Clive Sincalir has died.

Sad loss.... We ( my old company) Ram Electronics benefitted greatly from his 'inventions- ZX80/81 Spectrum by designing add ons . We started by buying Z80 kits, building them and selling on 'ready to go'.Moved on to designing and building add ons for the spectrum, notably the Spectrum Turbo and Ram Music Machine. We made it big time when Spectrum went bust, getting a massive deal with Dixons and Boots to supply them with a Xmas special bundle of joystick + interface.WE had a battle with Ferranti ( who made custom chips for Spectrum) as I had designed an ASIC that was very similar to one of Sir Clive's designs..... I the end, Ferranti relented and we got our chip. Sir Clive, I have a lot to thank you for. RIP.

On 20/09/2021 09:34, Anthony William Sloman wrote: <snip>

I vaguely remember reading something like that, but can't now find any reference to it using Google.

has been up-dated to reflect the fact that Clive Sincalir's cancer finally killed him last week - 12th September 2021.

It's on topic - Clive Sinclair was a well known electronics engineer in the UK, though within the industry he was most famous for his capacity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, usually by trying to trim the bill of materials a little too far.

I've deleted my original post - there was a typo in the subject line which John Doe didn't seem to notice

On a sunny day (Mon, 20 Sep 2021 11:34:08 +0100) it happened TTman snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in <si9o31$nrr$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

+1

I had great fun with the ZX80 and ZX81, bought a memory add on, and designed a lot of add ons a.o. I/O such as floppy interface and EPROM programmer for it, then sort of recoded it into a CP/M clone. History:

ZX81 had the best BASIC I have seen. ZX80 was really top, almost a single chip computer!

I no longer have those apart from the ZX81 power supply...

Never had a spectrum.

Great guy! Sir Clive Sinclair Lives on in my memory and the things I learned from it.

The John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sdhn7c$pkp$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And the John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sg3kr7$qt5$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And yet, the clueless John Doe troll has itself posted yet another incorectly formatted USENET posting on Mon, 20 Sep 2021 09:46:50 -0000 (UTC) in message-id <si9laa$vd7$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me.

The John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sdhn7c$pkp$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And the John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sg3kr7$qt5$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And yet, the clueless John Doe troll has itself posted yet another incorectly formatted USENET posting on Mon, 20 Sep 2021 14:29:46 -0000 (UTC) in message-id <sia5sp$1b1$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me.

You got a reference for that?

Despite a lot of searching I can find no reference to "Clive Sinclair bank-rolled Chris Curry's effort ......".

And no links between Chris Curry and the National Front. I think you should either retract or come up with some evidence.

Clive wasn't perfect, far from it, but he doesn't deserve to be smeared without some actual evidence.

MK

definitely citation needed on that one

Would you please post a link to the official sed formatting website.

Dan

Would you please post a link to the official sed formatting website.

ww

Would this have been in the 80s? IIRC the National Front was "Third Position" back then, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist but with the same love of strongman leaders as any far-right party, i.e. a motley crew of whack jobs

Michael Kellett wrote: =================

** Sinclair started out as a cheap skate & opportunist re-marketing reject semis . He moved on from that but his products appealed to a minority of similar minded UK customers. The only Sinclair item I managed to acquire was a Z30 amp module. It worked, in a fashion, but was so penny pinched reliability and performance were hopelessly compromised. ** Errrrrr - not every scandalous fact is listed on the WWW.

** That is far from reasonable to expect. Big as it is, the WWW contains just a * tiny wee fraction* of all the world's information. ** Folk are entitled to say what they know to be true.

Thankfully, dead men are not able to sue for defamation.

....... Phil

No. It was Cambridge (UK) scuttlebut from the 1980's. I was interested because when I moved to Cambridge I'd had the choice of two jobs - one with Chris Curry's Acorn Computers (who wouldn't pay my moving expenses) and Cambridge Instruments (electron microscopes - who would). Cambridge Instruments had it's problems, but it didn't go bust at the end of the year (as Acorn Computers did). One of the people whom we later became friends with in Cambridge - David Johnson Davies - had been their software manager at the time, but had bailed out before they went bust, taking out quite a bit of money in the process.

One of the guys I worked with had worked with Clive Sinclair. He share the common view that Clive Sinclair was very clever, but he had been frustrated by his own inability to get Clive to accept that it wasn't a good idea to use the cheapest possible transistors (which seemed to include parts that had scavanged from Texas Instrument reject bins).

Whatever you made on the up-front price of the transistors you lost at lot more on the completed assemblies that didn't work well enough to let you sell (even granting Clive's casual approach to quality control) . Sadly, Clive's barrow-boy instincts beat out rational consideration.

I expect it might be difficult to show that Sinclair bankrolled him particularly, but I would think there'd be a record of Chris Curry running for Parliament if he put any substantial effort into it. I can't seem to find anything about that, either, though.

bitrex wrote: ============

** The NF party only got a small percentage and the UK uses " first past the post voting" . So candidate expenses would not be great. But maybe a sizable inducement was needed to get Curry nominated by the NF in the first place.

... Phil

Ed Hernia keeps reposting the same misspelled bullshit.