Sir Clive Sinclair has died
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/zxspectrum/docs/Comple...
Godspeed, Sir Clive. Your projects were all bonkers in the best possible way.
https://www.amazon.com/ZX-Spectrum-Ula-Microcomputer-Compute...
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.
For anyone interested:
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
All the best music software was on Atari I think due to the excellent timing and MIDI support: Cubase, Emagic Notator/Logic (now only by Apple)
Though I guess both of those started on C64 but then migrated to Atari
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)
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.
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.
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.
But that is exactly right!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The quality of the documentation with these early computers was also truly exceptional. I learned basic in a weekend.
And in the back it had a ascii table with all the Z80 instruction codes - so once you had basic down you could try assembly!
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.
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.
Farewell, Sir Clive, and thank you for some of my best memories.
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).
Edit: Oops it wasn't the 64 but the PET: https://dfarq.homeip.net/the-killer-poke-for-the-commodore-p...
Also, everyone here will know the phenomenon of bricking. You can damage hardware with software. Luckily it's very rare.
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.
I remember how I destroyed my first PC on the first day by flipping a switch on the PSU before turning it on. Good times.
Anyway got a spark and the magic smoke, and bought a new PSU from a guy at school for $15.
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!
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Christina,_Mrs._Magnu...
Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Model B and so on!
It was glorious!
It was so exciting as a kid!
Going to each of them and writing 3 lines of basic to print my name infinitely!
A truely golden age of discovery!
10 PRINT "Boots is rubbish, shop at Dixons.";
20 GOTO 10
a mischeivious program of
10 pause (big number)
20 beep
30 goto 20
the faces of the customers thinking they've broke the computer is still etched in my mind
*FX 200,3
10 *MOTOR 1
20 *MOTOR 0
30 GOTO 10
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.
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.
https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Watch_(wristwatch)
http://www.vintagebritishcalculators.info/html/sovereign.htm...
He wasn't so good at making things that worked reliably or delivering them on time, but even with the delays the ZX comps were game changers.
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.
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.
Yes, this. Very much so.
One example is the RF rules that hampered the Acorn Archimedes.
I argue that if Acorn designed the hardware ready-for-localisation then this would be a non-issue.
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.
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...
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.
The QLs problem was more the unreliable micro-drives the use of a cut down processor and the keyboard/build quality.
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.
but it felt like I was living in the future
Thanks Clive - RIP
The user manual "Atomic Theory and Practise" was an amazingly good introduction to computers, and is still on the shelf above my desk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (1h24m)
Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro.
(Sinclair didn't exactly like it though.)
Your reach should exceed your grasp, or what's a heaven for?
"Reach" is what you can just touch with your fingertips outstretched; "grasp" is what you can firmly close your hand on and grip.
A link to the quote in the film:
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/55810/Micro-Men-10th...
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.
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.
In the days when slide-rules ... ah, ruled the land.
RIP
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.
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.
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.
They were available as bargain sellout at the time(1985).
When other people already used Commodore64 or the first Amigas or Atari STs.
But I've been sceptic and low on funds :-)
Wasn't that difficult because there weren't much parts. And no SMD.
Scale was almost like electronic breadbording.
And it worked for the first time!
Regarding the Handbook, compare this image of the cover
[1] https://i.imgur.com/0WarG.jpg
with
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaxxon
I felt so very, very Zaxxonized!
Anyway, it lasted me about half a year, where I got a 16KB RAM extension,
learned how to duct-tape this so I don't get resets,
a data-capable cassette recorder for reliable storage, which my ghetto blaster didn't do,
learned Z80 assembly including illegals,
replaced parts of the ROM with RAM to get glorious 256x192 pixels
in black & white instead of block graphics,
and finally got an Atari 520stfm with flicker free 640x400 pixels on 12 inches,
because why not? I've already been used to BW from the ZX81.
I'm truly grateful to have been part of that, it gives such a perspective...
Bloat is the moat were stuck in.
An unsustainable sin,
a cognitive load,
too heavy to comprehend,
a house of cards,
the opposite of smarts.
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.
OTH... Taking a RPI400, and build a stripped-down linux system which resembles Sinclair BASIC could prove to be a fun exercise.
Edit: I just realized how expensive the ZX81 was here in Germany back in 1981 - it'd set you back 450€ by todays value.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
PS: buy your kids a Steam Deck.
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?
I still give him shit for it
Apple gets the credit, but it was Sir Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, and TI that raised a generation in computing.
Rest well great man.
Learning BASIC and then assembly on the spectrum got me hooked on computers, all thanks to Sir Clive making it possible and affordable.
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.
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!
https://twitter.com/varjag/status/1146500643328331776/photo/...
https://spectrumforeveryone.com/technical/zx-spectrum-ula-ty...
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.
Sir Clive Sinclair had an enormous impact on my life and career. Today is a sad day for me :(
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.
