RIP.  My first &quot;computer&quot; was a Timex Sinclair 1000.  I still have it, though I lost the power supply.

Also my first computer, bought as a kit and I soldered it together. Mine lasted a long time. It was so limited though I learned Z80 assembler, which turned out to be really cool. The ZX-81 was a wonderful machine.

The ZX81 was also my first computer.  Have to say I must have better luck because mine is still going to this day (although I did recently need to service and fix it).

The ZX81 was the first computer I ever touched, in terms of “stretching,” for me it stopped working after I used it for an hour or so.

Chess in 1K. INCLUDING THE VIDEO BUFFER. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1K_ZX_Chess" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1K_ZX_Chess</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ZX81" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ZX81</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timex_Sinclair_1000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timex_Sinclair_1000</a>Those were wild little toys; and people stretched them beyond all reason.

&gt; His computers weren&#x27;t aimed at middle aged adult engineers.Maybe not Clive Sinclair&#x27;s products specifically, but you&#x27;d be surprised with what professional engineers could use these &#x27;toys&#x27; for. Keep in mind that machines with comparable featuresets could sell for huge prices well into the early and even the mid-1960s, and were used for real, sometimes critically important work.

That doesn&#x27;t particularly surprise me. His computers weren&#x27;t aimed at middle aged adult engineers. The early calculators weren&#x27;t all that sophisticated. They were convenience devices rather than serious tools. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with designing products aimed at people other than yourself.

&gt; &quot;But he did not make personal use of his own inventions. His daughter said he never had a pocket calculator as far as she knew, instead carrying a slide-rule around with him at all times. And he told interviewers he used neither a computer nor email.&quot;

Absolutely. During a time when most any other computer was an unreachable dream in communist Poland the ZX Spectrum was a  gift to the emerging geek community here. I was lucky to have received my own in 1984. I was one of the first in the neighbourhood to get one. It literally cost about 2 months of my dad&#x27;s wages. Those were the days.

Yup.  His little ZX computer was the gateway drug into programming for me.

Yep: from being given a +2 when I was 9, I don&#x27;t think there was ever much doubt what my career would be.

I owe him a career, I suspect a lot of others do as well.

It was also the first for me. It was expensive for my family to have but my school buddy had it and naturally we spent all our free time in their house typing programs from the large book. Fun times. RIP.

The ZX Spectrum was my first computer. So many good moments with it... It&#x27;s hard to describe it for the current generation - if you were there, you know what I mean.Sir Clive Sinclair had an enormous impact on my life and career. Today is a sad day for me :(

You could replace many ICs with just your fingers or a screwdriver. On the C64 the main ones like the CPU, graphics, sound and IO chips were in sockets, and that was similar on many home computers of the era.I freaked my parents out by switching chips between our C64 and the floppy drive to see what would happen (they had almost compatible CPUs and IO chips - many things kept working).Also: Repairing by touching chips to see if any of them were unusually hot was fun...EDIT: to bring this more back to the thread subject, as a Commodore user at the time we used to make fun of the Spectrums, but they absolutely had a massive impact on the market. Including on competitors - e.g. Tramiel got spooked by how cheap the ZX81 was, and it certainly contributed to choices made at Commodore. Sinclair&#x27;s influence as a result spread wide and far beyond the sizable direct influence of his own machines.

Only a couple of years a go I replaced a blown cap on a motherboard. It was faster than replacing it with a new board because I happened to have a cap with the right specs. So in principle you still could do this today. If you don&#x27;t use your soldering iron on the CPU or the RAM or ... well, lots of other parts.

Probably because back then you could rip apart your, say C64, and replace borked components with a soldering iron or so my dad told me.

Me for one. ZX Spectrum +2 got me into programming. ROI on that home computer must be enormous.

Rarity I guess? Computers were formerly even rarer. But everyone&#x27;s got one in their pocket now.

Steve Vickers wrote that manual. A couple of decades later he taught me an impenetrable course on mathematical structures in computer science. (My previous comments about that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23760382" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23760382</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26375986" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26375986</a>)

I memorized the ZX81 (and Spectrum) manuals back to front. Around age 11 I used to write out assembly long-hand and &quot;poke&quot; the OpCodes into memory to write programs and drivers. I really credit what has now been a long and happy career in software development to the affordable computers Sir Clive developed. (My family was pretty poor growing up, but I convinced my Dad to spring the 80 pounds or so for one after I borrowed a friend&#x27;s and took to it).What you could do was limited enough that you could master it, and I really think that&#x27;s a good thing for education and motivation. When I think about teaching my kids to program today, I effectively get &quot;choice paralysis&quot; from all the paths I could go down and the options within easy reach.

Self soldered my first computer ever from a ZX81 kit.They were available as bargain sellout at the time(1985).When other people already used Commodore64 or the first Amigas
or Atari STs.But I&#x27;ve been sceptic and low on funds :-)Wasn&#x27;t that difficult because there weren&#x27;t much parts. And no SMD.Scale was almost like electronic breadbording.And it worked for the first time!Regarding the Handbook, compare this image of the cover[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;0WarG.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;0WarG.jpg</a>with[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Zaxxon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Zaxxon</a>I felt so very, very Zaxxonized!Anyway, it lasted me about half a year, where I got a 16KB RAM extension,learned how to duct-tape this so I don&#x27;t get resets,a data-capable cassette recorder for reliable storage, which my ghetto blaster didn&#x27;t do,learned Z80 assembly including illegals,replaced parts of the ROM with RAM to get glorious 256x192 pixelsin black &amp; white instead of block graphics,and finally got an Atari 520stfm with flicker free 640x400 pixels on 12 inches,because why not? I&#x27;ve already been used to BW from the ZX81.

Started with a ZX-81 clone. The factor I liked most was the attention with the manuals, they really cared to teach the basics of programming, even low-level things, to the layman.

Ha, I thought this was just my Spectrum with dust &#x2F; biscuit crumbs in it

Still today when I see picture of old computer, I get memory of the smell and the glow of the screen (Yes, computers at that time had electric smell).

Yes, and today such a perspective is almost impossible to achieve outside the embedded space. Even a Raspberry-Pi is many orders of magnitude more complex than say a Dragon 32 (Color Computer clone, by the way) or a BBC Micro.

I started with an Amiga 500.  Wonderful machine, but the lack of a built in compiler&#x2F;programming language that allowed you to access the power of the machine was a lack that limited your learning. I think it resulted in me taking a very wide path to my current programming job than would otherwise have happened.  Looking back, there is a lot of power in having to work hard to get a program from a magazine entered and working.  You are forced to learn something about programming.

I started with Apple 2+ but back then there were many computers to be fond of. There were Vic 20, Dragon 32, Amstrad, Thomson TO7, TRS-80, BBC. All were different, all had their capabilities. But what was fun is that everyone had access to the whole thing : hardware, software. Nothing was hidden behind layers of security. You could relate software and hardware in a very natural way. Everybody was fiddling around. Also, they were the first computers for the general public so software had to be invented every single day.I&#x27;m truly grateful to have been part of that, it gives such a perspective...

