Thanks, Sir Clive Sinclair, from Reg readers whose careers you created and lives you shaped
- Reference: 1632049269
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/09/19/remembering_clive_sinclair/
- Source link:
To mark his life we felt it appropriate to also consider his impact on Reg readers.
Like many others, your correspondent's first computer was a ZX Spectrum. The machine led to my presence in these pages, because I eventually joined the Australian ZX Users' Association ( [2]AZUA ), which published its own magazine and invited contributions.
A die was cast.
I tracked down AZUA co-founder David Vernon who told us, by email: "We all loved Clive. We loved his foresight, his eccentricity and his desire to bring computing to the masses."
Referring to the ZX80 and ZX81, Vernon added: "But we found him frustrating in equal measure. Why to save a few pounds did he give us such a crappy touch keyboard? Why not give us 4K of RAM and not 1K?"
"But even these irritations had a silver lining. They showed us that we didn’t have to put up with whatever a manufacturer gave us but we could improve on it. And this is perhaps Clive’s legacy to my generation — we could do stuff that we never imagined. Clive gave us confidence that we could do clever stuff too. And we did."
"Honestly, it’s thanks to Clive that I now run my own publishing business. Without my early experience of writing and publishing computer programs and help pages I’d not be doing what I do today."
Author of '80s classic The Hobbit didn't know game was a hit [3]READ MORE
Similar stories poured in from around the world as comments on our [4]appreciation of the great man’s life.
“For me it was the ZX 48K,” [5]wrote commenter Mozzie.
“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.”
“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 80s, sat in my bedroom in front of my Speccy,” [6]wrote another forum member, ChrisC.
Linus Torvalds was a Sinclair user: Among those influenced by Sir Clive was Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, who worked on a Sinclair QL before he turned to his most famous work. From 00:30 in the video below, he reminisces about his time using the QL.
[7]Youtube Video
A commenter named Allwallgbr [8]shared his experience working for Sir Clive for two years in the 1970s and described the time as “amazing hard working, fun packed years servicing audio products and demonstrating at Hi-Fi exhibitions.
“I enjoyed the work and the buzz of the company so much, no other employer came close in my entire working life.”
Readers also remembered Sir Clive as possessing a strange charisma.
"An absolute genius with just the right amount of barminess to be a proper British boffin,” [9]opined a commenter with the handle John Brown (no body). “He even had the proper boffin’s bald patch and glasses.”
Others shared their experiences putting Sinclair kit to work.
“I wrote a text-graphic based D&D game, and fed in the entire D&D stats to help automate games,” [10]wrote a Reg forums member named Danny 2.
Next, he tackled something harder. “I tried and failed to write a conversation simulator to pass the Turing test: more difficult than I expected.”
“I think I freaked my mum out when she heard noises at 6am. It was just my seven-year-old self who was desperate to find out whether SIN and COS would let me PLOT a circle on my birthday present ZX81,” [11]wrote another commenter, who goes by the strangely apt handle 0x80004005. (We're guessing it's a Windows error code.)
Sinclair's FORGOTTEN Australia-only micro revealed! [12]READ MORE
Sir Clive’s passing has hit some of you hard.
“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 chunk of my formative years, and possibly the greatest influence in my entering the career I have,” [13]wrote commenter Stumpy.
“RIP to a massively flawed genius,” our reader added. “A man with ideas often far ahead of their time. I'll be setting a glass of decent malt aside for you tonight.”
A few readers offered some Sinclair BASIC as tribute:
GOTO Valhalla , [14]wrote Dr. G. Freeman 10 PRINT "RIP Clive you'll be missed"
20 GOTO 10
...came in from a netizen named [15]Dazzler .
The legacy lives on: One measure of Sir Clive's contribution was that [16]emulators for his computers remain available to this day, even if some homages such as the [17]Spectrum Vega+ went awry.
Classic games developed for the ZX Spectrum remain available in many forms, not just as image files for emulators. Manic Miner is now [18]an app , as is [19]Lords Of Midnight . Some other Spectrum classics have even been [20]ported to Microsoft's XBOX.
One of the folks we reached out to for a Sinclair memory was Shane Muller, an Australian tech entrepreneur who in 2019 threw a very good party to celebrate his thirty years in the tech business. At that event he brandished the ZX81 that started it all.
Shane’s response to news of Sir Clive’s death was to write him a letter:
To Clive, I never met you personally and didn’t know you as Clive, but as Sinclair.
Thank you for pursuing and creating what you did through the Sinclair ZX81. As a youngster before my teens I first saw and started to use my sister’s computer and from that first time, I started to claim it.
With zero experience with computers, the ZX81 was ideal and amazing as it was what I learnt on and with it, I wrote my first program and earned my first monthly income.
Most importantly, what helped shape my interest in life, a career in IT and having founded a cloud business, a consulting business and now an artificial Intelligence business.
Thank you for pushing through to see your dreams come through, as from that, I’ve seen mine come through and hope in turn, others will see theirs come through.
