder and awe, as you said. One of the best times of my life was understanding and coding an assembler routine to achieve 64 columns. RIP Sir Clive Sinclair. So sad news.
You could replace many ICs with just your fingers or a screwdriver. On the C64 the main ones like the CPU, graphics, sound and IO chips were in sockets, and that was similar on many home computers of the era.
I freaked my parents out by switching chips between our C64 and the floppy drive to see what would happen (they had almost compatible CPUs and IO chips - many things kept working).
Also: Repairing by touching chips to see if any of them were unusually hot was fun...
EDIT: to bring this more back to the thread subject, as a Commodore user at the time we used to make fun of the Spectrums, but they absolutely had a massive impact on the market. Including on competitors - e.g. Tramiel got spooked by how cheap the ZX81 was, and it certainly contributed to choices made at Commodore. Sinclair's influence as a result spread wide and far beyond the sizable direct influence of his own machines.
Only a couple of years a go I replaced a blown cap on a motherboard. It was faster than replacing it with a new board because I happened to have a cap with the right specs. So in principle you still could do this today. If you don't use your soldering iron on the CPU or the RAM or ... well, lots of other parts.
Sir Clive Sinclair was a hero of mine for realizing that computing could be for children of poorer families. The Apple II is lauded for the classroom, but it was way too expensive for my family. Without people like Sir Sinclair, I and many other would have never been able to enter this profession we so love.
Apple gets the credit, but it was Sir Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, and TI that raised a generation in computing.
Yes! As a kid, I was jealous of friends who had 'better' computers, but the appeal of the spectrum was seeing how it could be pushed to its limits and do amazing things.
Learning BASIC and then assembly on the spectrum got me hooked on computers, all thanks to Sir Clive making it possible and affordable.
Our first computer was БАЙТ - Belarussian clone of ZX Spectrum. It was mid to late 90s and it was already super obsolete at the time, but every time we took it out and connected to TV it filled me with a sense of wonder and unknown that started my fascination with electronics and programming. What an amazing impact Sir Clive had on so many lives.
Even my nickname on this very website comes from my favourite game I played on Spectrum when I was a kid. Now I'm a game developer myself.
Very similarly mine was Santaka, another Belarusian clone of a 48K. Had that horrid Cyrillic font instead of lowercase Latin.
It was built by a former military supplier plant so its heritage stuck out in unexpected details (like 8x 2Kb ceramic package gold plated ROMs). I've upgraded it over the years with memory expansion, printer port, "real" keyboard, sound chip and disk controller. It grew into quite a hairball!
Saw those ROMs in my Romanian clone called Cobra (Computers Brașov). Young me was fascinated by the way they were encased in some sort of clear epoxy instead of black ceramic. You can read more about the clone here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/the-underground-stor...
At some point in the mid to late 1980s, there was a craze in Minsk of seemingly everyone home-building ZX Spectrum clones. Probably the Ленинград design, though I'm not entirely sure. As I recall, all the components were off-the-shelf Soviet parts (K155 TTL series), so no ULA or anything fancy like that.
Yes it was, however when the factories started picking up they usually didn't use Leningrad version. Mine was a from scratch design (it came with schematics), and sure all of them emulated ULA with discrete logic - but usually not as half assed as Leningrad did.
This was the huge advantage of Spectrum: the whole thing could be built from COTS components and the only imported part in USSR had to be the Z80A. None of those Sid, Frodo, Bilbo etc ASICs.
The ZX Spectrum was my first computer. So many good moments with it... It's hard to describe it for the current generation - if you were there, you know what I mean.
Sir Clive Sinclair had an enormous impact on my life and career. Today is a sad day for me :(
It was also the first for me. It was expensive for my family to have but my school buddy had it and naturally we spent all our free time in their house typing programs from the large book. Fun times. RIP.
Oh dear. My parents smuggled (!) a ZX Spectrum in 1985 into Hungary and they knew they will do it and while they were on their tour to Western Germany I was at a summer daytime camp at the nearby community center where we learned BASIC on them. And , of course , played games , mostly Horace And The Spiders :) I was ten.
Fast forward two decades and I was contributing to Drupal core (first core commit 17 years ago was https://i.imgur.com/ZGemjVc.png although Dries forgot to credit me, boo :) ) and another five years later I was working on a Top 100 website.
One of the legacies from Sinclair's era is the profound understanding of the power of young hobbyists working on cheap computers, and how that leads to a workforce trained in STEM. This idea directly inspired the development of the Raspberry Pi which has been beyond wildly successful and may be the most popular line of British computers in history.
