Sir Clive Sinclair, UK home computer market pioneer (audio)

The BBC's Chris Vallance tells us,

We recorded a long interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, British personal computer pioneer (ZX80, ZX81, ZX spectrum) and we've just posted it, more or less unexpurgated, online. Many of your readers will have grown up playing games on one of Sir Clive's machines. In the interview he talks about everything from from flying electric cars to Eee PC's and and his thoughts on the modern computing industry.

Sir Clive Sinclair [ BBC iPM ]

• [ggm]

  Sinclair is a bit of a mixed bag. Innovative, but very careful to jump around like a butterfly before the shit hits the fan over *serious* design faults. -My family constructed two of his early 60s op-amp based home hifi amplifiers, and the instructions were rediculously bad, fried power transistors on the case, really noisy.

  The ‘tape cartridge’ idea for the QL was neat, the same way that minox cameras were neat: neat, but entirely impractical. The flex keyboard has just re-surfaced in the OLPC, again an interesting idea and cheap to make, but also cheap-to-feel.

  The calculators made it into the terence conran ‘best of british design’ but that was for looks: the battery life of the LED one was shite, and the forward/inverse trig functions did not equal up. Bad rounding in the math. Reverse-Polish Notation in a consumer device????

  And don’t get people started on the sinclair electric car: massively over-sold, released as a kiddycart toy, the law required a flag to make it visible to real cars. They all got bought up by a gym and used as on-road advertizing (presumably “feel as crap and run-down as a sinclair electronic car? come into our gym and feel worse…”)

  All his devices had to be super small, and black. Mailorder was notoriously late to deliver. Hence the ‘Not the Nine O-Clock News’ joke:

  Q: Heard about the Sinclair Digital Penis?
  A: Its black, 2 inches long, and takes 28 days to come…

  All in all, I think his knighthood reflected marketing skills and a sharp beard more than reality.

  -G

• [ifw]

  If it wasnt for this man.. i wouldnt be doing what i do now.. A video games programmer…

  That said, if i met him – i dont know whether i’d thank him or slap him

  :-)

• [Luc]

  What a great interview! The interviewer did a great job.

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  Hey Hey 16K!

  ”
  For n = 0 to 2
  those were the days
  next n
  ”

• [EtaWat]

  My first computer. Not been without a computer since then.

  Thanks Clive!

• [Anonymous]

  Sir Clive’s inventions made me what I am today, i.e. a computer consultant, programmer and general enthusiast. My first Sinclair was a zx-81. I still remember feeling proud beating 1K chess. I moved on to the Spectrum, then finally the C64.

  My first job was in 1984 in a computer store. I started in December. In the run up to Xmas the line for folks wanting to buy Spectrums went out the door, such was the demand. But in January hundreds came back. I forget the failure rate, but it was abysmal. Sinclair instituted a blue label to facilitate returns. The market was ripe for a quality product.
  
  Amstrad prolonged the platform, so to speak, for a few more years, but the ultimately PC triumphed, albeit with valiant efforts from Commodore.
  
  For anyone feeling nostalgic, just load up any of the many emulators and play a few classics. I can only bear JetSet Willy and Lords of Midnight. Everything else is just dated.

• [mdhatter]

  This man is a real hero to several of my geek friends ‘across the pond’.

• [SteveKiwi]

  My first computer was a Spectrum, round about 1983 or so. I wasted many many hours playing Manic Miner (and I can still hear In the Halls of the Mountain Kings from a tinny little speaker). Still, here we are 25 years later and I’m a programmer, so it was all worthwhile. Thanks Clive!

• [teapot7]

  The Spectrum was the first computer I was ever paid to program, and it was a delight in its own small way – just a z80 chip and some RAM, and the programmer gets to figure out the rest.

  There’s no love like your first love…