What a great learning tool the early personal computers were.  
It&#x27;s a pipe dream, but I would have loved to have given my children a simpler device and restricted the internet until they were capable of assembling the hardware&#x2F;software to get connected.
These devices exist today as VMs. But, what I think we&#x27;ve lost is the boredom and free time that drives that type of learning and discovery.

People have different expectations to computers nowadays. They aren&#x27;t isolated curiosities any more, you can&#x27;t capture the environment of the 1980s home computer revolution.If you do want a similar experience (at least superficially) to a spectrum 48k, get a Pi 400, don&#x27;t connect it to a network, but don&#x27;t expect the same outcome as you had -- the world is different, there are very different things competing for attention, and different rewards for time spent.

My 8 and 10 year old kids have just discovered the Roblox editor. They are building mutiplayer 3d worlds.The 8 year old is the most enthusiastic about it. He is second grade at school and knows addition, and subtraction, and his times tables but has not started multiplying more than single digit numbers.Right now they are mostly placing blocks around and decorating the world, but they are very interested in the lua scripting. I have no doubt that they will soon be attempting to read that read the Roblox API docs. Actually, they&#x27;ll be watching youtube video tutorials.Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that while the old 8 bit days are gone, there are plenty of ways kids can build things and tinker with computers and software.PS: buy your kids a Steam Deck.

I had to give a talk on coding a few years back. I brought in my Acorn Atom to show people what I started on. 12Kb of memory, no hard drive, no sound card, no network, monochrome display. The BASIC language it knew had maybe 10 keywords, and the Assember had another couple dozen commands. Everything in the computer was simple, easily understood, and robust (turning the computer off wiped everything except the ROM - essentially a factory reset every time).I compared that to my phone - 256Gb of storage, 32Gb of memory, plus sound, graphics, wifi, and the kitchen sink.Learning on the Atom was easy because it was so simple. And as I mastered it, so computers became more complicated. It was, in many ways, the perfect method of teaching tech. A new programmer nowadays has to learn so much so quickly to be able to write anything useful, it&#x27;s often overwhelming. Trying to teach my gf how to code was painful because we were always bumping into rabbit holes of complexity, which we could either go down and waste whole days, or avoid and leave an area of ignorance that would bite later. I never had that problem. It&#x27;s humbling - I wonder if I would even be a dev if I hadn&#x27;t had that advantage?

There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power.Indeed. After I saw this sad news and your comment, I was reminded of an earlier HN comment¹ I had written about the joy I experienced as a young child learning to program on a ZX81 and my regret that my children’s generation are not growing up with the same opportunities. I’m not sure there is any analogous device I could give my kids when they reach the same age any more. Any device they do eventually get when they’re older seems more likely to have preinstalled social media apps and regular security updates than a preinstalled programming environment and a line in the manual reassuring you that nothing you type will break your computer. Something certainly has been lost.¹ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21119236" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21119236</a>

Same here, I owe him my whole career. One day I came to my house at nine years old and saw that metal with ruber thing and lots of colours that my father bought. Wonder and awe, as you said. One of the best times of my life was understanding and coding an assembler routine to achieve 64 columns. RIP Sir Clive Sinclair. So sad news.

RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.

Agreed! The Timex Sinclair 1000 (US ZX81 rebadging) was my first computer when I was 6 and as an autistic child it really helped keep me engaged and I suspect that without it I would have ended up in special education classes... Sir Clive literally changed my life

Absolutely. His systems did so much to democratize computing in the 8-bit era, and there must be countless greybeards who owe their careers to the access that Sinclair Computers granted. Likewise, many non-technical entrepreneurs who made tons of cash in the first dotcom boom would only be able to find programmers able to work for them because they had self-trained in skills that schools knew nothing about by staying up late staring at the family TV with one of these little machines plugged into it.More democratising than other machines around at the time, because those less-well-off families in the UK who couldn&#x27;t afford a BBC Micro or CBM-64 could more easily scrape together the funds to buy a ZX Spectrum instead.My personal anecdote: I didn&#x27;t have enough pocket money to feed my Pac-Man addiction in the arcades, and my family certainly wasn&#x27;t going to splash out on an Atari console, so I wrote myself a Pac-Man clone in ZX Basic. It turned out that programming was so much more fun than playing the game in the long run, and almost 40 years later people are still paying me to do this! Thank you, Sir Clive.

@dang - I believe that deserves a black ribbon. In some countries generations grew up learning hacking and programming with his computers (and knock-offs)

One thing the Arduino doesn&#x27;t quite have is that the ZX machines, while not cutting edge, were quite novel and &quot;high tech&quot;.Most people who have an Arduino also have a supercomputer-phone. But a ZX81 or ZX Spectrum were, at the time, all you could afford and relatively advanced to the point of being amazing for most other people (who didn&#x27;t own any computer whatsoever).

I splashed out on a Nascom 2. I wish I had a keyboard as good as the one it came with now.Had a bit of a fright after I finished soldering everything and switched it on. Nothing happened! So I laboriously went over all 1200 (?) solder joints again and breathed a sigh of relief when it worked.I bought an old 5 bit code teleprinter and wrote a driver so that I could print by connecting the UART to a couple of transistors driving a mercury wetted relay to drive the printer. I think it would be a lot more complicated to do that on any modern computer.

I had a Sinclair Scientific too - so small with hard clicky keys! Back then it was a wonder to type numbers that looked like words when you held it upside down.I expect more people here will remember the ZX80, but what about the minimal SC&#x2F;MP-based MK-14 that came before... I skipped that but got a NASCOM-1 kit the following year (1978).I worked at Acorn in the early 80s and Sir Clive attended a couple of our infamous Christmas parties (since he knew Chris Curry).The good thing about those old computers was the simplicity. The only thing on a NASCOM-1 between your assembly code and the hardware was 1KB of monitor program.

Leaky abstractions in not well thought out solutions caused by exponential growth in computing is the issue. Rich Hickey&#x27;s &quot;Simple made easy&quot; talks about this very thing.

I sold my Sinclair Scientific calculator, from the mid-seventies, just a month ago. Got a tenner for it even though it wasn&#x27;t working.I miss those times, there was something so much more immediate, more real about computing in the 70s and 80s. It was somehow lighter and less intimidating. It&#x27;s only just coming back with Arduino style kit.RIP

Yes, perhaps it is. Eulogies and Obituaries are different things. I&#x27;m not here to eulogise him, for sure. He was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, a brilliant self promoter. Lord Alan Suger learned a lot of marketing tricks from him.There&#x27;s something quintessentially British about promoting tech wizards as heros for making remarkably average product, but making it mass market. Sinclair electronics and Amstrad unquestionably took computing to the masses, in all its buggy variety.Sinclair&#x27;s calculator made the V&amp;A design gallery as an icon. It was pretty unusable, but stunningly beautiful. My dad refused to let me get one (he was a compsci professor) and I got a Texas instruments handheld instead.