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.
I also owe a lot to Sir Clive. At 13 years old in 1981, My friends father bought a ZX80 for him. Some days after, I was at his home and he explained, what he had figured out about it. The same evening at home, I wrote my first program on paper (a Russian roulette game, I think). I couldn't wait until the next day, when I came home to him again, to see if my program would work. After some work we got it working :-) and I was hooked. I began buying the magazines "Your Computer" and "Byte", and even though English was a foreign language, I managed to understand some of it. A few months later, on my birthday I got my own ZX81, and after that an Acorn Atom, and then an Acorn Electron, and then a PC clone, and then... Still working with programming, now in data science :-)
Uh oh. Soviet ZX spectrum clone was my first computer, and the first I ever wrote a program on using a built-in basic at an age of 10. This was a magnificent device that brought me a lot of joy. Rest In Peace, Sir Clive.
Now, I'll go play some Manic Miner or Nether Earth in your honor.
Absolutely. During a time when most any other computer was an unreachable dream in communist Poland the ZX Spectrum was a gift to the emerging geek community here. I was lucky to have received my own in 1984. I was one of the first in the neighbourhood to get one. It literally cost about 2 months of my dad's wages. Those were the days.
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 curse the membrane keyboard to this day.
Smart man. Crap product. A joke of the times from British TV: the Sinclair digital penis: 1 inch long and takes 28 days to come.
I understand how many people bootstrapped into computing from the spectrum btw, a friend made significant money from writing sw for it. Tiny compilers, games.
> The calculators were highly approximate trig functions
This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one. He did this by using a chip designed for four-function math and using a series of brilliant (if, yes, slow and approximate) hacks to fit arithmetic and trigonometry in the same 320 assembly instructions and three registers. It cuts basically every corner, but my favorite one is that it didn't have room for constants like pi in the ROM. No matter what they did they couldn't fit it in. Eventually, they just printed pi on the case. My impression of Sir Clive is that he always tried to take shortcuts no other company would dare, and while this often flamed out, sometimes he pulled it off and brought a lot of technology to a lot of people.
Here's a fantastic breakdown of how the calculator worked and why it was so impressive:
> This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one.
Same with his computers. At least before the QL. They were affordable for people not on IT salaries.
And for Eastern Europe/Russia, for some values of "affordable".
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.
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.
Yes, perhaps it is. Eulogies and Obituaries are different things. I'm not here to eulogise him, for sure. He was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, a brilliant self promoter. Lord Alan Suger learned a lot of marketing tricks from him.
There's something quintessentially British about promoting tech wizards as heros for making remarkably average product, but making it mass market. Sinclair electronics and Amstrad unquestionably took computing to the masses, in all its buggy variety.
Sinclair's calculator made the V&A design gallery as an icon. It was pretty unusable, but stunningly beautiful. My dad refused to let me get one (he was a compsci professor) and I got a Texas instruments handheld instead.
It really irks me when someone is misrepresented when they drop dead. I’m personally fine with the parent poster’s comment because it’s exactly a fair representation of the guy’s products. They were mostly awful to some degree.
We've banned this account, not just for this egregious violation of the site rules, but because you've been doing it repeatedly for a long time and have ignored our requests to stop. Seriously not cool.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Also my first computer, bought as a kit and I soldered it together. Mine lasted a long time. It was so limited though I learned Z80 assembler, which turned out to be really cool. The ZX-81 was a wonderful machine.
The ZX81 was also my first computer. Have to say I must have better luck because mine is still going to this day (although I did recently need to service and fix it).
The ZX Spectrum+ I grew up with still works (only had to replace the keyboard membrane). What an amazing piece of tech. I have fond memories of it, and I also keep my collection of Microhobby Magazine [1], which is effectively how my career started.
I had some earlier contact with a ZX81 but I don't remember much of it - really only playing 3D Monster Maze [2], a very early ancestor of 3D shooters.
The ZX Spectrum+ and the ZX81 are so meaningful to me, you could argue they're the focus of my book's dedication [3]. Would I be where I am today, would I be who I am today, if back in the day it wasn't as easy as PLOT 6,5?
For its time and price vs. performance, the Spectrum might have been the best personal computer ever made. It was my first machine, and I loved it so much.
