The man who saw the future
The giants of the tech world pay tribute to visionary inventor Sir Clive Sinclair who died this week, aged 81
BY ITS nature this page is forward thinking, and it’s unusual for us to take a look back. But it wouldn’t be right if we let this week’s column out into the world without a mention of Sir Clive Sinclair.
The UK’S very own tech titan, who has died aged 81, is regarded as either a genius or a fool, depending on which era of his phenomenal career in innovation you recall most clearly.
My generation is most certainly in the former camp. I can still recall the excitement as I watched my dad fill in the little form he had cut from a newspaper – believe it or not, in 1981 that was the way you ordered your new computer.
And the ZX81 – the second of Sir Clive’s personal computer to hit the market – was new in every way.
A few weeks later the magical device arrived and my brothers and I fought for time with the little black box and the flickering black and white images it produced. It felt very much like the future.
And it was. That was just the beginning, of course.
Sir Clive’s finest hour came with the release of the ZX Spectrum and its variants, which brought colour computing to the masses, and helped kickstart the programming lives of many who have gone on to shape our digital world.
There were misses, of course, and if you remember the C5 electric trike more clearly than the computers, you might view Sir Clive as a figure of fun.
We know now, of course, he was right. As we enter the eye of the cli
mate change storm, we’re not laughing at electric vehicles any more.
The same goes for his A-bike
folding commuter bike – it looked odd, but it might have changed the world.
Despite those misses it would be hard to overstate Sir Clive’s lasting influence over the gaming and tech world.
Rockstar Games, makers of Grand Theft Auto, perhaps the
biggest video game series of all time, said: “Rest In Peace to the great Sir Clive Sinclair.
“Genius, inventor, and creator of the Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum home computers, machines that helped inspire the creation of a generation of video game companies across the UK – including this one.”
And one man at the cutting edge of the tech world today paid tribute on Twitter – Tesla and Space-x boss Elon Musk said: “RIP, Sir Sinclair.
“I loved that computer.”