It really irks me when someone is misrepresented when they drop dead. I’m personally fine with the parent poster’s comment because it’s exactly a fair representation of the guy’s products. They were mostly awful to some degree.

genuinely appreciate your anecdote, it is interesting to know, but perhaps a bit distasteful in reply to his death.

Yes. Hooking up with Timex (a very stodgy, cheap product company at the time) was a big move. Ultimately commodore did for them, but it took Sinclair to the US.The Sinclair car would sell well now the market for escooters is established.

Looking back, maybe the lesson is that there are some occasions when giving up on quality in order to make a cheaper product is an excellent idea, and 8-bit computers in the early 80s was one of those occasions.(While, for example, electric road vehicles in the mid 80s was not.)

&gt; This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one.Same with his computers. At least before the QL. They were affordable for people not on IT salaries.And for Eastern Europe&#x2F;Russia, for some values of &quot;affordable&quot;.

&gt; The calculators were highly approximate trig functionsThis is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one. He did this by using a chip designed for four-function math and using a series of brilliant (if, yes, slow and approximate) hacks to fit arithmetic and trigonometry in the same 320 assembly instructions and three registers. It cuts basically every corner, but my favorite one is that it didn&#x27;t have room for constants like pi in the ROM. No matter what they did they couldn&#x27;t fit it in. Eventually, they just printed pi on the case. My impression of Sir Clive is that he always tried to take shortcuts no other company would dare, and while this often flamed out, sometimes he pulled it off and brought a lot of technology to a lot of people.Here&#x27;s a fantastic breakdown of how the calculator worked and why it was so impressive:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.righto.com&#x2F;calculator&#x2F;sinclair_scientific_simulator.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;files.righto.com&#x2F;calculator&#x2F;sinclair_scientific_simul...</a>

If I recall, it was the &quot;micro penis&quot;. The 28 days to come was based of then then rather standard 28 day (4 week) delivery time for much of this mail order stuff.Yeah, some Sinclair products were solid, and others were flakey, but all were cheap and seemed very futuristic at the time.

We had one of his op-amp home hifi kits from before his computing days. I&#x27;m not going to gloss things up here, it was shit. Noisy, bad circuit design, bad instructions.Delivery was often fraught: he had no supply chain and always went to market before stocks built up.Sinclair is notorious for overpromising and under delivering. The calculators were highly approximate trig functions, the Sinclair e-car was a joke.I curse the membrane keyboard to this day.Smart man. Crap product. A joke of the times from British TV: the Sinclair digital penis: 1 inch long and takes 28 days to come.I understand how many people bootstrapped into computing from the spectrum btw, a friend made significant money from writing sw for it. Tiny compilers, games.

I wish I still had my original Osborne 1, and my Sinclair QL...

Don&#x27;t plug them in without doing some basic checks! A common fault with the ZX81 at least is the PSU and&#x2F;or the internal voltage regulator degrades&#x2F;fails and will destroy the RAM chips. Have a look through some of Noel Retro Lab videos for some tips first: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;NoelsRetroLab&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;NoelsRetroLab&#x2F;videos</a>Edit: Different channel, but here&#x27;s a video about ZX81 restoration: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xyluEM0N6TY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xyluEM0N6TY</a>

I too still have the computer and it powers up.  90% of the keys have stopped working though.

I also own mine still, but I will never plug them again, too afraid to fry them.

My first computer was a ZX81, then an QL. I still have them at home. Maybe I&#x27;ll try to power them up. I&#x27;ve found some listings of programs I wrote in BASIC on the ZX81. They are only marginally easier to understand than machine code, maybe not :-) but they were the first step to bring me here. Thanks Sir Sinclair.

Drawing video took up a very large fraction of the CPU cycles on the ZX81 so there was a &#x27;fast mode&#x27; and &#x27;slow mode&#x27;. Fast mode cut out video output when programs were running, slow mode left it on and ran at something like 1&#x2F;4 the speed.

On the ZX80 it was done in such a way that just processing your keyboard input caused the video to blank.

When I had no computer, I wanted one of those &lt;USD$200 ZX81s so badly – just from seeing it magazines, &amp; maybe pressing some of its keys at the electronics counter of someplace like maybe a Sears.IIRC the video output often cut out whenever a user program was running?I&#x27;m sure I would have enjoyed having one, but was fortunate enough my parents picked up an Apple ][+ instead. Still, warm feelings towards that unit, &amp; its series, as something that made home computing thinkable.

For its time and price vs. performance, the Spectrum might have been the best personal computer ever made. It was my first machine, and I loved it so much.

Sure, the 1K of RAM was a bit limiting...1K of RAM seems an unimaginably miniscule memory limit today, but incredibly you could squeeze a game of chess in that limit using a bit of creativity. The YouTube channel Nostalgia Nerd compares a game of chess on the 1981 Sinclair ZX81 1KB computer vs. a modern PC.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R3By_rdwxSg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R3By_rdwxSg</a>When you think of the oceans of RAM available today, a 1KB limit feels like something from a completely different world.

Ah, the Timex Sinclair 1000! I would fantasize about having one while looking at magazines ads. You could buy the kit, build it and learn so much about computing, all for $99.95 US! Sure, the 1K of RAM was a bit limiting, but you could save up and buy a 16K RAM pack.

Both were company founds who went pair shaped in 1985. Both were narcissists obsessed with miniaturization and small items. Both were obsessed with the physical look of their devices. Both were not engineers.

Not really.  That would be Herman Hauser.

I worked at Acorn in the early 80&#x27;s. I once arm wrestled Chris Curry in a bar. Neither one of them was really a Steve Jobs figure. I doubt many BBC Micro owners at the time would even have heard of them, unlike Sinclair who was in the press all the time. Curry was more of a drunken playboy, and Hermann more business man than marketeer or face of the company. It was a dream job for a geek!

I&#x27;d say Clive Sinclair was more like Britain&#x27;s Jack Tramiel. Chris Curry or Herman Hauser would be more like Britain&#x27;s Steve Jobs and Sophie Wilson as Britain&#x27;s Steve Wozniak.Wikipedia calls Acorn, Britain&#x27;s Apple. Just as Apple chose its name because it was before Atari in the phone book, so Acorn chose it&#x27;s name because it was before Apple.

My 77&quot; LG CX OLED still has a coax RF input, and I&#x27;ve hooked a few consoles and computers up to it. And it actually looks, well, better than I expected I guess!

I&#x27;ve still got my Sinclair in a shoebox upstairs, complete with the 16KB RAM expansion pack, a program or two on cassette tape, and the cord for plugging it into my TV (which would probably need a whole chain of adapters today).