Vale, Sir Clive. ®
Get our [21]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/17/sir_clive_sinclair_obituary/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_ZX_Users%27_Association
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/18/hobbit_author_veronika_megler_reminisces/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/16/sir_clive_sinclair/
[5] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/16/sir_clive_sinclair/#c_4332758
[6] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/16/sir_clive_sinclair/#c_4332725
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05pgVwzAZ6k&list=PLF9306B719037CED1&t=133s
[8] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/16/sir_clive_sinclair/#c_4332889
[9] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/16/sir_clive_sinclair/#c_4332822
[10] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/17/sir_clive_sinclair_obituary/#c_4333789
[11] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/17/sir_clive_sinclair_obituary/#c_4333682
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/28/telecom_australia_computerphone/
[13] https://forums.theregister.com/user/42834/
[14] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/16/sir_clive_sinclair/#c_4332707
[15] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2021/09/16/sir_clive_sinclair/#c_4333410
[16] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.elite.zxec&hl=en_AU&gl=US
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2019/02/05/retro_computers_ltd_wound_up_private_planet/
[18] http://manicminergame.com/
[19] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chilli.midnight&hl=en_AU&gl=US
[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Replay
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: And now we have the Cloud and SaaS
Agreed. I wonder what he thought of a world in which corporate overlords and their operating systems work against the developer and most people using a computer will never know, or even care to know what a command line is. Machines designed to consume rather than create.
But still, the perversion of the gaming industry with DLC, loot boxes, and pay to win business models spawned the indie gaming scene and something of a resurgence of the bedroom programmer.
Much like the 1980's, glimmers of light continue to shine in the dark.
Re: And now we have the Cloud and SaaS
and now, “Product Activation”. “Digital Licensing”. “DLC” and their evil misbegotten ilk.
But also, now Raspberry Pi. In many ways a spiritual successor of the ZX81 and a bloody good thing to play/learn/make with.
Kenyan businesses ran on the Sinclair QL
As it was small enough to smuggle in when there was 160% duty and sales tax on computers, as President Daniel Arap Moi had declared the only purpose of a computer was to put secretaries out of work.
A complete direct mail marketing company ran on the QL. While I wrote a timekeeping programme for the Nairobi Round Table 24 hour pedal cart race. It had multi-tasking assembly programs controlled by a QL BASIC one.
Even before that, the university microelectronics course that trained the first ever computer technicians in the country used a lab full of Sinclair Spectrums - connected to a cassette recorder via an amplifier and cooled with frozen tetrapaks of milk.
ZX81 clone started my interest in computer science
I was really sad to know that Sir Clive Sinclair was gone. He was an indirect influence on the formation of many young people in the 1980s. Microdigital's computers (TK85 and TK90) were clones of the Zx81 and Zx Spectrum, at a time when Brazil was living on the Market Protection Law, which forbidded foreing country tech companies to operante directly if there were "equivalent" solutions produced by brazilian companies. My first computer was a TK85, connected to a monochromatic TV by an antenna adapter, which used cassette tape as storage media, programmed in BASIC. In today's terms, even an Arduino Uno won. But what a wonderful thing. I learned a lot studying its manual (which I have kept until today), in a time where information was sparse. That motivated me to go into a software career.
If today I am a professor in this area, I owe it to this first contact with a simple computer for today's standards, which widened my horizons. I feel that I owe it to this gentleman, who was one of several who had the ideas that made microcomputers explode in the 1980s, and who popularized their use for everything. Thanks for everything, Sir Clive.
Well
The ZX81 with its RAM pack wobble taught a generation the importance of multiple backups of everything as soon as you had done enough work to miss it if it vanished.
The crappy keyboards - ZX8*'s cheap remote style, the ZX Spectrum's dead flesh, and the QL's swamp feel - also taught a generation the benefits of a decent one.
The appalling signal / noise ratio of the expansion port on the Z80-based ones taught the value of buffering signals.
The ZX Printer showed what you could do with a bit of imagination, aluminium covered toilet roll, and enough current to burn it... and why you should have just got a proper printer.
The declining quality of tape-to-tape copies taught a bunch of us disassembly skills to crack odd headers and data formats, so we could produce first generation copies. Even Lenslok cracked in the end.
On a slightly more positive note, the ZX Spectrum also showed the advantages of having your own micro to do coursework - thank you HiSoft - rather than trying to get a seat in the terminal room to share an overloaded mini.
Never used email or the internet
Wonderfully Sinclair never used email or the internet and he never owned a computer, he just sold them!
And now we have the Cloud and SaaS
And I’ve just realized why I’m so grumpy at the state of the IT industry these days.
It’s that the current headlong rush to centralise and monetise everything, nickel-and-dimeing us for every possible use of our computers (ha! “our” computers! not so much any more…) is the very antithesis of what Sir Clive offered us.
The sheer liberating freedom of my ZX81, then Spectrum+, in those sun-dappled days of the 1980s… and now, “Product Activation”. “Digital Licensing”. “DLC” and their evil misbegotten ilk.
Grrrrrr.