The Guardian has published a rather lukewarm appreciation of Sir Clive Sinclair, who has died aged 81. As a schoolboy I can remember trying - and failing - to get to grips with a slide-rule. Then - thanks Sir Clive! - we had access to the Cambridge pocket calculator. Wow! At a time when computers were as big as a room, requiring teams of programmers and technicians, his Spectrum computer brought home computing to the masses. For a few years, with a virtual monopoly on the cheap ’n’ cheerful sector of the home computer market, he was a multi-millionaire. He was knighted and made ‘businessman of the year’.
Then - oh dear - it all went tits up. The Sinclair C5 was a low-slung, three-wheeled, lightweight, open, plastic-sided vehicle. The top speed was 15mph and the battery needed recharging every 20 miles. It was a deathtrap. When the C5 was launched, to a chorus of mocking laughter, I was working in Peterborough on Camera magazine. The guys who worked on Motor Cycle News had a C5… not to drive on the road, of course, but just to get from one end of the building to the other, in a pleasingly ironic way. Sir Clive’s reputation never really recovered, and, for years, he was seen as a bit of a joke. History will be kinder to him, I reckon, than the writer of the Guardian obituary. The man invented the pocket calculator! He was a hero!…
Abandoned C5: best not tangle with a lorry...
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