Sir Clive has last laugh after ‘silly’ car is ridiculed

Home computer nostalgia went into overdrive after the sad death was announced last week of Sir Clive Sinclair at the age of 81. Reading his obituary, many things about the British inventor sounded utterly fantastic. An early line - ‘Sinclair made a communications system for his hideout in the woods’ - sums it up.

It made you long for the days when tech innovator types were genuine eccentrics rather than men who spoke in mystic, new age babble and pretended to be antiestablishment, despite being the heads of multi-billion dollar global corporations.

For many of us, our first brush with computers came with arrival of the Sinclair ZX81. Given how far computers have come in 40 years, it’s easy to sneer now at the primitive nature of this wonderful machine but it was utterly beguiling.

Computer graphics were in their infancy but millions couldn’t believe how they could now play a version of ‘Space Invaders’ in their own homes, even if it involved firing quotation marks into an advancing army of semi-colons

(I forget exact details but the screen was certainly heavy with punctuation, rather than fancy graphics).

As technology advanced, the next

Sinclair home computer landed - the equally fantastic ZX

Spectrum, complete with actual pictures and a rubber keyboard. The games went to the next level and became hot currency in school playgrounds, through the fiendish deployment of two cassette machines and a connecting plug.

Some of his other achievements were less celebrated. Sinclair’s purple patch came to an end in the mid 1980s, as bigger corporations inevitably got in on the act. He also suffered merciless mockery when he introduced - and drove - the C5 electric car around the same time. I’m glad Sir Clive lived long enough to have the last laugh, with millions now driving around in bigger - and vastly safer versions of his most ridiculed invention.

Millions could now play ‘Space Invaders’ in their own homes, even if involved firing quotation marks into an advancing army of semicolons