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Month: September 2021

Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated by Facebook's link sharing behaviors...

To attempt to alleviate confusion when I share future "in memoriam" posts to social media, I have decided to remove the words "In Memoriam" from the title of the post. Going forward, I will simply name the post with the person's name followed by their birth and death years.

This is due to the current use of my photo as the logo for my blog, as having an actual logo designed is expensive...

Thanks goes to Pastor Chad for having a mini heart attack while scrolling his Facebook Newsfeed and actually calling me out on the issue.

Published on

Clive Sinclair (or Sir Clive Sinclair if you are in a Commonwealth realm) passed away today.

While he may be widely known for the Sinclair C5, the failed three-wheeled electric vehicle, I would like to recognize his contributions to home computing.

At £79.95 in kit form and £99.95 assembled, it was about one-fifth of the price of other home computers at the time.

The Guardian

His ZX80 computer brought computing to the masses, as it cost about a fifth of what other home computers cost. Its successor, the ZX81, brought the price of home computing down even further – to a low £49.95 for those willing (and brave enough) to assemble the ZX81 from a kit. The ZX81 made such an impact that it was ranked as the 9th most influential computer in history by TechRadar back in 2010 (with the original IBM PC being #8 and the original Apple Macintosh being #10).

His ZX Spectrum computers brought affordable personal computing to the masses and sold in their [sic] millions across the world.

Yahoo! News

In all, millions of Spectrum ZX computers were sold world-wide, giving millions of people a start in computing.

Thank you, Clive.