It’s always sad when someone clever passes away, moreso when they have played a significant part in your life. For me, the loss of Motörhead’s Lemmy in late December 2015 followed just weeks later by the death of David Bowie in January 2016, was hard. I used to go see Motörhead play at Christmas every year and David Bowie was just a big background sound since the 1970s.
So when the news of Sir Clive Sinclair’s passing came yesterday, it was yet another end of another era.
When I was growing up in Suffolk and then Essex, Sinclair was a big name. My father was in the electronics industry so Clive Sinclair was well known in our house. My dad had the early Sinclair calculator with that distinctive red LCD display. It languished in a drawer once it became obsolete, but it was a little bit of history tucked away in our home.
Sinclair ZX81
Then we had a Sinclair ZX81 home computer. You could buy them fully built, but for about twenty quid less, there was a kit version that my geeky DIY electronics father enjoyed constructing. It had a membrane keyboard that you had to press down quite firmly on to get a “keystroke”, just 1k RAM, and the graphics were monochrome and blocky. But with a 16k RAM extension, a 14” Ferguson portable TV and a cassette deck to save and load programmes, it was my first computer. I learned to code BASIC, Beginners All Symbolic Instruction Code, my first programming language on that Sinclair ZX81.
The ZX Spectrum followed with friendlier rubber keys and colour graphics, but we’d migrated to the Acorn BBC Model B by this time. My Uncle Tony did have a ZX Spectrum though, and I did enjoy playing Hunchback on that.
And that was it for me as far as Sinclair computing went. But wow, what an introduction, I was hooked.
Sinclair C5
A few years later Sir Clive was back with his C5 electric trike! A schoolmate’s dad worked for Hoover who built the little vehicle in a factory in Wales. He brought one home for a weekend and we had great fun in this crazy mode of transport, thrashing it up and down the hill where my friend lived. I even nearly tipped the damn thing over as I turned into the road by his house. Fun but also a little dangerous too.
Of course, the Sinclair C5 was visionary, but it was a flop too. Sir Clive didn’t sell as many as he’d projected, well ahead of his time he was, and the battery technology was still a bit crude. But a few years later again some entrepreneurial chap was renting out C5s on the seafront in Morecambe. It was great to see them being used by the tourists, hacking up and down the promenade and then home to the arcade where they were recharged for the next day’s (ab)use.
The Centre for Computing History
In the world of IBM PCs we didn’t see anything more from Sir Clive. There was a fold-up bike if I recall, but that was that.
But then one day, many years later, I stumbled across The Centre for Computing History online and decided that I really must pay it a visit. Now there’s a ton of cool stuff there, and the VR headsets were bonkers, but the ZX81, ZX Spectrum and BBC Model B really made it for me. It was just such a shame the kids weren’t that interested in dad’s old computers, especially now that they were using iPhones and iPads.
But that was a great afternoon out and I highly recommend a visit.
Cheerio Sir Clive, and Thank You
And that was Sinclair’s part in my life – a calculator, two computers, and an early electric vehicle. As a geek who has grown up seeing tech evolve so rapidly, I’m glad I was there in the 1970s and 1980s when this all happened. Thank you, Sir Clive, you played a big part in putting me on the path to computing that started me programming in BASIC, went on to HTML and the WWW, and has made me a digital marketing guy today,
If you’re interested in what else he got up to, there are more general obituaries over at The Guardian and The Register. The BBC even serialised his life in their programme Micro Men, which I hope comes back to iPlayer.