He certainly was responsible for some interesting products. I have fond memories of my Sinclair QL.

I also still smirk at the memory of seeing a C5 vehicle being closely followed by a large truck on Elizabeth way roundabout in Cambridge. I'm pretty sure that the only thing the truck driver could see was the flag flying jauntily on the top of a pole attached to the rear of the C5.

Sorry to see him go.

I saw him give a lecture about technology, where a cheeky student asked about the disaster of the C5.

His response? "I lost about seven million pounds of my own money on that, but there you go."

Many of us owe our careers to his early influence on the tech scene in the UK. Besides the technical leaps and wild experimentation, he also had a keen enthusiasm for design - Rick Dickinson (Sinclair) and Jony Ive (Apple) were both graduates of the same Design for Industry course in Newcastle.

RIP Sir Clive

Thanks for the thrills and spills.

I'll raise one of these for you tonight.

I can't help thinking there should be a ritual dodgy keyboard burning to help him take that Quantum Leap into the new DIM

Sir Clive was definitely a one-off. I remember the adverts for his hi-fi in magazines like Practical Electronics long before he branched into computers.

The fact that the retro market continues trying to replicate his old systems (though never at the same price!) is a testament to the man's vision.

RIP Sir Clive.

There's a great deal of information about his various products [1]here .

I remember the hi-fi adverts, they were very slick.

He did have a genius for finding cheap solutions, though there were regrettably few occasions - the ZX80 being one - when the corner-cutting produced something that lived up to the publicity

I fear his passing marks the end of the 'British boffin'.

[1] https://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/contents.htm

a horrid membrane keyboard, unreliable saving/loading system

Yupp the ZX81 had them all.

But it was cheap..... and you could program it yourself

So heres to Sir Clive, without him, my career in computery stuff would never have taken off as every other computer on the market at the time was way out of my family's price range.

Me too.

All my friends had Spectrums and C64s, I got this crappy little plastic box that just printed K on the screen when turned on, oh, and a ring bound book that told you how to make it do stuff.

It changed my life.

Not sure who else could have put a computer that was so cheap in one of the worst housing schemes in Glasgow. Lead to a fairly successfully career in dev for me so worked out well.

RIP Sir Clive.

Let's face it - this guy is responsible for the launch of a LOT of British programming/computing careers. If you were around for the British home computer boom of the early 80s, and you're in IT today, you probably owe a beer to Jack Tramiel, or Uncle Clive. In my case, I owe a beer to both of them.

Beers Clive. You literal legend.

Yep, me too. I still have my speccy and my ST. They still worked last time I checked.

Don't forget Sinclair repeatedly took in orders before the product was available.

Who pissed on your chips?

There's a time and a place to bring up some of the less desirable business practices of that era. This is not that time, nor that place.

And modern crowdfunding isn't much much worse?

It was a different era, and at least Sir Clive delivered.

This was an era where you made the promise and did everything you could to deliver on it because you believed yourself it was possible. These days taking pre-orders is about building up some capital that you can fall back and you still get paid even if you get caught out on the bullshit you're spinning. You don't even have to provide a finished product.

For me is was the ZX 48K. It got upgraded with a Saga 1, had an astonishing Saisho cassette player that never to failed to load anything except LoTR. Chuckie Egg, Dizzy, Wriggler, Harrier Attack, Target Renegade and even HiSoft Pascal.... thanks Clive for giving me the means to feed my family the last 16 years.

Rest in Peace. Your computers developed my love of computing, and 33 years later, it's still going strong. Thank you.

My condolences to the Sinclair family. Sinclair clearly had a big influence on the industry and as such, it's a loss to everyone. I remember the old cassette tapes go around with games and other things on.

First redefining what the public expect computers to be (somewhat more cut back and pared down than the competition) and somehow miraculously delivering computers at a bargain price that nobody else could manage (they still insisted on proper keyboards and floppy drives).

But even so Spectrums had all the software and were enough to start me and many others off in IT and that's what counts.

And if he didn't sink all his profits into electric vehicles and portable TVs I'm sure he would have had an empire.

Pouring one out into my ZX for Sir Clive.

I don't feel proud of being British most days.

But this man sure kindles that.

I started on a ZX81s, an astounding machine, even in retrospect.

The products this man developed created & shaped my career.

So sorry to hear of his passing.

I've got to say Sir Clive gave me my start with computers so am indebted to him for that. I think he was better as an inventor than he was at running businesses or producing products people actually wanted though.

Bugger.

Like everyone of my generation in Dundee, had a factory second ZX Speccy, designed by the great man, at home.

For some of us, the computer games led to careers fixing computers, designing games, or a myriad of jobs in the great IT.

