Skip to content

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.

Published on

First of all, I have not forgotten about Project CX5M. I put it on hold to move to a new house, and continued the hold while I put together a proper video production space in my new house.

And while I would like to release a video on the Yamaha Music Computer on this inaugural International Music Computer Day, that's not going to happen today.

There's always next year. However, I won't feel obliged to wait that long if I have a video ready sooner.

Secondly, I think June 5th should be International Music Computer Day. At 10AM, drink a cup of coffee and watch a YouTube video on the Yamaha CX5M. Or even better, if you have a CX5M, pull it out for old time's sake.

Why 10AM? Well, CX is the roman numeral for 110 and binary 110 is 6. And M is the roman numeral for 1000. And since Doc Brown's first time machine was destroyed... Er, since there was no electricity in 1000 A.D., we'll settle for the 1000 being ten-hundred hours, or 10:00AM local time.

Or listen to your favorite 80's album featuring the Yamaha DX21 or Yamaha DX7 synthesizer.

You're still stuck on coffee? Fine, whatever, just drink a glass of your favorite beverage.

Or go for a ride on your Yamaha motorcycle, I'm not picky; but if you choose the motorcycle ride option, you might want to consider finishing your coffee first. (Or whatever you picked to drink, but that better be a legal beverage to consume before operating a motorcycle.)

But what do I know, I can't even ride a bike, much less operate a motorcycle. But it seems both methods of conveyance require both hands to operate safely.

Now if anyone can find Doc Brown's other time machine...

Published on

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that today is the 22nd anniversary of registering my first domain name (jdmcs.com)... which conveniently happens to be the domain name being used for Computerized Start™ at the time of this post.

Hooray to the human obsession with anniversary dates!