Grew up in a house surrounded by many wonderful machines, but by far the most beautiful and alluring were the Spectrums. My dad wrote some reasonably popular books on these things in the 80s which pretty much set me on my way:
I learned to program on the 48k when I was about 8. Couldn’t figure out how to save my code to tape so I just left the machine switched on for weeks whilst I wrote games and then let them go when I had to turn the power off. I learned more sat alone with that machine than anywhere else in my life. Rest in peace Sir Clive Sinclair.
Yes, I well remember the Sinclairs I played with. They never made the 'Apple leap', and slowly faded, but he had a lot of good ideas. With a Silicon Valley milieu in the UK, he would have done better.
I was a Silicon Valley parts rat in the late 70's.
Went there 2-3 times a year. Mike Quinn, Space Age metal products, Advanced Computer Products(Freeman Brothers), Bill Godbout and so on.
They all had surplus warehouses. The tax law in the USA allowed old parts to be written off - but if you wrote them off, you could not keep them. If you kept them = not written off. This led to huge surplus warehouse entrepreneurs who bid on the scrapped parts and then resold them. This is the way it should be. In the UK/Canada companies wrote them off and KEPT them - sitting unused = no good to man or beast.
I think that is why it was unique - US tax law.
I, like many others here, started on a ZX Spectrum 48k. It was a wonderful time where one could experiment and "learn by doing". I spent days copying program code from a magazine into the REPL, and after debugging it for a while, i marvelled at the space invaders game i had "made myself".
It was also a time where local radio stations would dedicate a couple of hours every friday night to broadcast user made programs. Yes, that's right, 2 hours of "brrzzzziiiiwwwwwhhzzz". Before each program was broadcast, the radio host would give a small intro to what was being broadcast, and the computer needed to run it.
We had classes with no set agenda, where "nerds" could meet up, and we could code whatever we wanted.
The whole "world" was different back then, and looking back i can easily see how a generation of skilled engineers came to be.
[edit] More details on his calculators, which were quite cool, especially his trick to decrease power consumption and the super-slim Sinclair Sovereign:
I will never forget characteristic screen loading method. A 256x192 resolution, 16384 - beginning of video memory, 6144 bytes of B&W pixel data in 3 blocks and 768 bytes for 8*2 color palette. Those visuals and numbers are imprinted in my memory...
Two people who changed my life forever - Sir Clive Sinclair and my Father who'd been bold enough to invest in Timex 2048 despite price and difficulties of life behind an iron curtain.
ZX81 was my first computer, putting the kit (!) together with my dad. Didn’t work so sent it back and got a pre made one, found out later that at least 1/3rd of the kits didn’t work.
That, going through 101 Basic Computer Games, and typing in the esoteric Beagle Bros commands in their ads are fond memories.
The reason many of the kits didn't work is that the timing was super critical and parts variation alone could result in a built kit not working, especially if you added the RAM expansion.
I was a (small) part of the Spectrum hackers clique in Warsaw. Most of us had "Masterface" which was a hardware extension that had a switch to replace the ZX ROM with a custom-baked one and used NMI to do things like snapshotting the state of the machine to tape or loading a custom debugger.
The first one was used for pirating games (but pirating by snapshotting was considered cheap) but the debugger was the real deal. It fit in the screen memory (so as to mess as little as possible with the game memory) and let us discover "pokes" for infinite lives. I think it was called Fox Mon or Foxmon?
Ah, that's too bad, really. Pocket calculators, Electric vehicles, cheap personal computers, e-bikes and probably others that I'm not aware of. Game changers in every instance, not all of them equally successful but you really can't fault the man for trying.
I 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.
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 Superbrain, the TRS-80 model 3, CoCo and, later, PCs). Didn't last long - we returned it to get a much more practical Apple II+ (a clone, again). The damage to my brain, though, was done: I discovered the thrill of writing programs.
The ZX Spectrum was the only other Sinclair cloned in Brazil, by a different company, Microdigital.
I really like the elegant, minimalistic electronics design (even though it did hurt performance to task the Z80, which is no speed demon itself, with putting up pixels to the screen) of the ZX-81.
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.
My first computer was a ZX81, then an QL. I still have them at home. Maybe I'll try to power them up. I've found some listings of programs I wrote in BASIC on the ZX81. They are only marginally easier to understand than machine code, maybe not :-) but they were the first step to bring me here. Thanks Sir Sinclair.
