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Remembering the legacy of Sir Clive Sinclair Inventor and pioneer was behind the iconic ZX81 home computer, plus the Sinclair QL – which Linus Torvalds learned to program on. ir Clive Sinclair has died at the age of 81. After leaving school at 17, Sinclair worked for a while as a technical journalist before creating Sinclair Radionics in 1961. Its first product was the Sinclair Microamplifier, released in 1962. After almost a decade of creating audio equipment, the company began creating popular pocket calculators that were considerably smaller than the competition. However, Sinclair was best known for effectively inventing home computers with the ZX80. Released in 1980 costing £79.95 as a kit, or £99.95 pre-assembled, it was drastically cheaper (and smaller) than any other computer at the time, and it meant having a computer for the home was finally affordable for many people. Selling 100,000 units the ZX80 was moderately successful, its follow-up the ZX81 was far more of a hit selling 1.5 million. In 1982, Sinclair Research, the company that succeeded Sinclair Radionics, released the ZX Spectrum. Selling over 5 million units this range of computers ushered in a generation of developers who are still shaping the software we use and the games we play today. One of those was Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux kernel, and without whom this fine magazine wouldn’t exist. In an interview at LinuxCon 2010 (which you can watch at https:// bit.ly/3zHFlWu), Torvalds explains how he learnt to code on a Sinclair QL, linking the late Sir Clive Sinclair to everyone’s favourite open source operating system, Linux. While it would be rather silly to claim that without Sinclair and his home
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computers they’d be no such thing as Linux – as Torvalds would have almost certainly have used an alternative – the fact that Sinclair made home computing an affordable option for so many people has rightly been celebrated. While not everything that Sinclair released was a success (his most infamous failure the Sinclair C5 electric car was too far ahead of its time), his impact on computing cannot be overstated. While he never fully succeeded in turning Cambridge into a UK-based Silicon Valley, for a while he was behind the bestselling computers in the world, and his death led
The ZX Spectrum was perhaps Sir Clive’s most popular invention, and inspired many people to get into coding.
MICROSOFT CEO PAYS TRIBUTE “I vividly remember my first computer, a ZX80, and the sense of wonder and empowerment I felt.” to tributes from the likes of Elon Musk, who tweeted (https://bit.ly/lxf282musktweet) “RIP, Sir Sinclair. I loved that computer.” Meanwhile, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, posted (https://bit.ly/lxf282nadellatweet) “RIP Sir Clive Sinclair. Your innovations democratized computing and inspired so many, including myself. I vividly remember my first computer, a ZX80, and the sense of wonder and empowerment I felt.”
The less well know Sinclair QL (Quantum Leap) is the computer Torvalds learnt to program on.
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