10 RUN BLOG
Sir Clive Sinclair has died.
For a long time he was simply ‘the computer guy’. I once caught sight of a ZX80, and when I started secondary school in 1982 the computer room (clearly a hastily-converted stationary cupboard) boasted a ZX81 – but it was with the Spectrum that Sinclair really struck gold.
My brother got one for Christmas 1983. I hasten to add he paid a lot of it himself, but whether it was funded by bruv, by Mum & Dad, or by Santa (or by a mix of all four) what it demonstrates is that the Spectrum made computers affordable.
True, its infamous rubber keys didn’t become the industry standard (they were the subject of much derision even at the time) but suddenly computers weren’t huge air-controlled caverns inhabited by white-coated technicians wielding punch cards and examining tickertape – nor even the sleeker-but-still-bulky tape-spool cabinets so beloved of 1970s telefantasy shows. Now a computer was a small, self-contained plastic box that you could carry with one hand, no longer exclusive to heavily-financed government organisations and multinational conglomerates, but available to have in your sitting room.
Part of its genius, and presumably part of its affordability, was that the screen was your TV and you loaded games with a bog-standard cassette recorder. No heavily-priced monitor screens or separately-purchased disc drives, you just bought the computer and you were good to go.
There was no internet then of course, not even a spreadsheet package (I love a spreadsheet) and despite claims of it being suited to all sorts of worthy educational purposes it’s entirely possibly even the manufacturer thought it would only be used for playing games – but even so, with one invention a whole generation was suddenly introduced to the concepts of home computing and gaming. One small step…
That would have been quite the legacy – and for a long time, as business boomed, as share prices rose, as the Knighthood was awarded, Sir Clive’s place in history seemed assured.
20 GOTO 1985
Maybe it was ‘difficult second album’ syndrome. Maybe when people keep telling you how visionary you are, you begin to believe it. I once read an interview with David Nobbs who said that, after a huge success you can get anything commissioned. That’s how he followed up the incredibly popular, fondly-remembered, oft-repeated classic The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-1979) with the totally-forgotten The Sun Trap (1980). Similarly, post-Spectrum I expect Sir Clive found it very easy to get investment for his next exciting project.
That next project, of course, was the C5…
We look at it, and laugh, and see instantly that nobody would ever want to be sat 12 inches off the road, in the gutter, with traffic whizzing past. It looks uncomfortable, and dangerous, and impractical.
And yet for all the scorn heaped on the C5, both at the time and whenever it’s been mentioned ever since, I can’t help but see it as coming from a need to reduce traffic flow, and a belief that electric vehicles were the way forward. Nowadays, those two ideas are generally accepted – albeit we still don’t see the C5 as being the solution.
So Sir Clive gave us the home computer, affordable and practical, but too soon to be used for anything but games; and the C5, to tackle issues with congestion and motoring. Maybe he wasn’t just ahead of his time, he was crucially TOO far ahead – especially with the poor C5, which at the time was the wrong answer to a question nobody was asking anyway.
For all that, I never saw him pop up on an 80s nostalgia show to bitterly complain about his lot – and I was pleased to see that his obituary reported that he was still inventing right up to the end. I very much like the image of a man not striving for fame and fortune, but simply driven by the need to invent, the urge to improve and innovate – a man who could “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.”
RIP Sir Clive
30 END
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 