Me, it led to wondering what it was made of, what the metal inside was made of, and what was inside of the metal was made of.

Sir Clive, I thank you.

GOTO Valhalla

END

I'm currently crying like a baby here. This has hit me a lot harder than I thought it would. This marks the end of the line for the largest chuink of my formative years, and possibly the greatest influence in my entering the career I have.

RIP to a massively flawed genius. A man with ideas often far ahead of their time. I'll be setting a glass of decent malt aside for you tonight.

You are not alone Stumpy. I never met the man, but my first computer was the TimexSinclair-1000 with the truly abysmal keyboard, and the 16K RAM pack that would crash the computer if you even looked at it.

Think I am going to go play with it tonight.

Surprised the (admittedly brief) article didn't mention the actually really good Z88. I rescued my late father's Z88 (box, printer interface, manual, PSU and all) from a house fire this year, must get a moment to power (nearly wrote fire, oops) it up again.

Such a useful format and machine that some folk are still using them for practical tasks even today...

Sitting here with my old Sinclair / Cambridge Z88 under the desk.

Sad. I was born in 1972 and learned programming on a ZX81; my dad had a QL. Yes, the microdrives were horrific and yes, it was annoying loading games from cassettes. I still have a copy of a program listing (in BASIC of course) I wrote for the Disciple, a third party storage system for the Spectrum.

But it's where I cut my teeth. Fast forward to now and I've been a tech lead in software services companies and I am now a CTO, so in retrospect he was responsible for mapping out much of my career.

Those ZX and X keys really took a hammering on Daley Thompson's Decathlon though. And I didn't buy a C5.

Like many folks my age, I got my start in computing thanks to the ZX Spectrum. As a kid in the 80's I was able to learn real hands-on coding skills, debugging, assembly, devices, protocols, and problem solving, all because of the huge communities of developers and creators that sprang up around this quirky but special little machine.

My life in computing began on a ZX81, as a young kid. That was eventually upgraded to a BBC Master 128, in the late 80s, and then my first PC in 1992. The rest is history. Who knows where things would have gone, back then, without Sir Clive's pioneering machines?

Getting on for 40 years since I first put fingers to keys (or at least to squdgy rubber protrusions) on my very own 48K Speccy. That and the other experiences I had in those early days of the UK home computing revolution are, without any shadow of a doubt, responsible for my life being the way it is today on both a personal and professional level. SO so many aspects of my life are directly or only slightly indirectly related to my love for coding and electronics and tech in general, and that all stems back to those heady days of the early 80's, sat in my bedroom in front of my Speccy, or round at my mates house on his Beeb, learning about coding just by being able to switch on the machine and start typing there and then.

It's absolutely no exaggeration to say that the products Sir Clive brought to market genuinely changed the lives of millions. That's one hell of a legacy to leave behind, so as one of those many I say a heartfelt thank you. Rest in peace, may your tape heads be ever clean and aligned, and your RAM pack free from wobble.

Finally a job the C5s will be just the right speed for! (They can use a Reliant Robin for the hearse)

Thanks for the Sinclair Scientific Clive.

People under 30 can hardly believe I actually used it to program on.

"What do you mean 1K and 16K with a rampack!?"

And from there I upgraded to a 16K Spectrum that I upgraded to 48k. Happy days.

Oh, And I'm still playing Jetpac and Atic Attack on the Xbox with the Ultimate collection.

RIP Sir Clive.

Without him, the beginning of mass ownership of computers in the UK would have looked very different, and would likely have been much more exclusive and limited, due to the higher prices of other machines. Sure, everything was somewhat quirky about the machines, and the business was ramshackle at times, but there was no roadmap for how to do home computing at the time and that's why it's so fondly remembered by those of us who were there. Nobody ever complained about corporate blandness in those exciting days.

Inventiveness and originality will always lead to as many failures as successes, and whilst the failures were often fun to laugh at, the successes were real and had a major impact on so many people. You don't become an icon like Sir Clive did without being the real deal.

Goodness knows what my teenage years and career would have looked like had my classmate not brought their ZX81 in to school to show us, typed some small programs in and run them, causing me to go "so THAT'S how they work". I'm still programming now, 40 years later. That's how much he influenced people.

Sorry to hear this.

He was one of those people who helped change the world forever. Not by himself, not necessarily the way some would always approve of, but as part of the generation that was there at the right time to try to find a way forward for the then new technology.

RIP Mr Sinclair.

RIP

So many similar stories of careers that happened because of Clive’s low cost micros. I was another one, ZX81. However crude it was, I can still remember the feeling of seeing the k prompt. There wasn’t anything before.

Ave, Clive