Don't plug them in without doing some basic checks! A common fault with the ZX81 at least is the PSU and/or the internal voltage regulator degrades/fails and will destroy the RAM chips. Have a look through some of Noel Retro Lab videos for some tips first: https://www.youtube.com/c/NoelsRetroLab/videos
> "But he did not make personal use of his own inventions. His daughter said he never had a pocket calculator as far as she knew, instead carrying a slide-rule around with him at all times. And he told interviewers he used neither a computer nor email."
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.
"Horace Goes Skiing" was written by Fred Milgrom, co-founder of Beam Software (studio) and (I think) Melbourne House (publisher). His team also did The Hobbit. The studio is based in Melbourne, Australia.
"Knight Lore" was by Ultimate Play the Game, whicn became Rare (Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong Country etc).
I learned to program in 1982 when my mom bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000 (2K RAM!) and had to type in all the games from source listings in books and magazines. At some point later, I bought a 16K memory expansion pack which was awesome until you jiggled the computer a little bit and it would reset all memory.
The very first bug I had to figure out was when I was typing in an expression like "A <> B", and not realizing that "<>" was a single character on the keyboard, and not "<" followed by ">".
My first computer was a ZX81, and his machines made a profound impression on my early days in computing (and became even more remarkable once I was able to understand the hardware design tricks involved).
Good thing we have things like the Raspberry Pi to recapture some of that magic for our kids.
When I had no computer, I wanted one of those <USD$200 ZX81s so badly – just from seeing it magazines, & maybe pressing some of its keys at the electronics counter of someplace like maybe a Sears.
IIRC the video output often cut out whenever a user program was running?
I'm sure I would have enjoyed having one, but was fortunate enough my parents picked up an Apple ][+ instead. Still, warm feelings towards that unit, & its series, as something that made home computing thinkable.
Drawing video took up a very large fraction of the CPU cycles on the ZX81 so there was a 'fast mode' and 'slow mode'. Fast mode cut out video output when programs were running, slow mode left it on and ran at something like 1/4 the speed.
The scary thing: this all seems like yesterday to me. For years I thought we were counting up to when we die, but now I realize we are actually counting down.
As much as the hardware fuelled my interest in computing, and ultimately forged my career. Something that I think isn't appreciated enough was the beautiful design language Sinclair employed.
I've always viewed Sinclair as proto Apple.
A clone of Sinclair ZX81 was the first computer that I touched and coded when I was a kid.
My color homage to Sinclair ZX Spectrum in less than 140 characters of Javascript: https://www.dwitter.net/d/23871
I was always an Acorn kid (now ARM and taking over the world). I still have my Acorn Atom; 12Kb of memory (with the expansion pack) that somehow included a BASIC interpreter, assembler, and left 10Kb of usable program/graphics memory.
I was jealous of the Spectrum kids with the sheer number of games made for the Spectrum. I'd go round to my mate's house who had a Spectrum but wasn't into games, and bug him for hours until he'd load something up and we could play it. I'd then try and make bad clones of those games on my Atom.
I think there's a whole generation of British techies like me, raised in the 80's, who owe Sir Clive (and his peers) our entire careers. If there's a Tech Valhalla, he'll be seated on the high table.
Likewise. I only ever had an Acorn Atom. My tech friends had Sinclairs and then upgraded to BBC computers. (Not an option for a working class kid like me).
I was an early enthusiast and originally wanted a Nascom One. I was so frustrated when they went bust, but the (August?) 1980 edition of Practical Computing included the first advert for the Acorn Atom so I switched my attention to that.
In late '80s an italian advertisement company sent to almost all italian families a book where you could buy almost everything using Post Offices. A kind of amazon's father :-).
If any italian will read this post he will remember "Postal Market".
In the last pages of that book there were all tech stuffs to buy including ZX Spectrum, commodore 64, etc.
I was 7-8 years old and I was fascinated about those things.
I didn't have enough money to buy a computer.
When I reached the right amount (my savings) to buyone, Postal market hasn't sold any computer anymore.
I started in 1991 with a "12 Mhz 80286 Vegas Communications".
I still rimember the feeling when I was browsing those pages
Ah, the Timex Sinclair 1000! I would fantasize about having one while looking at magazines ads. You could buy the kit, build it and learn so much about computing, all for $99.95 US! Sure, the 1K of RAM was a bit limiting, but you could save up and buy a 16K RAM pack.
1K of RAM seems an unimaginably miniscule memory limit today, but incredibly you could squeeze a game of chess in that limit using a bit of creativity. The YouTube channel Nostalgia Nerd compares a game of chess on the 1981 Sinclair ZX81 1KB computer vs. a modern PC.
