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September 17, 2021 - 11:45am
One of the odd things about writing very recent history is that you spend so much of your time with people who were once immensely famous but are now almost completely forgotten. The home-computer pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair, who died yesterday, is such a person. During his early-1980s heyday, he was one of the most famous businessmen in the land, perhaps even the most famous.
Here’s just one example. In the spring of 1983, with a general election looming, the Observer interviewed Margaret Thatcher about her economic shock therapy, and asked her to name a single British success story. ‘The obvious and quick one is the Sinclair home computers,’ she said immediately. Then she recalled her trip to Japan a few months earlier:
Sadly, history doesn’t record what Mr Suzuki made of the rubber keyboard.
Perhaps it’s too easy to laugh at Sir Clive Sinclair. Everybody remembers the C5, his disastrous attempt to revolutionise transport overnight. But we forget the pocket calculator he launched in 1972, the first really cheap calculator of its kind. And there’s just no getting away from the popular success of his home computers: the ZX80, the ZX81 and above all, the Spectrum.
By the end of the 1980s the Spectrum had become easily the bestselling British computer in history, shifting an estimated two and a half million units in the United Kingdom alone. It might not have been very reliable, but almost uniquely for a computer, it was friendly. ‘When you took the Spectrum out of the packaging,’ remarks the writer Francis Spufford, ‘you knew it was supposed to be fun, not good for you.’
Like so many public figures of the Thatcher years, the slender, red-bearded Sinclair, burning with ambition and impatience, was a great character. Interviewers lapped up his presidency of Mensa, his love of Porsches, his habit of rising early to run seven miles before breakfast. And by 1984, Sinclair seemed the master of all he surveyed. ‘Today,’ declared the Observer, ‘a Sinclair computer drops off the end of the production line every four seconds.’ The Guardian crowned him the Young Businessman of the Year. The Government awarded him a knighthood.
That spring, invited to Washington to address an American congressional symposium, Sinclair predicted that in decades, ‘we will be able to assemble a machine as complex as the human brain’. Soon, ‘machines of silicon will arise first to rival and then surpass their human progenitors’. Computers would become teachers, even doctors. There would be ‘totally automatic personal vehicles’ and ‘truly personal telephones … wireless devices [that would] allow us to telephone and be telephoned wherever we choose’.
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SubscribeA great man. RIP, Sir Clive
My very first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48K. I got it for my eighth birthday. My very first computer games were Manic Miner and Chuckie Egg. The Hobbit by Melbourne House was my very first computer RPG. From playing it, I developed a love of Tolkien’s works. I learned how to program on it and created my own games. Unfortunately, my mother discouraged my efforts and told me to concentrate on something useful that would make me money.
God speed to whichever destiny is yours, Sir Clive..another big part of my ’70/80’s consciousness [sigh] bites the proverbial.
There seems to be a lot of truth to the old saw that the British are outstanding at scientific discovery but they’re not much good at commercialization, which is a shame.
Yes – matchbox radio kits – got me into business assembling them for classmates!
I can’t believe my comment was disapproved because it contained the F word. It was a joke comparing a Welshman to Sir Clive Sinclair.
Don’t take it personally. It looks like unherd has an automatic approval algorithm written by a script kiddie. Perhaps Sir Clive was over-optimistic about the benefits of technology!
I think if it had just contained the word ‘sheepshagger’, it would have survived. Let’s see.
The technology he backed worked quite well for its day but had no future. Cassette hard drives, for example. He was a sort of Count Zeppelin figure, in a way.
The C5 was hilarious. It was an obvious turkey from the get go. This seems to be the way with British technology entrepreneurs though. Everything Alan Sugar has developed has been an absolute stinker (the Amstrad eMailer being memorably appalling) and he’s held onto his fortune by becoming essentially a property speculation company.