Thanks! I&#x27;ve heard that quote a few times but till now never grasped the full meaning.A link to the quote in the film:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=5m9s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=5m9s</a>

<pre><code> Your reach should exceed your grasp, or what&#x27;s a heaven for?
</code></pre>
A key quote from the documentary.&quot;Reach&quot; is what you can just touch with your fingertips outstretched; &quot;grasp&quot; is what you can firmly close your hand on and grip.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=V3l_NV9oQ1c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=V3l_NV9oQ1c</a>

&quot;Games! Games! Everywhere I go games! This is what my lifetime of achievement has been reduced to! Clive Sinclair the man who brought you Jet Set f**ing Willy!&quot; -- Clive Sinclair (fictional), Micro Men

Micro Men is so good. I met the director once at an event and asked him if it would ever be released on DVD or equivalent and it sounded like that was unlikely, so it&#x27;s great to see it available on YouTube.

The Centre for Computing History videoed Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser watching Micro Men and chatting for the tenth anniversary of its broadcast:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computinghistory.org.uk&#x2F;det&#x2F;55810&#x2F;Micro-Men-10th-Anniversary&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computinghistory.org.uk&#x2F;det&#x2F;55810&#x2F;Micro-Men-10th...</a>

It is interesting to watch the video of the actual interview that they recreate in the movie. The movie Sinclair seems a bit upset while the real life one was smiling a lot and being very friendly.

I had the best of both worlds in my upbringing.My father knew Clive Sinclair thanks to the Cambridge tech&#x2F;hifi scene at the time, and we also used to live near him in Madingley. Somewhere in my dad&#x27;s shed there&#x27;s a ZX81 with a single digit serial number (amongst a lot of other similar machines: Jupiter Ace, ZX80, various Spectrums with weird and wacky keyboards, Dragon 32, Commodore 16 Plus&#x2F;4, etc).A bit later we also lived next door to Franni and Geoff Vincent who were part of the Acorn team that designed and built the BBC Micro. They used to let me come round (aged 8 or so) and use their Model B whenever I wanted.Sir Clive Sinclair had a HUGE influence on my life. RIP.

The excellent Micro Men docudrama (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Micro_Men" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Micro_Men</a>) has somehow been on Youtube since 2013:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM</a> (1h24m)Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro.(Sinclair didn&#x27;t exactly like it though.)

The reason many of the kits didn&#x27;t work is that the timing was super critical and parts variation alone could result in a built kit not working, especially if you added the RAM expansion.

ZX81 was my first computer, putting the kit (!) together with my dad. Didn’t work so sent it back and got a pre made one, found out later that at least 1&#x2F;3rd of the kits didn’t work.That, going through 101 Basic Computer Games, and typing in the esoteric Beagle Bros commands in their ads are fond memories.

Knights use their first names - he’s Sir Clive, or Sir Clive Sinclair - never Sir Sinclair.

And it was an incredibly slick looking machine for the time!

The QL was one of my first computers too, I loved that thing!

Failure can be a source of inspiration, after all.

Funny that it was inspiring in its frustrating designs &#x2F; lack of features, rather than a &quot;positive&quot; sort of inspiration.

Reading QL BASIC source code was the first time I was exposed to structured programming. I really liked its BASIC dialect.

Has anyone ported ucLinux to the QL? Shouldn&#x27;t be that hard.. here it is on a minimal system:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bigmessowires.com&#x2F;68-katy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bigmessowires.com&#x2F;68-katy&#x2F;</a>

The QL failed because (amongst other things) they had outsourced the basic interpreter to another company for the ZX series and decided to bring it in house for the QL :(

Oh wow, it turns out the QL hardware was reused in the ICL One Per Desk. We had one at home growing up (for some reason?!). Kind of funny to read that it&#x27;s greatest success was in networking hundreds of bingo halls together across the UK.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;One_Per_Desk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;One_Per_Desk</a>

You can see the ad for his software on the top left of page 35: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sinclairql.speccy.org&#x2F;archivo&#x2F;docs&#x2F;mags&#x2F;QLWorld_1986-10.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sinclairql.speccy.org&#x2F;archivo&#x2F;docs&#x2F;mags&#x2F;QLWorld_1986...</a>

My Dad had a QL at home and even had a small business selling software for it back in the day. It was a bit of a daunting machine for me as a child (I got more mileage out of the BBC Micro), but I have fond memories of playing around with it, and loading games off of microdrives.

I still have my Acorn Atom from Christmas 1980.The user manual &quot;Atomic Theory and Practise&quot; was an amazingly good introduction to computers, and is still on the shelf above my desk.

Whilst my first programs was on the acorn atom, Zx80 and zx81the zx spectrum hold a special place in my memory because the manual was fantasic - I learnt almost everything from it.and then progressed on to typing the monterous (using the aweful rubber keys) blocks of programs from magazines - THEN I learnt how to debug and rewrite the games that I&#x27;d just typed in from the magazines, because they never worked first time.but it felt like I was living in the futureThanks Clive - RIP

I have memories of my father using a QL. also, he was very lucky as he got a late version with many bugs fixed.
He like it too, that when got a IBM PC compatible with a 8086, he thought that the QL was better.

Sir Clive was in a memorable QL ad as well:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;as6hSAqJ_g4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;as6hSAqJ_g4</a>

Did you have one? I skipped the QL and went to an Amiga

The Spectrum and ZX81 are (rightly) the computers for which Clive Sinclair is remembered. But it was his unsuccessful follow-up, the QL, which inspired a certain Linus Torvalds to write Linux:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sinclair_QL#Legacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sinclair_QL#Legacy</a>

I suspect a lot of people on this website wouldn&#x27;t be here were it not for him (perhaps me included).The sense of wonder I got as a kid by playing games and learning how to program on his machines made for amazing life-shaping experiences.

I&#x27;m actually really sad about it. My first experience programming was with his machine. Rest in peace :(

My first actually owned was a Timex 2068, although I do remember seeing those ZX 81 maker kits on electronic stores on sale.I was quite envious from my pals that eventually got +2A and 3 models, specially with the 3 one, having floppies and CP&#x2F;M version available.Pity that QL did not work out, nor the Sam Coupé, although the later wasn&#x27;t related to Sir Clive.

I&#x27;ve seen one of those during my time in Poland.

Uh oh. Soviet ZX spectrum clone was my first computer, and the first I ever wrote a program on using a built-in basic at an age of 10. This was a magnificent device that brought me a lot of joy. Rest In Peace, Sir Clive.Now, I&#x27;ll go play some Manic Miner or Nether Earth in your honor.

First computer I ever typed a program into was zx80 that belonged to a friend of my dad. He (a journalist) didn’t like the membrane keyboard so he attached a teletype keyboard.

