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Clive Sinclair
passed away yesterday in London at the age of 81.
He will be remembered as the father of a whole generation of computers, especially the
ZX Spectrum
, which served as the inspiration for the creation of personal computers.
In 1972, Sinclair invented the first calculator that could be easily carried in your pocket.
It was the
Sinclair Executive
, a small device weighing less than 100 grams with a price that today, taking inflation into account, would exceed 1,000 euros.
Still, it was
half as cheap as the competition at the time
, and much more compact.
It became a success.
Within a year of launch, Sinclair Radionics, his first company, was already manufacturing more than
100,000 units per month.
This invention alone would have been enough to add his name to the pantheon of British inventors but today it is almost a side note of a brilliant career full of ups and downs that would
rival
that
of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Bill Gates without problems
.
A self-taught engineer (
Sinclair
refused to go to university despite his excellent grades and talent for mathematics and physics), he had to combine a passion for electronics with journalism in his early days in order to pay for his early developments.
His biggest contribution would come in the 1980s. The first affordable microprocessors were beginning to hit the market, and Sinclair came up with the idea of starting to sell electronics kits so that students could learn how to take advantage of them.
He soon realized that by developing these kits a little more, he could make a personal computer at a much lower cost than the models that companies such as
Commodore or Acorn were
starting to sell in British homes.
In 1980 the
ZX80 was
born
and, a year later, the
ZX81
, two computers that taught a generation of application and game developers to program.
His third machine was the most iconic.
In April 1982 he released
the ZX Spectrum
, with 48 KB of memory.
The computer, with its characteristic rubber keys, became an instant hit in Europe and Japan because of its low price, small size, and extensive collection of available games and programs.
Sinclair made a huge fortune from these computers and his next goal was to revolutionize transportation.
In 1983 he created the company Sinclair Vehicles Ltd. with the aim of launching an electric vehicle, the C5.
It hit the market two years later, but it was a complete failure.
It was expensive and its design, similar to that of a toy tricycle, did not convince the British public.
The ruling forced Sinclair to sell its computer division to one of its competitors, Amstrad.
Later, in 2010, the inventor would try to revive the idea of an electric personal vehicle with a prototype baptized as the X-1, but that did not see the light of day.
Despite his passion for electronics and miniaturization, and the success of his creations, Sinclair was not a huge fan of his own products.
Her daughter says, for example, that despite having invented a pocket calculator, she preferred to do the math with a slide rule.
He was also one of the most critical voices with the idea of artificial intelligence.
On more than one occasion, he predicted that the development of a general-purpose intelligence superior to that of humans would spell the end of the species.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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