Like so many I learned to code on a ZX80 and basically never stopped. I'm here 40+ years later, typing this on a HoloLens and marveling at the impact that little computer had on me and the world.
RIP Sir Clive
My first experience of programming was on a ZX81, we also had a thermal printer, I remember having this overwhelming sense of possibilities watching that little printer work and becoming fascinated with computers controlling machines. Much of my career has been doing hardware/electronic/mechanical systems. I have fond memories of those early times where it was an exciting time where we devoured every word about computers.
First computer I ever typed a program into was zx80 that belonged to a friend of my dad. He (a journalist) didn’t like the membrane keyboard so he attached a teletype keyboard.
Growing up we first had a Sinclair Cambridge calculator, then a ZX81 (complete with a 16K RAM expansion pack!), then a Spectrum that we upgraded to a Spectrum+ by sending off for the upgrade kit. We even had a Sinclair thermal printer...
So many happy memories of weekends spent entering game code from the back of magazines and then venturing into writing our own. Genuinely don't think I'd be in the software industry today if it hadn't been for his creations.
I was thinking this morning about how the Raspberry Pi never really quite got it right in bringing the legacy of the early 80's computers into the 21st century.
The Pi Foundation bring out new models, but I think this just complicates things. They are evolving more towards PCs. I think this is unfortunate. The question they should be asking is: what if we crossed a RP2040 with a Pi Zero? Perhaps with a very simple "DOS".
I was just thinking about how and when to bring my children to computers the other day. I came across RC2014, contemporary homebrew Z80 computer: https://rc2014.co.uk/
Sad to hear this. I got a ZX in the mid-eighties. It was the 16k-model but my father upgraded it to 48k, I think it even involved some soldering.
One of my best friends also had one and we tinkered a lot, all by ourselves. To get stuff to load from copied cassettes on whatever tape deck or boom-box you had available was sometimes a very frustrating experience. We cleaned the tape heads with q-tips and alcohol, set the five-band eq to some previous good setting (marked with a pencil), then loaded, adjusted and retried. Typing in long listings from computer magazines, often failing and having to double check and re-type parts was quite common too.
We also learned the value of RTFM. The first game my friend had on a cassette had a fold in leaflet. We spent one evening not being able to load it using the instructions. The next evening a brilliant move was made, remove the leaflet from the cassette and read the remaining part on the hidden side :) Success!
These experiences definitely help remove any fear of tinkering with respect to computers and other digital equipment that I later on have noticed in others.
My parents were having a clear out and found my old (2nd hand when I got it!) Speccy, just last week. It's been in a box but I feel compelled to see if it's in working order still (no leaky caps please or dodgy joints, at least there's no old PSU to worry about)
As an 8yo, I thought ZX was a German computer, because like every other home computer of the time it came from a shop in Munich’s Schillerstrasse. Somehow it found its way into Eastern Europe that wasn’t too keen on importing computers.
An old joke says it was passing through customs as a “washing machine programmer, not a computer, see, its all rubbery”
Very sad news. Like many commenting here, I cut my teeth on a Spectrum; a +3, when I was about 6 or 7. I remember my dad painstakingly inputting the code for an analogue clock program from a book. It took him hours but once I saw the result I was hooked and wrote all kinds of silly little programs, slowly learning what I could create.
I sold my Sinclair Scientific calculator, from the mid-seventies, just a month ago. Got a tenner for it even though it wasn't working.
I miss those times, there was something so much more immediate, more real about computing in the 70s and 80s. It was somehow lighter and less intimidating. It's only just coming back with Arduino style kit.
One thing the Arduino doesn't quite have is that the ZX machines, while not cutting edge, were quite novel and "high tech".
Most people who have an Arduino also have a supercomputer-phone. But a ZX81 or ZX Spectrum were, at the time, all you could afford and relatively advanced to the point of being amazing for most other people (who didn't own any computer whatsoever).
I had a Sinclair Scientific too - so small with hard clicky keys! Back then it was a wonder to type numbers that looked like words when you held it upside down.
I expect more people here will remember the ZX80, but what about the minimal SC/MP-based MK-14 that came before... I skipped that but got a NASCOM-1 kit the following year (1978).
I worked at Acorn in the early 80s and Sir Clive attended a couple of our infamous Christmas parties (since he knew Chris Curry).