Saw those ROMs in my Romanian clone called Cobra (Computers Brașov). Young me was fascinated by the way they were encased in some sort of clear epoxy instead of black ceramic. You can read more about the clone here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-underground-story-of-cobra-the-1980s-illicit-handmade-computer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-underground-stor...</a>

At some point in the mid to late 1980s, there was a craze in Minsk of seemingly everyone home-building ZX Spectrum clones. Probably the Ленинград design, though I&#x27;m not entirely sure. As I recall, all the components were off-the-shelf Soviet parts (K155 TTL series), so no ULA or anything fancy like that.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrumforeveryone.com&#x2F;technical&#x2F;zx-spectrum-ula-types&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrumforeveryone.com&#x2F;technical&#x2F;zx-spectrum-ula-ty...</a>

Very similarly mine was Santaka, another Belarusian clone of a 48K. Had that horrid Cyrillic font instead of lowercase Latin.It was built by a former military supplier plant so its heritage stuck out in unexpected details (like 8x 2Kb ceramic package gold plated ROMs). I&#x27;ve upgraded it over the years with memory expansion, printer port, &quot;real&quot; keyboard, sound chip and disk controller. It grew into quite a hairball!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;varjag&#x2F;status&#x2F;1146500643328331776&#x2F;photo&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;varjag&#x2F;status&#x2F;1146500643328331776&#x2F;photo&#x2F;...</a>

Our first computer was БАЙТ - Belarussian clone of ZX Spectrum. It was mid to late 90s and it was already super obsolete at the time, but every time we took it out and connected to TV it filled me with a sense of wonder and unknown that started my fascination with electronics and programming. What an amazing impact Sir Clive had on so many lives.Even my nickname on this very website comes from my favourite game I played on Spectrum when I was a kid. Now I&#x27;m a game developer myself.

I&#x27;m more reflecting on the fact that the number of programmers roughly doubles every 5 years and thus the number of Sir Clive&#x27;s should be greatly increasing too, no?

Weak argument.  Sir Clive&#x27;s influence on computing, particularly in Britain is enormous.  For many of us his products are the reason we are part of this industry.

Sinclair was probably as important in Europe as Apple II was in the US.

RIP.With all due respect, Meta comment here: I imagine computing has become sufficiently ubiquitous such that in ~50 yrs time the HN bar will always be black because we will have &gt; 365 important folks pass away each year.But will there be a HN then?

Yup!  That, and his LED wrist watch - an absolute brilliant piece of work at the time!

That pocket TV is ridiculously cool and he knows it.

RIPI had a hand-me-down spectrum although I don&#x27;t remember learning to program on it, just the games. Was probably too young at the time.So I guess I can credit it for starting my life long love for computer games :)

I didn&#x27;t grow up with the ZX Spectrum, but I managed to buy one (actually a few) a number of years ago, and had a lot of fun playing around in BASIC and then writing programs in assembly. The computer&#x27;s design is so very simple, it was a nice introduction to low-level computing and I now do that for a career. It&#x27;s no surprise to me hearing about how many careers started on that system, I somehow think that -- in the age of CodeAcademy and endless free JavaScript courses -- computing is somehow so much less approachable.Sad news, rest in peace Sir Clive.

Haha, I was wondering why your comment was hidden. That kind of behaviour feels like yet another episode of &#x27;Reddit comes to HN&#x27;.

Oh hello angry person who went into my history and downvoted benign comments.

… I dreaded this day. He was the first “computer celebrity” I knew of and looked up to.Always expected him to make some kind of comeback in a world that sorely needs something like what the ZX Spectrum (&amp; C64) was in its time.

Ditto. I assembled&#x2F;soldered the thing my self. Went on to using it to learning assembly language and how the internals work (buses, etc).I&#x27;ve retired after a great career in IT&#x2F;Systems tech and it was Clive&#x27;s little computer that was the gateway drug for me!

My first computer was a ZX81, and his machines made a profound impression on my early days in computing (and became even more remarkable once I was able to understand the hardware design tricks involved).Good thing we have things like the Raspberry Pi to recapture some of that magic for our kids.

The ZX Spectrum+ I grew up with still works (only had to replace the keyboard membrane). What an amazing piece of tech. I have fond memories of it, and I also keep my collection of Microhobby Magazine [1], which is effectively how my career started.I had some earlier contact with a ZX81 but I don&#x27;t remember much of it - really only playing 3D Monster Maze [2], a very early ancestor of 3D shooters.The ZX Spectrum+ and the ZX81 are so meaningful to me, you could argue they&#x27;re the focus of my book&#x27;s dedication [3]. Would I be where I am today, would I be who I am today, if back in the day it wasn&#x27;t as easy as PLOT 6,5?Rest in peace, Sir Clive.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;microhobby.speccy.cz&#x2F;mhforever&#x2F;numero001.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;microhobby.speccy.cz&#x2F;mhforever&#x2F;numero001.htm</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;3D_Monster_Maze" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;3D_Monster_Maze</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gabrielgambetta.com&#x2F;computer-graphics-from-scratch&#x2F;dedication.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gabrielgambetta.com&#x2F;computer-graphics-from-scratch&#x2F;d...</a>

&quot;Horace Goes Skiing&quot; was written by Fred Milgrom, co-founder of Beam Software (studio) and (I think) Melbourne House (publisher). His team also did The Hobbit. The studio is based in Melbourne, Australia.&quot;Knight Lore&quot; was by Ultimate Play the Game, whicn became Rare (Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong Country etc).

I think this pretty much sums it up.... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ts96J7HhO28" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ts96J7HhO28</a> 
 RIP sir Clive.

Ah, that&#x27;s too bad, really. Pocket calculators, Electric vehicles, cheap personal computers, e-bikes and probably others that I&#x27;m not aware of. Game changers in every instance, not all of them equally successful but you really can&#x27;t fault the man for trying.

Although I was in the Acorn camp, my first home exposure was to a friends ZX81. The keyboard!In highschool, my physics teacher had a C5, which he could not get &#x27;road legal&#x27; in The Netherlands.Great times. RIP.

My dad had a ZX Spectrum. The music to Spy Hunter is seared into my brain. Such early exposure to tech (and to some extent dealing with its crappiness) started me on the path to becoming the software engineer I am today. RIP Sir Clive.

Ouch.I&#x27;m here because of Sir Clive. Like many I started with a 1k ZX81.

They don&#x27;t make them like that no more. What would it take for technology to feel again just... white magic.

Anybody noticed, the inventor of the ZX81 of course died at the age of 81. So, he predicted this decades ago?

Grew up in a house surrounded by many wonderful machines, but by far the most beautiful and alluring were the Spectrums. My dad wrote some reasonably popular books on these things in the 80s which pretty much set me on my way:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;worldofspectrum.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;books&#x2F;working-sinclair-ql-the" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;worldofspectrum.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;books&#x2F;working-sinclair-q...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrumcomputing.co.uk&#x2F;entry&#x2F;2000420&#x2F;Book&#x2F;The_Working_Spectrum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrumcomputing.co.uk&#x2F;entry&#x2F;2000420&#x2F;Book&#x2F;The_Worki...</a>

There wouldn&#x27;t have been a BBC without Uncle Clive.

Sort of. As a former Sinclair user his products taught me patience and tolerance.I jumped ship the moment I could afford a BBC.

The Raspberry Pi is really a continuation of Acorn&#x27;s contribution - including some of its developers being former Acorn personnel.

