RIP Clive Sinclair...

[Bud]

Sad news...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58587521

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair.

[johnboxall]

Such a personality, he will never be forgotten. He created (or tried to create) entire new markets with his multiple generations of companies and efforts. Some a success, some not - but I 1000% respect him for having a go.

[floobydust]

Sad to see him go. The media liked to go on about his products that were flops - instead of really appreciating the creativity he had. Visionaries, inventors always look ahead and never focus on the bits that aren't working.
Today SpaceX can fail and blow up rockets, people think "they are improving, getting better" but Sinclair didn't seem to command that respect in the brutal consumer products industry. Yes his stuff didn't fully work and was cheap, but it disrupted things in a good way. Imagine a $99 personal computer.
You build something which ends up being an overall flop, but there were 10 wins in the build - nobody seems to think that is gold from which you move ahead. It seemed to climax with the C5's issues and here we are today with rogue electric trikes, scooters, e-bikes etc. 36 years later.

The movie about him made him out to be a nutbar, playing Ozzy Osborne Crazy Train song in the background etc. I thought it missed what he was about.
In life he'd married a young exotic dancer, pretty hot so he had his fun lol..

2015 BBC Interview, comparing his vision of computers in the 80's to today (30 years later):
"I'm very impressed by the processing power. But I'm not at all impressed by what is done with it. It's really rather dull when you consider, you know, what we achieved with a few K RAM, in those days. It's a bit sad how very much... it has not progressed from there. I fully expected back then that we would have computerized doctors and teachers".

[james_s]

There definitely has been diminishing returns. I remember when computers were rapidly developing and gaining new capabilities all the time. Then they hit a point where it seems like development shifted to just supporting more and more bloated software that doesn't really do anything the old software couldn't. People don't bother optimizing anything anymore because "it doesn't matter" or "RAM is cheap", etc. I suppose in a way though it's inevitable, modern computers and the software to support them is immensely complicated to the point that it isn't really feasible for a human to understand them the way crafty developers did in the early days.

[SiliconWizard]

Younger people who basically take every electronic device they have for granted can't understand how much this guy contributed, and what the spirit of the days was.

The comparison with Musk is interesting. Although both are (/were) businessmen in the tech industry, and both trying to "disrupt" things, the circumstances are completely different. These days, companies such as the ones Musk started can get billions of dollars of funding, have easy access to technology that has matured over the past few decades, can get all the engineers they want on board, and so on. Good lord, that was certainly not the case for companies in the 70s and 80s.

So the guys have almost opposite approaches due to this. Musk is a bit like "let's see how much cash and resources we can waste on this project to make it work", while Sinclair was just "let's see with how little we can achieve this".