pouët.net

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(Together In) Electric Dreams

A tribute to Sir Clive Sinclair, 1940 - 2021

Code: evilpaul
Music: mA2E/dSr
Gfx: Aki, bfox, diver, J.McGibbitts, Luther, visionvortex, dman',
  Grongy

Extra special thanks to: ne7, Ramon/dSr

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"I don’t think Clive saw the Spectrum as just a computer. Whether it
 was being used by parents and their kids to key in listings from
 magazines, engineers probing early digital motor and systems
 analysis, at the hands of hobbyists attempting to solder a kit for
 the first time, being smuggled under the seats of beat-up Trabant’s
 into East Germany or via tapes swapped between us in the playground
 it was the beginning of *something* different in computing: true
 accessibility.

 This little machine opened the door to affordable computing for
 millions of users across the globe; many years before our having
 access to the internet its hardware, clones and software connected
 cultures all around the world from the UK to Asia and even across
 the iron curtain into Russia and Eastern Europe where people risked
 everything to just get a taste of computing in their homes. 

 The sheer number of people that cut their teeth coding on this
 affordable little machine across the world is staggering, Clive
 broke the barrier to entry to affordable computing with his kits and
 machines from the zx80 to the 128k ZX Spectrum and even though he
 eventually handed the reins over to Amstrad and Alan Sugar’s
 development teams in later years it was those seeds of accessibility
 that made all the difference for those folks that couldn’t afford to
 splash out on more expensive machines like the Apple, BBC Micro or
 god forbid IBM’s quite boring 8086 based hardware…  

 We shared this little machine and it’s z80 processor through its
 clones and updates over the years with friends across the world:
 it’s CPU and derivatives are still used today in many pieces of
 hardware and even made it into consoles like the Master System and
 Nintendo Gameboy, one could argue without his spearheading the cheap
 computer revolution we wouldn’t have had those machines delivered in
 the same way.

 With its fixed palette you could be mistaken for assuming the ZX
 Spectrum was a simple computer but its influence on computing cannot
 be underestimated. I don’t think Clive saw the ZX Spectrum as just a
 computer and we didn’t either: it’s probably the single reason many
 of us do what we do."

Andrew Lemon (@_lemon)

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