Has anyone else seen Daves new video? He is going to be restoring his Sinclair C5 in memory of Sir Clive Sinclair and Dave also said that he made consumer electronics affordable to the masses by building down to a price point and his pocket calculator was just 20% of the price of its comparable HP35, reaffirming my points about him making them affordable and even in some cases achieving what HP said was impossible. Anyway, watch the video, he makes many valid points and so many today owe a lot to Sinclairs products for inspiring them into getting them into the industry.
Just because you weren't the only person who swallowed Sinclair's self-promotional propaganda doesn't confirm him as the genius he went around telling everybody that he was, or that he was anywhere as influential as some (including himself) make him out to be. I'm sure that our esteemed prime minister can find all sorts of people that agree with him, that does not make him necessarily correct. Comparing a Sinclair calculator to an HP calculator is like comparing a 1980s Lada to a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, if the former cost 20% of the latter, you were ripped off.
Both the HP35 and Sinclair Scientific were "aimed" at replacing slide rules. As was the norm:
- the -hp- product significantly exceeded its objectives
- the Sinclair product barely met them
Nonetheless, the Sinclair Scientific was significant and influential and a remarkable achievement.
Precisely, clearly if costs are removed to meet a price that is affordable, something has to give. I really doubt that anyone would have brought a Sinclair product if they had the means to get one of the other main stream products. My argument has always been that as an inventor etc, he is getting an undeserved bad press. Compare Sinclair with Steve Jobs as an example, Jobs set out from the get go to develop a flagship product at flagship prices and gets highly thought of, whereas Sinclair set off in the opposite direction, trying to bring to the less well-heeled people products that would enrich their lives at an affordable price point, and he seems to be getting disrespected for that. Not everyone can be a high earner and thus afford the better things.
In many cases his bad reputation was self-inflicted. Consider his audioamps in the 60s, the black watch, the microdrives, to name but a few.
Oh hell yes, the audio amps I believe featured many of those Plessey reject transistors, not that they were totally useless but failed to meet the high standards that they demanded for their equipment. Some of them had short lives it would seem, but that was in the early days, and the black watch also did not like nylon shirts which was a popular material for shirts back then as well. That said, I still think that if people dig deep enough similar failures probably beset other companies as well, but because they weren't aiming at the consumer market, they were better able to keep failures under wraps, and they also had better resources being as they were a more established business, to move quickly and resolve the problems as they arose.
And they were mostly DC coupled, capacitors are expenive. This ment you tended to get a cascade of failures once one transistor failed. Even with a partial failure DC coupling make trouble shooting harder. And of course a set of full spec E-line transistors cost nearly as much as a new amp.
DC coupled?! A typical Sinclair innovation.
As you hint, the original design probably included capacitor(s), but Sinclair found it still worked when they were removed, and so decreed they were unnecessary.
ISTR hearing something like that w.r.t. a resistor in the microdrives, back in the 80s.
The X10 was the good one at that. My father bought one. The design was basically an H bridge. The side effect of this was there were no bias conditions so one marginal transistor meant that there was a permanent DC leakage through the speaker. What’s even worse is there were always four marginal transistors that liked to go CE short. This actually destroyed a speaker entirely right in the middle of Stairway to Heaven ironically.
Again my point about cheapness. It’s ok to start with a good design and remove stuff until you’ve got something that still works. But with the condition thay it meets the original specification and general safety requirements.
In this case he started with a terrible design and made it dangerous.
At some point it is disingenuous to release a product like that and give the guy any credit.
Edit: to point out my father was also a cheapskate. His buying process for anything was:
1. Fall for the marketing and buy something magical at a too low price.
2. Find out it wasn’t fit for purpose and go and buy something mediocre.
3. Find out it wasn’t fit for purpose and buy what he should have done.
Eventually he stopped buying turds and bought a Sony amp for far less than the combined sum of all the turds and the damage they caused.
When he bought the X10 he was at stage 1. He actually bought it from someone who hadn’t got around to using it well after they stopped shipping them.
A fine example of this is his passion for buying cheap electric screwdrivers. I found 7 when I had to clean out his stuff. None of them worked.
This suggests there is a serious problem with quality and waste in society.
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