Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Rorthron
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Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by Rorthron »

The question came up in the Vega+ discussion as to what credit Clive Sinclair deserves for his role in computing history. I remember "Uncle" Clive as the face of the ZX81 and Spectrum, and it's easy to look back on his role fondly. But is that just a rose-tinted view?

Some suggested that the credit really belongs with the likes of Rick Dickinson, Richard Altwasser and Steve Vickers for the industrial, hardware and firmware design. I have to confess that nowadays I'm drawn to that view. I suppose we don't know exactly what Clive Sinclair's involvement was, but it's hard to point to many things he got right. He deserves credit for spotting the opportunity for low-cost home computers early on, but after that dropped the ball completely, squandering effort on projects like Microdrives, portable CRT TVs and the C5.

And he didn't just make "business" mistakes. He made a series of terrible technology decisions: preferring CRT to LCD, tape to floppy disc storage, etc.

Clive Sinclair was in the right place at the right time when one of the biggest transitions in history was getting going. Peers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates laid the foundations for (almost) trillion dollar businesses. Clive mostly blew it.

But what do you all think?
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by PaddyC13 »

Personally I believe Sir Clive was an ideas man and someone who made things happen. Sir Clive hired the talent to make his and/or their dreams reality. If it was not for Clive's drive and vision many of the projects would never have happened.

There is no doubting that the ZX81 and Spectrum were a commercial success but there are more failures than successes. Sir Clive is more like Steve Jobs than Bill Gates although no where near as successful. :D

There were far too many side projects that Sir Clive funneled valuable resources in to. If you look at the C5, it was never going to be a serious vehicle. If it had been marketed as a disability scooter or expensive toy then it may have been a different story.

The QL was ahead of its time in so many ways but was nobbled by daft decisions like processor, RAM and Microdrives. If the QL had been like the ST or Amiga it may have been an amazing success.

For me, Sir Clive will always have a special place as he did help to kick start the amazing reputation that the UK has for software development etc. Not sure this was by design but he gets a gold star anyway.

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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by 1024MAK »

From the outside, it will always be difficult to work out exactly what went on in Sinclair Research Ltd. But it was Sir Clive Sinclair's company. So as the owner and the boss, he made the important decisions. So he should therefore at least get some credit.

Now we have hindsight to use to help us judge all his mistakes. But back in the 1980's it was rather different.

At the time of the launch of the ZX Spectrum, all video monitors and TVs were CRT technology. LCDs were only used in watches, clocks, calculators, handheld computers, handheld game machines and some expensive portable computers. So a low cost portable CRT may have appeared to be a good idea.

If at the time, the U.K. had a good cycle network, the C5 may have been successful...

The debate about what the QL could have been has been debated on WoSf and on the QL Forum many times. Search for the market research report on the QL. It makes interesting reading.

Sinclair of course thought that launching a computer based on 16/32 bit CPU ahead of Apple would be enough for it to be successful.

The sad fact is, inventors always have far more failures than successes.

And inventors rarely make good business men/women.

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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

The idea of 'bringing a computer to every home' says it all. He not only designed computers for the general public, but also at an affordable price.

Many people started coding thanks to his machines.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by PeterJ »

For me, a hero. He did make mistakes, but I don't think the path of technology would have been the same without his involvement.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Rorthron wrote: Fri Jun 22, 2018 2:33 pmAnd he didn't just make "business" mistakes. He made a series of terrible technology decisions: preferring CRT to LCD, tape to floppy disc storage, etc.
I agree with you there. The thing is, I would say that Clive was more interested in making new innovative products from cheap, proven technologies than looking for better ways to do things. This can be a good strategy because it carries fewer risks and lower costs (e.g. the Microdrive, despite being less capable and slower, definitely beat out floppy disks in terms of pricing).

Unfortunately, in the case of the TV80, it just looked pretty naff for the £79.95 it commanded (about £240 today), especially when its LCD competitors started to appear. The Microdrive, similarly, was no match against the floppy disk for professional use, the market which Sinclair was aiming at, and was impractical for home users, considering that unlike tape and floppy disk duplication, there was no way to manufacture Microdrive cartridges apart from write them from a Spectrum computer.

It can't be denied that this strategy never worked for Sinclair, as it brought him modest success with his portable radios and his handheld calculator line. At the same time, however, he made substantial losses on the Black Watch, which nearly bankrupted him.

