in terms of the sinclair spectrum, what is your experience? what are your memories of using it? my very first games were on the sinclair spectrum. i made pole position, wall blazer, firebirds, and those games gave me my first royalty checks and really kicked off my career. you could buy a computer for £125 and it had the worst keyboard in the world, i remember but you could buy that computer and learn basic and you could put the game onto a cassette tape, because we used cassette tapes back then, and you could sell it. there was no internet back then, there was no way to get the game out onto the internet, so we had to sell it on cassette tapes. but we slowly started a game industry out of that. it was small but from that we started a larger industry, and quite a lot of us are still in that industry today. what sort of hallmarks of sir clive sinclair s work so you think we see in modern
computers today, if any? i think some of the. i think the old zx spectrum had 16 kilobits of memory. if you look at the programmes back then, they respected that amount of memory, they respected what 16 kilobits or 40 kilobits meant. they could programme a lot into just a little bits, and that meant a lot to do them. it also meant a lot of computer games started on a zx spectrum. it made a huge difference to the computer game industry with games like panic attack started on the spectrum and they are still playable today and visible today in a lot of today s games that are on modern consoles. graeme devine. you can reach me on twitter i m @benmboulos and there s plenty more on the
brought his company to its knees. undaunted, he set up sinclair research and in 1980, launched a ground breaking personal computer, the zx80. it sold for under £100. it was the zx spectrum with its colour display that was his biggest success, credited by some with launching the uk s computer and video games industries. more money had been poured into his obsession with a new form of urban transport. the sinclair c5, launched in the freezing winter of 1985, became something of a national joke and many critics complained it was unsafe on busy urban roads. you try some things and they succeed and sometimes they don t and i don t look back on it and say to myself the c5 was a wildest idea which failed because peoplejumped on it i don t think that s true. i think it was not good enough to succeed, simple as that. having run out of money,
it was the zx spectrum with its colour display that was his biggest success, credited by some with launching the uk s computer and video games industries. more money had been poured into his obsession with a new form of urban transport. the sinclair c5, launched in the freezing winter of 1985, became something of a national joke and many critics complained it was unsafe on busy urban roads. you try some things and they succeed and sometimes they don t and i don t look back on it and say to myself the cs was a wildest idea which failed because people jumped on it i don t think that s true. i think it was not good enough to succeed. simple as that. having run out of money, sinclair was forced to sell his computer business to a budding entrepreneur called alan sugar. undeterred, he continued his quest for a new kind of personal transport but an electric bicycle, the zike, proved no more popular than the c5.
his own electronic kits by mail order and writing technical manuals. he then put a magnifying bubble over each digit to make it visible. an obsession with miniaturisation saw him launch the word s fist slimline pocket calculator in 1972. soon though, competition from cheaperjapanese versions forced sinclair to slash his prices. then the failure of his next innovation, a digital watch, brought his company to its knees. undaunted, he set up sinclair research and in 1980 launched a ground breaking personal computer, the zx 80. it sold for under £100. it was the zx spectrum with its colour display that was his biggest success, credited by some with launching the uk s computer and video games industries. more money had been poured into his obsession with a new form of urban transport. the sinclair c5, launched in the freezing winter of 1985, became something of a nationaljoke. and many critics complained