The good thing about those old computers was the simplicity. The only thing on a NASCOM-1 between your assembly code and the hardware was 1KB of monitor program.
I splashed out on a Nascom 2. I wish I had a keyboard as good as the one it came with now.
Had a bit of a fright after I finished soldering everything and switched it on. Nothing happened! So I laboriously went over all 1200 (?) solder joints again and breathed a sigh of relief when it worked.
I bought an old 5 bit code teleprinter and wrote a driver so that I could print by connecting the UART to a couple of transistors driving a mercury wetted relay to drive the printer. I think it would be a lot more complicated to do that on any modern computer.
Leaky abstractions in not well thought out solutions caused by exponential growth in computing is the issue. Rich Hickey's "Simple made easy" talks about this very thing.
When I was 8 years old I had a teacher who let me explore the spectrum zx every midday break. I spend so many hours loading tapes with games and programs. It was for sure the spark for me to start my life with programming and computers in general. Rest in piece. A legend!!!
My first computer was Spectrum. With broken cassette recorder. There was no other way to play games but writing them down from a recipe book. And picking up programming along the way. Discovering the new world, the world of the electron and the switch and then the beauty of the baud.
We had the “timex Sinclair ZX 1000” a gadget loving aunt gave us. I think That’s the US version of that computer. I remember searching for the space bar… it was a button on the lower right of the membrane keyboard. Each key had like 4 things on it. Letters/ characters/symbols and basic commands. Entering basic programs was interesting but I learned a lot.
And 2k of Ram (we got the 16kb expansion). And some games on tape that were oddly good.
While i graduated to the schools apple computers a year after getting the machine, I’m still fond of it and because it’s really small, I still have it…( now where is the wall adapter). Quite a great machine from an era where the machines where more easy to understand.
As a 14 year old in 1981, I bought a Timex Sinclair from Sears with money that I had been saving up for a over a year. Best. Purchase. Ever. What I learned on that $99 machine would change the course of my life.
Thank you, Sir Clive, for helping me to find my calling.
My first computer was a Sinclair clone hooked up to the only TV we had at home. So was the case for so many people in my country in the 80s who couldn't afford the disproportionately more expensive machines. Kudos to this genius for bringing inexpensive computer access to the layman. He could have patented the shit out of his company's systems, charge whatever he wanted for them, and spend a ton of money on an army of lawyers defending his patents and making him a shit ton more. Instead he gave so many of us early access to the tools we would use to make our living, so we weren't in a huge disadvantage any more. I couldn't be more grateful.
Very late to the thread here, but I also got my start on a Timex/Sinclair 1000. I'm not sure what possessed my dad to buy one. I think I'm the only one in my family who touched it more than once. Being able to save programs on a regular cassette tape was awesome! I'll never forget typing in games from Compute! magazine, and then figuring out how to make them better. It's amazing what you could do in 2k of ram!
I was very disappointed when I came back from college once and decided to fire it up for old times sake, only for it to be dead for some reason. I still wonder how it went bad, sitting on my desk.
A sad day indeed. A true democratising force in computing, without his work I wouldn't have ever thought someone like me could write software. Even If I was too young to write at the time, the ZX Spectrum was my first/only video game experience, small games made by one or two people that my family could afford or borrow.
This led me into making indie games and software dev, it gave me the idea of 'why not me?', the ZX Spectrum might not have been the door, but is sure was the key into a much wider world for me.
It also led me to recreate my favorite thing about the ZX Spectrum, the loading sounds as a musical instrument. The ZX Plectrum.
My dad had a ZX Spectrum. The music to Spy Hunter is seared into my brain. Such early exposure to tech (and to some extent dealing with its crappiness) started me on the path to becoming the software engineer I am today. RIP Sir Clive.
I've still got my Sinclair in a shoebox upstairs, complete with the 16KB RAM expansion pack, a program or two on cassette tape, and the cord for plugging it into my TV (which would probably need a whole chain of adapters today).
My 77" LG CX OLED still has a coax RF input, and I've hooked a few consoles and computers up to it. And it actually looks, well, better than I expected I guess!
Somewhat amazingly, my mother-in-law was Sir Clive's financial controller at Sinclair Radionics. His financial rigour was somewhat less developed than his entrepreneurial skills, apparently.
My first computer was a home-built ZX81 (manufactured in my hometown of Dundee) given to me by a capable and nerdy family friend, which was quickly replaced by a ZX Spectrum Plus 2 (it had colour and built-in tape deck) that Christmas - a move which has shaped my life ever since.