Overall, I see him as a brave innovator, one keen and willing to take the risks of invention, a hero for the tinkerers and the precocious among us. Unfortunately, it is a shame that he never really accepted the Spectrum's place as a games machine, as he could have run his business for much longer had he tried to improve upon the Spectrum, rather than chase the professional market, which was already enamoured with the IBM PC and its clones.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by Seven.FFF »

Although I make criticisms, they're made against some kind of platonic ideal standard. I don't think for a minute that I could have done any better. Considerably worse, I'm sure :D
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by Ralf »

"Zero" is much too strong for me.

But yes, the real heroes are Vickers, Altwasser and Dickinson. They created Spectrum, not uncle Clive. If you are a real Spectrum fan, you should say these names after being woken up in the middle of the night ;)

Clive was just a businessman and not a very good one. Forgive me if I say something wrong but he almost went bankrupt in the 70s, before his company started to deal with micros. It ended with some financial support from the state (as there were such programs at that time) and some state clerk sitting at Clive's office and looking and his hands which Sinclair passionately hated ;)

He had also quite a bad temper, you can see it in document films ;)

But Clive also had an incredible amount of luck with hiring proper people and making proper product at proper time which was Zx Spectrum.

By the way Vickers and Altwasser were great at technology but lame at business. After they left Clive they tried their luck with Jupiter Ace and failed terribly. What did they expect by releasing a computer with black and white text display when Spectrum already existed?

So for a success you always need a good business guy, a good tech guy and some luck.

With Vega+ project business guy was Levy and tech guy was Chris Smith. Levy foolishly fired Smith and was never able to find a true replacement.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by Alessandro »

Neither hero nor zero - but a special place will always be held in my heart for Uncle Clive. A visionary whose main limit was, in my opinion, an excess of self-confidence and for the same reason the tendency to dismiss other points of view which could have been useful in the long run. He was ace in finding the best people for turning his visions into reality, or at least trying to do it. However he lacked the ability to keep them on his side.

I don't think it was Sinclair's fault not to develop the Spectrum as a gaming platform. Let's face it - the Spectrum was not designed for that, rather it was the Ford T of computing. A simple, minimalistic, affordable piece of hardware, aimed at a curious audience, eager to have a go at doing something else with their computers other than just shooting aliens.

Of course we all played with it - but this was a secondary objective for Sinclair as well as Altwasser, Dickinson etc. They hoped that the user could be pushed to create something himself/herself by experimenting with BASIC and hopefully reading the provided guides thoroughly. Those who had their first Spectrum in the Amstrad era, when it was downgraded to a console with keys in order to cash in on the large entertainment software library available, thus fueling the development of the "serious" branches (PCW etc.), completely missed this point.

The number of people which made their first steps into information technology, from simple amateurs like myself, to professional programmers, aided by Sinclair's most popular computer is presumably very high. I believe this is the most important legacy of Sinclair's involvement in the home computer industry to this day.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Alessandro wrote: Fri Jun 22, 2018 10:28 pm The number of people which made their first steps into information technology, from simple amateurs like myself, to professional programmers, aided by Sinclair's most popular computer is presumably very high. I believe this is the most important legacy of Sinclair's involvement in the home computer industry to this day.
I could not agree more! I'm not a professional programmer, but I do put my work, and lifelong interest in information technology down to the spark that was ignited in my brain when I first discovered the ZX81.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Alessandro wrote: Fri Jun 22, 2018 10:28 pm The number of people which made their first steps into information technology, from simple amateurs like myself, to professional programmers, aided by Sinclair's most popular computer is presumably very high. I believe this is the most important legacy of Sinclair's involvement in the home computer industry to this day.
I agree, too, and would expect pretty much everyone on this site to agree. But believing that the ZX81 and Spectrum had a huge impact is not the same as believing Clive Sinclair deserves the credit for them or that his other disasters should be ignored.

At least some of the credit for the ZX81 and Spectrum should go to Richard Altwasser, Steve Vickers, Rick Dickinson, Jim Westwood, Nigel Searle, etc. It's fair also to give Clive Sinclair credit; he clearly must have also been involved. But was the genius of the ZX81 and Spectrum in the strategic decisions (where I think we can assume Clive Sinclair was heavily involved) or the specific designs (where he was less likely to have been)? I think the latter: the ZX series of computers were great pieces of minimal design, but they really weren't the only home computers. In the early 1980s, the UK market was awash with competing home computer designs (even including the terrible Jupiter Ace!).

