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Clive Sinclair: Mr. Inventor, the father of the ZX81, is dead

2021-09-17T17:48:50.927Z


He was the Daniel jet engine of the first phase of the digital revolution: The Englishman Clive Sinclair invented devices that were epoch-making and successful - and made spectacular mistakes.


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IT pioneer Clive Sinclair (2014): Personally, he did not use email or computers

Photo: imago stock & people / imago / i Images

He was the Steve Jobs of his time, but he was too far ahead of his time.

The English inventor and entrepreneur Clive Sinclair brought the first pocket calculator onto the market in 1972, followed, with varying degrees of success, by a digital watch, an electric car, a pocket TV, but above all: the first home computer for everyone.

Sinclair was the father of the ZX80 and its successor, the ZX81, which he named after the year they were launched. The small boxes with up to two KB of RAM that had to be connected to the television cost so little money that they were soon found in thousands upon thousands of teenage rooms. For quite a few of these teenagers, this was the first contact with a bits-and-bytes machine, to which they later devoted their careers.

Now the electronics pioneer has died in London.

Sinclair was 81 years old.

He was clearly one of the trailblazers of the digital revolution, but somehow he himself got lost.

Personally, he did not use e-mail or computers, and for arithmetic he always stayed true to his slide rule.

All these technical devices, he once said, only disrupted the process of developing new things.

In his youth, Sinclair was enthusiastic about a BBC radio play series called "Toytown".

He was particularly taken with the character "Mr.

Inventor «, a brilliant inventor for whom nothing was too difficult.

Sinclair decided to become Mr. Inventor, the British version of Daniel Düsentrieb.

And he was, in a slightly eccentric English embodiment.

He didn't need to study engineering, he decided, after all, he'd already taught himself everything he needed.

Sinclair had written over a dozen electronic tinkering guides even before he started his first company.

In August 1972, however, his first work appeared: the "Sinclair Executive", the infamous pocket calculator, "as thin as a cigarette packet," as advertised it.

The machine couldn't do much.

He only mastered the functions +, -, * and:.

The display could only show eight digits.

The battery tended to explode, and the machine was also expensive.

Nevertheless: The world was thirsting for it, the "Executive" brought in Sinclair's young company millions.

The "Black Watch" digital wristwatch followed in 1975, virtually the original model of the Apple Watch. However, this apparatus had many disadvantages. The battery only lasted ten days and was very difficult to replace, and there was also a constant risk of explosion. In winter the clock ran at a different speed than in summer. Their display consisted of red LEDs, but they were hardly readable in the sunshine. The "Black Watch" became a commercial disaster for Sinclair.

So it went on for him: some of his many products became epoch-making, most of them not at all; and so Sinclair did not remain a member of the super millionaires' club for very long. Sinclair had invented an electric tricycle, the C5, the battery-operated adult version of the classic toddler. Nobody wanted it. He surprised the world with a folding bike that fit in a suitcase. However, the first testers judged that it was completely inaccessible to humans. The Sinclair TV80, released in 1983, was a mobile black and white telly with flat screen for the handbag - but nobody wanted that either at the time.

Sinclair didn't worry too much about it. What was left of his companies he sold in the mid-1980s. Freshly divorced, he later surrounded himself with beautiful young women and pursued a second career - as a thoroughly successful poker player.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-09-17

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