I have fond (ish!) memories of typing in hex codes and BASIC from computing magazines to create games and demos, and having the ability to see and edit that code almost certainly give me the start of the career I have now.
I had a ZX81 and then a 48k ZX Spectrum. He revolutionised the computer industry in this country, so many of us got into the industry because of what he did. A true visionary.
Let’s not forget that without Sir Clive we would probably never have seen Acorn and then Arm start in Cambridge. The computing world would have been very different without him.
I was bought a ZX Spectrum +3 when I was 10, the one with a floppy drive. My parents were persuaded by the salesman that floppy drives were the future and that it was worth paying more for the +3 rather than the +2 with it's tape drive. Correct, but hardly any games were available on disk which left me a bit miffed at the time.
Multiface 3 from romantic robot was the key peripheral you needed. After loading a game you could save an image to disk, so you could also create save points anywhere and poke in cheat codes :-)
I'd say Clive Sinclair was more like Britain's Jack Tramiel. Chris Curry or Herman Hauser would be more like Britain's Steve Jobs and Sophie Wilson as Britain's Steve Wozniak.
Wikipedia calls Acorn, Britain's Apple. Just as Apple chose its name because it was before Atari in the phone book, so Acorn chose it's name because it was before Apple.
I worked at Acorn in the early 80's. I once arm wrestled Chris Curry in a bar. Neither one of them was really a Steve Jobs figure. I doubt many BBC Micro owners at the time would even have heard of them, unlike Sinclair who was in the press all the time. Curry was more of a drunken playboy, and Hermann more business man than marketeer or face of the company. It was a dream job for a geek!
Both were company founds who went pair shaped in 1985. Both were narcissists obsessed with miniaturization and small items. Both were obsessed with the physical look of their devices. Both were not engineers.
Like many here I started programming on the origin ZX Spectrum, typing out code and hitting record on a cassette tape machine. The pure joy of buying a magazine and copying the code inside to create your own game. Tinkering with it to make it your own and passing on your recorded creation on to friends at school.
As someone who started coding just before the zx80 arrived I fully appreciate the difference he made! I was reading ETI (if you don’t know what the stands for you are too young :) that had adverts for the MK14 which was the predecessor to the zx series ) when it all kicked off and I was in awe! A true innovator.
Even as a Commodore person who's never really owned a Sinclair computer, it can't be underestimated what an impact Sir Clive had on early home computing.
He truly showed that affordable computing is possible and in my mind also inspired the large home computer "cottage industry" in the UK.
I remember how I aspired to get a ZX81 and then my dad brought the Vic20 home (color! 5+8kb!) so I became a Commodore fanboy but hey, Sir Clive is my hero too.
> But he did not make personal use of his own inventions. His daughter said he never had a pocket calculator as far as she knew, instead carrying a slide-rule around with him at all times. And he told interviewers he used neither a computer nor email.
Now that is probably unique among computer pioneers…
In a less facetious tone, the Spectrum plus was my first computer, and I rather like the way the BASIC was based on single keypresses, with every built in function there to see on the keyboard. It was spectacularly well designed to be learned.
I owe my career to this golden generation of micros (an Amstrad CPC in my case).
Much respect to the man who undoubtedly kickstarted this revolution in Britain.
Now, at the risk of sounding blasphemous : the ZX Spectrum is also the most annoyingly overrated, overhyped system in UK retro computing circles, bar none.
While it might technically be able to display 8 (garish) colours (some of which are shades of others) it can't even do it without weird limitations ("colour clash").
For all intents and purposes, its software feels monochrome. You might get a couple of different background colours on screen, but sprites are nearly always monochrome with heavy use of dithering. They leave a lot to the imagination, that's for sure (check out the monochrome rainbows in Rainbow Islands :) )
The keyboard is rubbish, the machine doesn't come with a tape player, it doesn't do standard joysticks. Its BASIC is cryptic and underpowered compared to the Amstrad's (tbh, the C64's isn't great either, maybe the Amstrad just shines here)
All of that was probably fair game for a cheap entry level machine in 1982, but by 1984 the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC were both affordable and running circles around the poor Spectrum (each with their own strengths). Most other European countries had caught wind of this and chose a side (C64 in Germany / Nordics, Amstrad in France / Spain) and yet, Britain kept this bizarre and very unique love affair with the Speccy going strong, well into the early 90s.