One of the legacies from Sinclair&#x27;s era is the profound understanding of the power of young hobbyists working on cheap computers, and how that leads to a workforce trained in STEM. This idea directly inspired the development of the Raspberry Pi which has been beyond wildly successful and may be the most popular line of British computers in history.

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair.His Sinclair ZX81 got me into my love for computing.I wouldn&#x27;t be where I am without that exposure.

Yes! As a kid, I was jealous of friends who had &#x27;better&#x27; computers, but the appeal of the spectrum was seeing how it could be pushed to its limits and do amazing things.Learning BASIC and then assembly on the spectrum got me hooked on computers, all thanks to Sir Clive making it possible and affordable.

It&#x27;s Sir Clive, or Sir Clive Sinclair, never Sir Sinclair. Knights primarily use their first names, and their surname only for disambiguation.

Sir Clive Sinclair was a hero of mine for realizing that computing could be for children of poorer families. The Apple II is lauded for the classroom, but it was way too expensive for my family. Without people like Sir Sinclair, I and many other would have never been able to enter this profession we so love.Apple gets the credit, but it was Sir Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, and TI that raised a generation in computing.Rest well great man.

Same. This is my desk decoration: &quot;The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly&quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.primrosebank.net&#x2F;computers&#x2F;zxspectrum&#x2F;docs&#x2F;CompleteSpectrumROMDisassemblyThe.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.primrosebank.net&#x2F;computers&#x2F;zxspectrum&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Comple...</a>

I got an Atari and I&#x27;m in tech. Why should that be any different?

The top keys have 7 (incl colours) functions per key. So cool!!

There were many 3rd party add-on keyboards for the 16K&#x2F;48K Spectrum. I got the Saga 1 Emperor keyboard the Christmas after I got my 48K. You opened the case of the Spectrum, removed the ribbon connectors from the board and then attached the new keyboard and screwed the bottom plus board to it.There was some magical feeling back then that I think is hard to capture now. The manuals were really good for teaching you - I learned sine and cosine from the diagrams in the manual years before we covered them in maths. The memory layout and system variables were documented, as were all the Z80 opcodes. The first time I used LDIR to transfer data to screen from off screen memory was magical.You really could master the whole machine and I feel that the limitations actually helped. I would spend summers writing large assembly language programs. Before I had an assembler (HiSoft DevPac) I would hand assemble programs by writing them out on paper and then figuring out the opcodes and calculate the jump relative offsets.

There&#x27;s a huge difference between these 8-bit computers and PCs that came later, or even the CP&#x2F;M machines contemporary to them.When you booted a ZX-80, 81, Spectrum, a VIC-20, a PET, or an Apple II+, you went straight into a BASIC interpreter (or REPL, for the initiated). You could enter a program, or issue commands at will. We rarely think about this, but the first UI you see in those machines is a programming language.And we did program a lot with those machines.With a CP&#x2F;M machine or a DOS PC (there were about 2 people in the world with PCs without floppies ;-) ), you boot into an OS. It&#x27;s not a programming environment, but one designed for starting applications someone else wrote. While most had a BASIC interpreter you could run, it was a standalone program and not THE language of the machine. And experimenting COULD harm the computer - you could delete files from your DOS boot disk, as many of us discovered the hard way.

My story is so similar to yours (and I’m sure many others).Santa brought my house a Spectrum 48k Lo Profile when I was a kid with a cool KnightRider style keyboard.Over the years I haven’t seen it talked about much if at all, so I always assumed it was a fairly niche model. After hearing about Sir Clive, I looked it up to find out how many sold and was surprised to learn that it never actually existed as a standalone device.My dad must have bought the add-on kit, and an 81, and quietly upgraded it and just never told us kids. I’m gonna call him when I’m done typing this.All I ever wanted to do on it was transcribe the programs from my magazines and try to learn how to make something of my own someday. I’m not sure what I’d be doing now if he had just brought home an Atari, but I almost certainly wouldn’t be in tech.Cheers, Clive. I hope I see you down the road when the last of my cyan and red bars have run out.For anyone interested:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;anachrocomputer&#x2F;2671208818" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;anachrocomputer&#x2F;2671208818</a>

I&#x27;m another who had exactly the same experience. That one sentence did the entire country a massive favour (and is, sadly, no longer true)The quality of the documentation with these early computers was also truly exceptional. I learned basic in a weekend.

In my country, there weren&#x27;t any originals, even smuggled. Clones were built and sold by local engineers, using smuggled schematics and photocopies of circuit board layouts.The one I first get my hands on as a kid was built by my elder brother, an electronics engineer. I was so fascinated, I remember secretly sneaking into his house when he was at work to play the games.He taught me electronics and encouraged me to understand the schematics and build one for myself. And I eventually did, but I got something wrong, and it worked unstable. I never got patience to find the cause and get it right.But I definitely got charmed by electronics and programming because of this. Thank you, Sir Sinclair. And thank you, my brother.

Mine was a second-hand smuggled ZX Spectrum 48k. The first computer I ever saw was Galaksija, at the school where my mom and dad worked. The school later got a Lola 8, but by then my mom and dad bought me a used Spectrum and I was happily plugging the depths of BASIC, and later assembly.Farewell, Sir Clive, and thank you for some of my best memories.

I still write programs on paper and pencil to see if I can do it as accurately as the machine can.

Mine was smuggled into the country due to currency crises and import&#x2F;export controls. I owe thanks to my mother for arranging that so that I could graduate from writing programs using paper and pencil to using an actual computer.Thank you Psion&#x27;s Horizons cassette for teaching me about computer architecture. Thank you Toni Baker for teaching me Z80 assembly so I could program x86 with no problem.But, thank you Sir Clive, above all, for making such an affordable and approachable computer. What I learned on the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum is still with me.

There was a way you could burn out a chip in the C64 with a poke command IIRC. And you could break the tape advance relay in the MSX by switching it on and off rapidly.Edit: Oops it wasn&#x27;t the 64 but the PET: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dfarq.homeip.net&#x2F;the-killer-poke-for-the-commodore-pet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dfarq.homeip.net&#x2F;the-killer-poke-for-the-commodore-p...</a>Also, everyone here will know the phenomenon of bricking. You can damage hardware with software. Luckily it&#x27;s very rare.

Same here, but it also reminds me, the first programming lesson in school (not on a Spectrum but on an IBM PC), our teacher told us &quot;there&#x27;s nothing you can do with code that will harm the computer in any way&quot; (these computers did not have a hard drive so you could not wipe anything).This immediately set us on a quest to find ways to prove him wrong - the basis of hacker thinking. Not that we did find anything with our limited knowledge but it was a nice thought exercise (our best bet was to create a program that constantly switches between graphics mode and text mode. The monitor would make a clicking sound when this happened, so we figured if we do this enough times we&#x27;ll probably burn some circuit, but we never tried it).

I did the same with my very first PC. For shame! I&#x27;d been used to simpler 16bit and 8bit machines, including a spectrum...

