1940 Clive Sinclair

Clive Marles Sinclair was born in Surrey on July 30th 1940; both his father and grandfather were engineers. Clive loved swimming and boating and at an early age with the help of his grandfather he designed a submarine. Clive went to Box Grove School, and when he was ten the school reported that it could not teach him any more mathematics, so he moved to the second phase of his education.

After this his father suffered a financial setback and he had to start from scratch, still in machine tools. Since the Sinclair family had no finances Clive went to different schools for his secondary education. In 1955 he took his O-levels at Highgate School, and S-levels in physics, Pure applied mathematics at St.George’s College, Weybridge.

Clive was a teenager when he discovered the world of electronics. He had always been fascinated in this area and he carried on this interest in electronic designs. His family used to tell him that his bedroom is a mass of wires, but from that bedroom came out amplifiers and radios for his family and friends. He also built his first Counting Machine using 0’s and 1’s to count, but he was very disappointed when he discovered that it was already invented. At school he worked, hard especially on subjects he liked. While still at school he wrote his first article for Practical Wireless. Just before 18, he left school, and decided not to go to university, because he knew from experience that what he wanted to learn he could find out for himself. His first work was an editorial assistant at Practical Wireless. After a few months, his two superiors failed, one due to illness, and the other had not been up to the responsibility. Therefore, at the age of 18 Clive became the chief of Practical Wireless. The job for Clive was very easy because there were many co-workers and reader forwarding, so he had only to select the most important material and give them an editorial polish. This had to be done once a week, which left much time for his designs and circuit drafts. However, after a while he was bored, his target was to open a company and in August 1958, he left Practical Wireless to join Bernard Babani Company.

On 25 July 1961, Clive Sinclair registered his company named Sinclair Radionics Ltd, but to achieve what he wanted he needed another job and joined United Trade Press for a year as a technical editor of the journal Instrument Practice. As a journalist, he could approach all the semiconductor manufacturers, which was very important for him. In 1962, he published a half page advertisement that appeared in the hobby magazines of November 1962. This advert was for Sinclair Micro amplifier, the smallest of its type in the world. Although his office was at Gough Square, the address of the advert was 69 Histon Road Cambridge. This was because he became involved in the development of Cambridge Consultants Ltd, which was founded in 1960 by Tim Eiloart, and eventually Clive met him when Sinclair Radionics was formed. Clive wanted an organization to receive his mail, assemble sets of components into kits, and dispatch them. With the success of the micro amplifier and adverts, other products followed in the coming years.

In the 70’s, it was the era of computer technology. Clive Sinclair was fascinated by these machines, and decided to venture in this field. Since computers were very expensive at that time, he wanted to produce computers at lower prices. On January 1980, he introduced the ZX80 the world smallest and cheapest computer. It was sold for $140 as a ready-made device or $115 as a kit. The largest cost saving was obtained by the use of a television set and a cassette recorder as storage devices. Clive Sinclair was convinced that people would buy the ZX80 but the problem was how to convince them. The image of a computer at this time was one of bondesque big rooms filled with reel tapes and air-condition units to cool the red-hot machinery, so how could people relate to a piece of equipment like the ZX80? Despite all of these worries though, the ZX80 was a great success, and during its first six months on sale, some 20,000 machines had been sold. The successor of the ZX80 was the ZX81 and was launched on March 1981. The ZX81 had a new chip designed by Sinclair Research and manufactured by Ferranti. With this new chip, it replaced 18 Chips in the ZX80 and the price went down to $108 for assembled models or $78 as a Kit. Unlike the ZX80, the ZX81 had a floating decimal point and specific functions. It came in a black case and used a colour TV. It was an improvement on the ZX80. Sinclair also announced that the company would launch a printer for this device later in the year, which was sold for $70 Sinclair released ROM packs for $20.

Now with an improved machine, Sinclair decided to fight back at the government’s scheme by offering a half price deal. Schools could buy a package of the ZX81 with ROM Pack for $90 and he promised that they will be able to buy the printer half price. With this offer, 2300 schools from England benefited from that scheme. At this stage, Sinclair decided to exporting computers to USA, which eventually sold 15,000 computers per month by mail order, and in Japan. In 1982, Sinclair sold 300,000 ZX81’s and 50,000 ZX80’s. On April 1982, they launched the ZX spectrum codename ZX82. The hardware was designed by Richard Altwasser, who later formed his own company. There were two versions of the ZX Spectrum the 16K and the 48K Ram. The machine could produce colour images, Sound, high-resolution graphics and a more advanced basic. Clive Sinclair was very disappointed that the ZX Spectrum was used almost and exclusively for playing. Regard this the ZX spectrum was sold over 30 Countries and in England in the Easter of 1983 they sold more than 15000 units per week. In 1984, Sinclair released another machine the ZX 128K this computer was designed more for programmers although you can run previous games of the ZX spectrum.

Sinclair stopped producing computers in 1986 and sold the ZX Computers Rights to Amstrad who later that year released the Spectrum +2, which was a modified version of the ZX 128K.