Sir Clive Sinclair, the father of the ZX Spectrum, has died

R.I.P Sir Clive.

The ZX spectrum was my gateway into computers. I owe it all to this man.

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The Sinclair Spectrum certainly got me programming far more effectively than any number of tedious sessions over a teletype linked to Manchester University.
The UK owes him a lot.

Ohhh! The “Sinclair ZX Spectrum +128” was the first computer i programmed in my life …
All honors for Sir Clive Sinclair!!

Ibae bayen tonu!

You were later than me… My first zx spectrum was 16k. Even then I used to like getting it to bleep tunes.

Back in the 80s when I was a Jr. in High School I built the ZX80 kit. It was my first computer.
Life is too short. RIP Sir Clive Sinclair

I owe much of my computing skills to this man. I owned (and still own) several ZX81 with its massive 1KB RAM, expanded to 16KB with a large plug in module. I spent a lot of time building expansion cards including sound, speech, high-res graphics, etc. I added mechanical keyboard and light pen and built a case to home it all and the cassette machine for loading and saving programs as well as a rack to hold those cassettes. I just grabbed it from the garage - the first time it has been out of the packing box since we moved to this house fourteen years ago.


I bought a ZX Spectrum +3 at university and wrote my dissertation using word processor and spell check software I bought for it and a graphics editing program I wrote to draw the circuit diagrams all printed using a Panasonic dot matrix printer.

The man was a legend who changed the face of computing for the better, making it affordable and accessible. Some of his innovation to reduce cost were amazing (who can forget the sharing of video and audio outputs resulting in seeing the FSK rendered on the screen as you saved or loaded anything to / from cassette?).

Sir Clive will live long in my memory. If it wasn’t for him I might have become a train driver…

Don’t forget the c5. Unfortunately Clive was never as good at the business end of things as some are, but electric driven personal transport in the 80’s shows he was a tech king that eclipses the likes of Elon Musk today!