Sir Clive Sinclair

[John Lawton]

As you may know Sir Clive Sinclair died recently. In the late 70's, early in my career I was at his then company  working on the development of the 'plastic box' TV range. Not a great product unfortunately.

Despite his early history of miniature amplifiers, radios, Hi-Fi units and calculators, he is best known for his computing products. I just came across this article which highlights the effect he has had on many people's lives. Some of his ex employees formed other companies in the Cambridgeshire area, such as Thurlby, Thandar, Black Star and of course Acorn from which we now have ARM.

https://hackaday.com/2021/09/16/farewell-sir-clive-sinclair-inspired-a-generation-of-engineers/

https://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Sinclair/index.php

[RayEllam]

I was not aware of sir Clive's passing. My late brother who ran an electronics design house in St Ives, cambs had business dealings with him and always had a good word for Clive. RIP Sir Clive Sinclair

[top204]

Unfortunately, it was his attitude to the people around him that made them leave! He was a Thatcherite and had a Thatcherite mentality, and it was the people around him who made him famous and made him money and honours etc.

When he, alone, dictated what he wanted, they all failed dreadfully. That was true from the 1960s onwards. His early audio equipment was utterly dreadful, and his 1970s calculators, usually, failed after a few weeks. :-) Not to mention the utterly dreadful C5 and the pointless QL computer using his discarded bits and pieces from the, failed, Spectrum+ computers. i.e. Dreadful keyboard and Microdrive tape cartridges, and no real graphics and a very outdated sound chip, while the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga were also available at the same time! They were true 16-bit computers, and the Amiga was a wonder of its day!

It is a loss to his family, but he was given far too much credit for, essentially, producing cheap products. He even used surplus and malfunctioning components for his early computers to save money. I know this as fact because I used to have to repair them, sometimes on-mass. It was mainly the RAM chips that had failed the manufacturer tests, but were good enough to get a machine working for a while. That's why the original Spectrums were 16K, but used 32K devices in them, because they had failed their original tests. :-) The same for the Z80 microprocessor, they were not up to scratch and had failed their speed tests by the manufacturer. Eventually, the larger companies also dropped their prices of "good" 8-bit computers in the UK, and Sinclair sold out to another Thatcherite who also sold crap and made a fortune from doing so. i.e. "Alan Sugar".