Remembering Sir Clive Sinclair: ZX in peace
Sir Clive Sinclair wanted people to embrace technology, yet he didn’t appear entirely convinced himself. Despite spending much of the 1970s developing pocket calculators, he always used a slide rule, says Acorn co-founder Christopher Curry. “And flying slide-rules were an occupational hazard when you worked for him,” Curry added.
Quirky, eccentric, inventive and driven, Sinclair was also the eternal optimist of the British technology industry. It says much about his character that he was working on new inventions a week before he died on 16 September this year, aged 81. Although he battled cancer for more than a decade, his enthusiasm to invent never waned.
“I suppose he was a bit like Elon Musk but 50 years earlier,” said Curry, who joined the entrepreneur’s company, Sinclair Radionics, in 1966 and remained there for 13 years before becoming a business rival. “But he wasn’t easy to work for if one was sensitive.
“There were screaming rages; objects were thrown. But, after the storm passed and, following an hour or two at the pub, all rants were forgotten and forgiven. Most people in the small team came to terms with this and they were very happy to continue with the development of innovative products.”
Those products included the ZX Spectrum and its previous variants, machines that brought home computers to the masses. They enabled Sinclair to have a humongous impact on the British computer industry, not only introducing people to coding, but nurturing