Thanks Sir Sinclair.
I guess Dizzy comes close, but Horace was the first "character" I played, and looked out for.
I jumped ship the moment I could afford a BBC.
We might not have had ARM if Acorn hadn't won the contract.
I mean the whole idea of making a computer in the UK for educational purposes wouldn't have happened. We would have had the Apple II.
Acorn was founded as a result of Clive's activities. Go read the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
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.
RIP, Sir Clive. I shall wear my (suitably black) ZX81 T-Shirt tomorrow.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ZX81+Manual
But I'd recommend this instead
[2] https://www.timexsinclair.com/product/zx-forth/
for the real retro blast ;-)
Now, I'll go play some Manic Miner or Nether Earth in your honor.
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.
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.
(While, for example, electric road vehicles in the mid 80s was not.)
The Sinclair car would sell well now the market for escooters is established.
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:
http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul...
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".
Yeah, some Sinclair products were solid, and others were flakey, but all were cheap and seemed very futuristic at the time.
Those were wild little toys; and people stretched them beyond all reason.
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?
Rest in peace, Sir Clive.
[1] https://microhobby.speccy.cz/mhforever/numero001.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze [3] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/d...
https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/books/working-sinclair-q...
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000420/Book/The_Worki...
The sense of wonder I got as a kid by playing games and learning how to program on his machines made for amazing life-shaping experiences.
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.
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/history_of_electronic...
[edit] More details on his calculators, which were quite cool, especially his trick to decrease power consumption and the super-slim Sinclair Sovereign:
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/sinclair_-_the_pocket...
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.
Thank you. Both of you.
That, going through 101 Basic Computer Games, and typing in the esoteric Beagle Bros commands in their ads are fond memories.
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?
Cool times.
Sad news, rest in peace Sir Clive.
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.
Edit: Different channel, but here's a video about ZX81 restoration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyluEM0N6TY
10 PRINT "RIP Clive Sinclair"
20 GOTO 10
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.
"Knight Lore" was by Ultimate Play the Game, whicn became Rare (Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong Country etc).
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 ">".
Good thing we have things like the Raspberry Pi to recapture some of that magic for our kids.
I've retired after a great career in IT/Systems tech and it was Clive's little computer that was the gateway drug for me!
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.
I think ‘Hey Hey 16k’ says it all.
RIP good sir.
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.
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.
I still rimember the feeling when I was browsing those pages
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3By_rdwxSg
When you think of the oceans of RAM available today, a 1KB limit feels like something from a completely different world.
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.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3043/Anamartic-Wafer-...
Currently:
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".
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)
Apparently it, or a follow-up model, WAS available in the US, branded by Timex of all companies.
An old joke says it was passing through customs as a “washing machine programmer, not a computer, see, its all rubbery”
I was quite envious from my pals that eventually got +2A and 3 models, specially with the 3 one, having floppies and CP/M version available.
Pity that QL did not work out, nor the Sam Coupé, although the later wasn't related to Sir Clive.
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.
RIP
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 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.
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.
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.
Thank you Sir!
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.
Thank you, Sir Clive, for helping me to find my calling.
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.
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.
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.
RIP Sir Clive.
The C5 still looks modern today!
RIP.
I'm here because of Sir Clive. Like many I started with a 1k ZX81.
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.
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.
He truly showed that affordable computing is possible and in my mind also inspired the large home computer "cottage industry" in the UK.
Kudos and may you long be remembered.
Now that is probably unique among computer pioneers…
I hope that he realized how much joy and positive change he brought to many people like me.
Rest in peace.
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.
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 ;)
His Sinclair ZX81 got me into my love for computing.
I wouldn't be where I am without that exposure.
I'm glad he did.
Always expected him to make some kind of comeback in a world that sorely needs something like what the ZX Spectrum (& C64) was in its time.
I still want a Spectrum, remember when I bought them, and flicking through the cassettes at the village newsagents.
I had a hand-me-down spectrum although I don't remember learning to program on it, just the games. Was probably too young at the time.
So I guess I can credit it for starting my life long love for computer games :)
In highschool, my physics teacher had a C5, which he could not get 'road legal' in The Netherlands.
Great times. RIP.
A friend owned a ZX Spectrum while I had the C64, and while I liked the games from my C64 more, the ZX was oddly appealing as well.
Except for the chiclet keyboard! :P
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.
What a journey has been since then.
Thank you, Sir.
That said, the 16KB RAM pack was necessary to do anything useful.
I'm too young to have experienced the computers many speak of on this thread. They seem to spark a surprising amount of nostalgia, though.
Thanks sir Clive!
His Sinclair C5 vehicle was being laughed at in his time. Nowadays electric bikes are a thing.
I will wear my clashing outfits for the next 8 days.
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.
But will there be a HN then?