Today, the reality distortion field its fans live in would put Apple's to shame.
The term "nostalgia goggles" must have been invented for ZX Spectrum Youtubers, seriously : they will do comparison videos between 8-bit conversions of arcade games where any outside observer would find the Spectrum port to be embarrassingly, almost comically inferior to the other two, but they'll still award it the top spot for reasons like "it plays well", or "it looks great despite the good old Speccy's limitations"
On forums, you will show them side by side Amstrad/Spectrum game screenshot comparisons (like this one : https://imgur.com/a/D7Ocd) and they'll still insist the games on the right hand side look better. The publisher of the excellent "visual compendium" series of retrogaming books has one about the Spectrum, refuses to do one with the Amstrad. Go figure...
In the end of course, it's all good fun to be reenacting what is really schoolyard squabble, but the inability of the British to recognise the one homegrown computer they should be proud of never ceases to amaze me ;)
When i hear the term "Manic Miner" i think of endless weekend sleepovers at my pal's place trying to solve those goddamn levels .. we would take it in turns on that crazy rubber keyboard of his Spectrum .. what a machine of the times .. awesome :)
In Czechoslovakia we had licensed clones of ZX Spectrum called Didaktik Gama. It didn’t look nearly as cool, but it was affordable and thus the very first personal computer for a whole generation. Thank you Sir Sinclair!
I'd grew up with a Commodore 16, then Amstrad. Never owned a 'speccy' but it was the machine everyone else around me had. Definitely part of a thankful generation with fond memories.
To my best recollection, I remember getting into computers when I first saw an advert for the ZX81 flight simulator in a computer magazine amd being totally amazed and inspired. Thanks Clive!
I grew up on a Soviet clone of the ZX Spectrum 48, the Hobbit! Many hours spent. Many games written. Used to write BASIC on graph paper before entering it in.
RIP Sir Clive. Like so many here, my introduction to computers and the career I carved out was the ZX81. I think perhaps Clive left his own dent in the universe.
Raspberry Pi, I suppose. But it doesn't feel the same, but the Pi is really underpowered compared to the average phone/computer, while the ZX Spectrum was the most powerful, and only, computer millions could afford.
Address of screen buffer.
Back pages asm instructions.
From zero to matrix in a thin red and black book.
I doubt our kids ever felt that trip. Im sorry about that.
@dang - I believe that deserves a black ribbon. In some countries generations grew up learning hacking and programming with his computers (and knock-offs)
Agreed! The Timex Sinclair 1000 (US ZX81 rebadging) was my first computer when I was 6 and as an autistic child it really helped keep me engaged and I suspect that without it I would have ended up in special education classes... Sir Clive literally changed my life
Absolutely. His systems did so much to democratize computing in the 8-bit era, and there must be countless greybeards who owe their careers to the access that Sinclair Computers granted. Likewise, many non-technical entrepreneurs who made tons of cash in the first dotcom boom would only be able to find programmers able to work for them because they had self-trained in skills that schools knew nothing about by staying up late staring at the family TV with one of these little machines plugged into it.
More democratising than other machines around at the time, because those less-well-off families in the UK who couldn't afford a BBC Micro or CBM-64 could more easily scrape together the funds to buy a ZX Spectrum instead.
My personal anecdote: I didn't have enough pocket money to feed my Pac-Man addiction in the arcades, and my family certainly wasn't going to splash out on an Atari console, so I wrote myself a Pac-Man clone in ZX Basic. It turned out that programming was so much more fun than playing the game in the long run, and almost 40 years later people are still paying me to do this! Thank you, Sir Clive.
With all due respect, Meta comment here: I imagine computing has become sufficiently ubiquitous such that in ~50 yrs time the HN bar will always be black because we will have > 365 important folks pass away each year.
Weak argument. Sir Clive's influence on computing, particularly in Britain is enormous. For many of us his products are the reason we are part of this industry.
I'm more reflecting on the fact that the number of programmers roughly doubles every 5 years and thus the number of Sir Clive's should be greatly increasing too, no?
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. This is good; _you cannot harm the computer in this way._ Be bold. Experiment. If you get stuck, remember that you can always reset the computer to the original picture with the copyright message by taking out the '9V DC IN' plug and putting it back again. This should be the last resort because you lose all the information in the computer.
"You cannot harm the computer in this way."
That single sentence started a life long journey. I doubt I would have been bold enough at that age to mess around with one of our most valuable possessions.