PC PIONEER DIES
Tributes pour in following death of trailblazer behind home computer
HOME computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair has died at the age of 81.
His daughter Belinda Sinclair revealed that the pocket calculator trailblazer and brains behind the Spectrum home computers died at his home in London yesterday morning.
Sir Clive Sinclair launched the first affordable consumer computer in 1980, costing less than £100.
The multimillionaire entrepreneur’s company launched the ZX models in a decade where personal computer use boomed.
Sinclair became the first company in the world to sell more than a million computers, making Sir Clive’s surname a household word.
His daughter said: “He was a rather amazing person. Of course, he was so clever and he was always interested in everything.
“My daughter and her husband are engineers so he’d be chatting engineering with them.”
Sir Clive’s projects also saw him explore new technology in the worlds of television and cars.
One ill-fated initiative was the Sinclair C5 vehicle, an electric tricycle heralded as the future of eco-friendly transport but which turned out to be an expensive flop.
Born in 1940, Sir Clive left school at the age of 17, becoming a technical journalist writing specialist manuals.
Aged 22, he formed Sinclair Radionics, his first company, making mail order radio kits, including the smallest transistor radio in the world.
Later in life, he pioneered the pocket calculator and was dubbed an “electronics wizard”.
Other ventures included expansions into digital watches and the development of the world’s smallest television set. It was with another company, Sinclair Research, that Sir Clive found his home computing successes.
The ZX 81 computer, launched in 1981, sold half a million and was followed by more powerful models.
Film director Edgar Wright paid tribute to Sir Clive’s computing achievements on Twitter.
He tweeted: “For someone whose first glimpses of a brave new world were the terrifying graphics of 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81, I’d like to salute tech pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair.
“He made 21st Century dreams feel possible. Will bash away on the rubber keys of a Spectrum in your honour. RIP.”
Tom Watson, former deputy leader of the Labour Party, tweeted: “Arguably, the digital age for us in the UK started with the Sinclair ZX80, when thousands of kids learnt to code using 1k of RAM.
“For us, the Spectrum was like a RollsRoyce with 48k.”
He was so clever and was always interested in everything DAUGHTER BELINDA ON HER DAD SIR CLIVE