Out of curiosity, what switch would that have been? Was it a 220&#x2F;120V setting?

Haha, that&#x27;s really wholesome.I remember how I destroyed my first PC on the first day by flipping a switch on the PSU before turning it on. Good times.

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000, too. That keyboard was too much, but you kept at it! And if you even looked at that memory module funny, it would short out and you&#x27;d have to stay up all night and re-key everything back in by hand. We got more use out of the TRS-80s at school, but having a machine to ourselves at home was influential.

yep, same for me. I remember being astounded as a kid that you could make something that would actually be seen on a TV screen!

Me too!  Astounded to write sprites to a screen. Objects. Collision detection.

My first compute was ~1984 Timex_Sinclair_1000 $99 and with 2K RAM. 
 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timex_Sinclair_1000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timex_Sinclair_1000</a>It definitively the gateway drug that hook me into computer.Bought $6 book on how to program Sinclair computer and copy the Basic Code from the book into that computer and record that program into audio cassette tape and output to analog TV.Now I working daily with systems that have 128 cores, 256 threads, 256-768MB of L3 cache memory, 1TB DDR+ 8xGPUs each with 32GB of HBM.I still think I got more &quot;High&#x2F;Rush&quot; from the sinclair 1000 37 years ago than the latest 128C&#x2F;256T CPU. Now is a job, back than it was an adventure, exploration to whole new world!

I remember the TI-99&#x2F;4A BASIC manual said something like “errors will not harm your computer” and it had a similar reassuring effect on my child self.

I love that attitude and I totally agree with the sentiment. Just experimenting is how you learn best.Especially in those days it was a unique sentiment. Most devices came with long instruction manuals which people would actually read, and even schematics. Until the home computer came, only educated professionals were allowed to go near computers. I think Steven Levy called them the IBM high priests in his book &quot;Hackers&quot;. It&#x27;s old but a good read.Now nobody reads the couple of pages that come with their new phone. Good.

&quot;You cannot harm the computer in this way.&quot;This seems quite likely to have been inspired by some of the intro documentation for the Apple ][, apparently written by Jef Raskin. Short comment about it from a few years ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15077364" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15077364</a>

Well,  it&#x27;s not strictly true at all that you are totally safe, I think, but you have to behave as if you are or you get nowhere. That&#x27;s quite a metaphor for life in general.

It&#x27;s fascinating how empowering knowing just how safe you are can be.I used nearly this exact phrase the other day with someone who appeared fearful of a dashboard tool and once they realised they could basically do no harm whatsoever it freed them up to experiment and learn.

What I didn&#x27;t know is if you are knighted, you have to give up your birth citizenship.

Formal surnames attached to a family are a later invention than aristocratic titles. In fact, surnames were originally introduced for the sole purpose of identifying individuals for the purpose of taxing them. When the English tried this on the Welsh, they mass rebelled by all choosing the name &quot;Jones.&quot;This was especially the case for commoners, or non aristocrats, who only had first names, and had to be uniquely identified by their professions, the names of their fathers or a well known relative. If Bob the Builder got a knighthood for exceptional diligence in building siege engines for the noble and perennial cause of annoying the French, then the only real name the title could be attached to would have been &quot;Bob.&quot;The reason it is different for other titles is that those titles belonged to the landed aristocracy, and were generally titles to the fiefdoms of that territory, so titles like Lord Acton, Lord Dunsany, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, referred to actual places. If a higher title is awarded to a commoner who does not possess a hereditary fiefdom, then a fiefdom will be invented for them such as when William Thompson became Lord Kelvin.

It&#x27;s one of those &quot;how important is the title&quot; things. According to an article in the workplace magazine at a (now very) former workplace, to celebrate the honours doctorate of Princess Christina, her full title (with doctorate) would be &quot;Princess Christina, Dr Mrs Magnusson&quot;.The explanation given is that the princesshood attached to her, personally. I suspect it is the same with a knighthood.
 And the &quot;dr&quot; comes before the &quot;mrs&quot;, as it is more prestigious.But, as with many things, don&#x27;t think TOO hard about it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Princess_Christina,_Mrs._Magnuson" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Princess_Christina,_Mrs._Magnu...</a>

&gt; Sir SinclairFYI since I&#x27;ve seen this mistake a few times in this discussion: Sir Clive or Sir Clive Sinclair. &quot;Sir&quot; and &quot;Dame&quot; are attached to the given name, never the surname. I don&#x27;t know why it&#x27;s different from other titles, and Wikipedia doesn&#x27;t seem to explain, just states the rule: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sir" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sir</a>

Remember this well. Though my three line programs were a little more mischievous. When Boots the Chemist weirdly started selling computers I thought it was fun to go in on a Saturday afternoon and type:<pre><code> 10 PRINT &quot;Boots is rubbish, shop at Dixons.&quot;;
 20 GOTO 10
</code></pre>
I thought I was a genius. Probably should have got a slimy career in adtech after that, but thankfully I didn&#x27;t.

Who remembers waking into a store on the high street in Britain and seeing rows of different computer systems!Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Model B and so on!It was glorious!It was so exciting as a kid!Going to each of them and writing 3 lines of basic to print my name infinitely!A truely golden age of discovery!

It works on that generation of machines, but when I was young I carried that philosophy into learning Unix in the early 90s, and some of the results weren&#x27;t as positive.  It was a net positive, though.

That is such an empowering statement.I&#x27;ve said before on HN that fear of what may happen stops many people from experimenting with computers, coupled with locking everything down and hiding the non-consumer-friendly aspects out of site.Starting with a blinking cursor, the worst you could do was format a floppy disk with your work on it - or blow a fuse because you were tinkering with the internals.

&gt; &quot;You cannot harm the computer in this way.&quot;I&#x27;ve long suspected that Star Trek trained people to be fearful of pressing the wrong key, as it would always send a huge electric shock through the hapless keyboardist and send him flying across the bridge.

My dead ZX Spectrum 48k does hang on the wall, behind my desk. The rainbow colors are amazingly light-fast.

A lot of people started programming thanks to the ZX Spectrum, and I&#x27;m one of them too:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.steve.fi&#x2F;how_i_started_programming.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.steve.fi&#x2F;how_i_started_programming.html</a>It was easily the most popular home computer in the UK at that time, though I imagine a large number of people started with the BBC - via the school integration.I still have my manuals, and recently paid for a print of the keyboard to hang on my wall. (I almost bought a dead 48K model, and framed it, but getting a poster&#x2F;print was slightly cheaper.)

It&#x27;s also an important message to parents, telling them that it&#x27;s OK to let their kids play with an expensive piece of tech without the danger of them breaking it.

&gt; &quot;You cannot harm the computer in this way. Be bold.&quot;What an empathetic, caring, tactful way to teach tech to kids. The whole instruction is like that, a really well composed message. No hypes or overpowering, just guiding children to quiet explorations.

