According to the newspaper The Guardian, the inventor died at his home in London. Elon Musk on his Twitter commented on the death of his father ZX Spectrum as follows: “Rest in peace, Sir Sinclair. I loved this computer. “
Cleve Sinclair was born near Richmond, Surrey on July 30, 1940. His father and grandfather were engineers. As a child, Cleve loved to swim and boating and designed a submarine at a very early age.
Rodney Dale’s biographical novel “The Sinclair Story” notes that the future inventor was gifted beyond his years with adult thinking and speech, “he was often at odds with his peers at school, preferring more the company of adults.”
Mathematics was his favorite subject. As a teenager, Cleve constructed a computer programmed with punched cards. Wanting to make addition as simple as possible, he accomplished it all with ones and zeros. “I thought it was a great idea,” he recalled. “I was really amazed to find that it was a known binary system. This discovery deeply disappointed me. I thought I made a fortune. “
His room was usually littered with all kinds of wires, from which amplifiers and radios for his family and close friends were subsequently born, as well as a telecommunication system for playing games in the forest.
Sinclair worked a lot at school, especially in subjects that he enjoyed reading and absorbing material, far beyond the required level. Having dropped out of school at the age of 17, he did not go to university, because he knew that everything he wanted to learn, he could learn for himself. But in order to move forward, create new and new electronic devices, he needed money for components, and he got a job as an assistant editor.
Independent business – Sinclair Radionics Ltd. for the production of miniature pocket transistor radios appeared only in 1961, but additional sources of funding were still required to maintain it, and therefore Sinclair continued to work as a scientific editor, getting a job in a technical publication.
In November 1962, Cleve released the first Sinclair micro amplifier. As advertisements in technical magazines said, “The world’s smallest of its kind.”
By 1979, there was already an established market for “personal computers” in the world. Commodore, Apple and Tandy all produced computers up to £ 1,000. They were bought by laboratories, commercial and educational institutions, but they were expensive for home use.
Sinclair urgently decided to create a similar product at a significantly reduced price. He outstripped the competition by a dozen years, having created by 1980 the smallest (9 by 7 inches) and cheapest computer in the world – the ZX80 at a cost of £ 99.95.
In 1982, a more powerful and, again, inexpensive ZX Spectrum appeared. Compared to its predecessors the ZX80 and ZX81, it already had color graphics, a sound generator, and the ability to support individual files. It should be noted that the computer did not have the monitor we are used to, it simply connected to the TV, like a set-top box.
The computer, of course, was inferior in a set of functions to the monsters already existing on the market, but its low price bribed consumers – parents were ready to buy these computers in order to give their children a “good start in life”. It was the children who later became the main experts in programming and games, for which the Spectrum turned out to be a very suitable machine. Sinclair’s company sold millions of Spectrum, in the 80s it was one of the most popular computers in Europe and in the USSR.
By 1983, Sinclair’s name had become a household name, and he was awarded a knighthood.
Later, this master of miniatures in technology also created the Sinclair TV80 pocket TV, which became the prototype of current gadgets.
His daughter Belinda Sinclair, in an interview with The Guardian, described her father’s creative process as follows: “These were the ideas in which he saw a challenge, it was exciting for him. He came up with an idea and said: “There is no point in asking if anyone wants this, because they cannot imagine it.”
It is surprising that the inventor himself was not a fan of technical devices. He never had a pocket calculator; instead, he always carried a slide rule with him. He also never used a computer, e-mail, or the Internet in his daily life, explaining that they distract him from inventing. Besides this main passion, Sinclair had other interests: poetry, running marathons and poker.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by sons, Crispin and Bartholomew, 55 and 52 years old, respectively, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Andrey Khristoforov, the commercial director of ITV groups, comments:
– Clive Sinclair is a whole era. His ZX Spectrum computer was wildly popular in our country in the 80s and 90s. Thanks to simple circuitry solutions, they began to quickly copy it. In our country alone, I knew 25 clones collected at our factories: in Leningrad, in Nalchik … It was possible to assemble it even at home, having simple components that could be bought in an electronics store. Thanks to Spectrum, many then learned to program. More than 25 thousand (!) Games and programs have been written for this machine.
I myself assembled my first ZX Spectrum from components and then wrote three games for it. Yes, these games are still very popular with old fans of this computer! Its emulator (a copy of a computing system) can be easily downloaded on the Internet and run on a modern gadget.
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