Today would have been Sir Clive Sinclair’s eighty sixth birthday. He died in September 2021, aged eighty one, and the obituaries were kind but brief. A few paragraphs about the ZX Spectrum, a knowing chuckle about the C5, and then the world moved on. It should not have.

Sinclair did not invent the personal computer. He did something more consequential. He made it cheap enough for anyone to own one. When the ZX Spectrum launched in April 1982, priced at £125 for the 16KB model, it cost less than the television set it plugged into. Apple and IBM were building machines for professionals. Sinclair was building machines for fourteen year olds with pocket money.

The keyboard was made of rubber. Enthusiasts nicknamed it “dead flesh.” The sound was a single channel of beeping. Programs had to be saved onto cassette tapes using an ordinary audio recorder, a process so unreliable that loading a game could take several minutes and fail halfway through. None of this mattered. What mattered was that for the first time, millions of ordinary families could afford a computer. Over five million Spectrums were sold in a decade, and the machine spawned an entire industry of bedroom coders, teenagers who taught themselves to program by typing in listings from magazines and then modifying them until something unexpected happened.

That generation went on to build the British games........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)