The most dispiriting day of my childhood was when I discovered that the write connection to the tape deck on my Spectrum +2a had failed and the day&#x27;s worth of code I&#x27;d written had been lost and I had a blank tape.

heh. I fortunately did not know things like assemblers existed. I hand-assembled my assembly to machine code using the mnemonic table provided at the end of the programming manual. I had an entire diary full of columns of hand-encoded hex numbers (and a decimal column - you needed the numbers in decimal to &quot;poke&quot; them into RAM).

&gt; &quot;You cannot harm the computer in this way.&quot;But your soul dies slowly as you have to reload your program from tape cassette. I remember learning machine code on my Spectrum and having to reload the assembler several times an hour.

Amazing to see the amount of similar comments here. I too grew up with the ZX (and later an Atari ST), and made my first program (a game, of course). It felt very zen to write it, play it, and then being okay with not saving it when I cut the power.

Dad bought a ZX Spectrum. I was very curious and wanted to play with it. Dad gave me the huge manual and told me to study that first. I didn&#x27;t. Instead i tried every key and this started my huge computer adventure that will probably only end when i&#x27;m dead.

I saw something similar with my gf in uni. She hadn&#x27;t had a computer at home and she was really intimidated by the computers there. It wasn&#x27;t just because she was unused to them, but she was petrified of breaking them. It wasn&#x27;t until I let her use mine and got her to relax about breaking it that she really started to learn how to use them properly.

I grew up with a PC and that already wasn&#x27;t as straightforward; we were Told in no uncertain terms that we should make sure to use the &#x27;shut down&#x27; option in the menu or else Bad Things would happen (= disk parking). And changes in the system were permanent, so I never really experimented with the computer until my mid-to-late teens when I went to school for computer stuff - my dad was the expert until then.

I try to keep this in mind with my kids. I try to not worry too much about them breaking stuff, and where possible put them in situations where they can experiment and try stuff without risk of screwing something up. Although I also like to repair stuff, and I think there&#x27;s something nice about them breaking it and then us fixing it.It&#x27;s why things like the RPi and the Micro-bit are so cool for education, you can experiment with them and if it all goes wrong just reset them and carry on.However I&#x27;m also concious that I and my kids are lucky to be able to absorb any financial&#x2F;time cost from them breaking something. Not everyone can.

I had a similar experience with a ZX-81 (and a TS-2000).  What&#x27;s interesting related to your &quot;You cannot harm the computer in this way&quot; quote is that I see that experimentation embodied in my kids (who grew up with a PC in the house) but also the anti-pattern in my mother and my in-laws who clearly didn&#x27;t have a computer in the house until middle-age (note that I left my dad our of this category as he was an EE building embedded systems for instrumentation for much of his career).

I&#x27;m curious how a generation of us grew up curious what a computing machine could do, just because it had all those fancy keys to press. They pushed us into creating stuff.But these days, we have smartphones with a hundred times more computing power, but it fails to trigger any creative curiosity into kids these days.Maybe I&#x27;m wrong, but is there any co-relation with how many ways the device could interact with the operator vs the level of creative curiosity it triggers?

Damn. I got a rush from learning to touch type on the IBM Selectricks....

RIP Sir.I was gifted the 48K when I was 6 yrs old - it changed my life. I am here because Sir Sinclair built a machine whose setup instructions said:Now that you have set up the computer, you will want to use it. The rest of this
booklet tells you how to do that; but in your impatience you will probably already
have started pressing the keys on the keyboard, and discovered that this removes
the copyright message. This is good; _you cannot harm the computer in this way._
Be bold. Experiment. If you get stuck, remember that you can always reset the
computer to the original picture with the copyright message by taking out the &#x27;9V
DC IN&#x27; plug and putting it back again. This should be the last resort because you
lose all the information in the computer.&quot;You cannot harm the computer in this way.&quot;That single sentence started a life long journey. I doubt I would have been bold enough at that age to mess around with one of our most valuable possessions.

For us North Americans not very familiar with Sir Clive&#x27;s machine, there&#x27;s a pretty good summary of it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1Jr7Q1yJOUM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1Jr7Q1yJOUM</a>Apparently it, or a follow-up model, WAS available in the US, branded by Timex of all companies.

Ps. Please play <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeky-gadgets.com&#x2F;33-year-old-zx-spectrum-challenge-solved-by-oxfords-museum-of-the-history-of-science-30-04-2015&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeky-gadgets.com&#x2F;33-year-old-zx-spectrum-challe...</a> at his funeral.

Horace and the Spiders, as well as Horace Goes Skiing are very much part of my early memories of computers.I guess Dizzy comes close, but Horace was the first &quot;character&quot; I played, and looked out for.

Oh dear. My parents smuggled (!) a ZX Spectrum in 1985 into Hungary and they knew they will do it and while they were on their tour to Western Germany I was at a summer daytime camp at the nearby community center where we learned BASIC on them. And , of course , played games , mostly Horace And The Spiders :) I was ten.Fast forward two decades and I was contributing to Drupal core (first core commit 17 years ago was <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZGemjVc.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZGemjVc.png</a> although Dries forgot to credit me, boo :) ) and another five years later I was working on a Top 100 website.Thanks Sir Sinclair.

Sir Clive was so far ahead of his time and brought color into so many lives. RIP.

I learned to program on the 48k when I was about 8. Couldn’t figure out how to save my code to tape so I just left the machine switched on for weeks whilst I wrote games and then let them go when I had to turn the power off. I learned more sat alone with that machine than anywhere else in my life. Rest in peace Sir Clive Sinclair.

So sad to hear this. The ZX Spectrum was my introduction to both computers and programming and still has a special place in my heart. RIP Uncle Clive

Indeed. Good days. Anyone got a link to the full pdf?RIP, Sir Clive. I shall wear my (suitably black) ZX81 T-Shirt tomorrow.

Wow, that bought a serious jolt of recollection, thanks

ZX81 manual - coolest cover ever <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collections.museumsvictoria.com.au&#x2F;content&#x2F;media&#x2F;13&#x2F;659613-medium.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collections.museumsvictoria.com.au&#x2F;content&#x2F;media&#x2F;13&#x2F;...</a>

I learned to program in 1982 when my mom bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000 (2K RAM!) and had to type in all the games from source listings in books and magazines. At some point later, I bought a 16K memory expansion pack which was awesome until you jiggled the computer a little bit and it would reset all memory.The very first bug I had to figure out was when I was typing in an expression like &quot;A &lt;&gt; B&quot;, and not realizing that &quot;&lt;&gt;&quot; was a single character on the keyboard, and not &quot;&lt;&quot; followed by &quot;&gt;&quot;.

Growing up we first had a Sinclair Cambridge calculator, then a ZX81 (complete with a 16K RAM expansion pack!), then a Spectrum that we upgraded to a Spectrum+ by sending off for the upgrade kit. We even had a Sinclair thermal printer...So many happy memories of weekends spent entering game code from the back of magazines and then venturing into writing our own. Genuinely don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d be in the software industry today if it hadn&#x27;t been for his creations.

Sir Clive Sinclair has died