Also, after the ZX Spectrum, almost everything Clive Sinclair did turned to dust. Microdrives, the QL, the C5, portable CRTs, wafer-scale integration, etc. About the only thing that worked was the Z88 (which was a niche). And yes, we can blame him from not building on the ZX Spectrum. If we give him credit for successes, we have also to include his failures. It was presumably his strategic decision not to continue developing home computers. He had followed the ZX81 up with the Spectrum. He could have followed the Spectrum up with another consumer computer, too, but didn't. There certainly were proposals at Sinclair Research, such as the LC3 or Loki (though I suspect neither of those particular proposals would have been successful).

Acorn's success with the BBC Micro led to the Archimedes and ARM. Even Commodore went on to the Amiga. I believe Apple went on to other things, too. ;)
But Sinclair went down blind alleys.

Yes, he was a visionary. His vision of electric vehicles, robotics and AI all seems prescient now, but it was little more than science fiction at the time, and Clive Sinclair contributed very little or nothing to realising them. The revolution under way at the time was the home computing revolution, and despite a winning start, Clive Sinclair failed to build on it. He had a winning hand, but played it badly.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Rorthron wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 7:06 am It's fair also to give Clive Sinclair credit; he clearly must have also been involved.
I think that's as generic a statement as, say, "Winston Churchill must have been involved in Britain's victory in World War II". Without Sinclair to co-ordinate his collaborators and turn their efforts into a concrete, viable product, we won't be here today. As Ralf pointed out, all that Altwasser and Vickers could create after they left Sinclair Research was the Jupiter Ace - the less said, the better.
Rorthron wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 7:06 am But was the genius of the ZX81 and Spectrum in the strategic decisions (where I think we can assume Clive Sinclair was heavily involved) or the specific designs (where he was less likely to have been)? I think the latter: the ZX series of computers were great pieces of minimal design, but they really weren't the only home computers. In the early 1980s, the UK market was awash with competing home computer designs (even including the terrible Jupiter Ace!).
Again, let's look at the specifications of the Spectrum and compare them to the competition in April 1982. The Spectrum wasn't exactly state-of-the-art, neither it was intended to be; it was designed as the affordable computer for the masses, to let people be fascinated by the possibility of writing their own software and start a generation of budding programmers. Which is precisely what happened most of the time, before the Amstrad takeover.

Moreover, I won't say the concept of wafer scale integration has entirely turned to dust, at least as far as data storage is concerned. In an interview published on Your Computer, November 1987, Sinclair predicted that solid state would dominate over conventional hard disks. 30 years and more later we are witnessing just that. Research as recent as 2016 has also revived the idea of WSI in the field of artificial intelligence.
Rorthron wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 7:06 am He could have followed the Spectrum up with another consumer computer, too, but didn't. There certainly were proposals at Sinclair Research, such as the LC3 or Loki (though I suspect neither of those particular proposals would have been successful).
The QL was meant to be a "consumer" computer in a certain sense, aimed at small enterprises and professionals. The key factors should have been the same of the Spectrum: simplicity of use and lower price than its competitors. But the rushed design, with all the problems that followed, and the insistency on using the microdrive cartridges instead of floppy disks as mobile data storage hindered its success, and the C5 fiasco did the rest.

In a nutshell, although Sinclair's vision on mass transport and portable TVs were far too futuristic for their time to be fully turned into real products, and his lack of confidence in others made him take the wrong choices more than often, the ZX range of computers still testify of his ability to pick up the right people for the job and lead them to a common goal. With a more down-to-earth approach and a lesser ego, Sinclair would probably have kept producing home computers as well as other products like an electric bicycle, far more conventional than the C5.

But then he would have been phagocytized by some large American corporation in a few years :twisted:
Last edited by Alessandro on Sat Jun 23, 2018 10:13 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Actually if we think about computer revolution from the 80s, almost everybody has lost in a long term.

Where is Commodore today? Where is Atari? Where is Amstrad?

We are all using PCs now. PC means "personal computer" suggesting that it's just a computer, PC=computer. But our PCs use IBM technology. We don't call them IBMs anymore but they are technically IBMs even if are manufactured by someone else.

IBM was the winner of the 80s althouth in let's say 1983 you would never guess it.
You know why? Because it was a big company with experience and tradition, established yet in 19th century, starting from some mechanical machines operating on punch cards. They knew how to survive on competing market, both in good and bad days. Everyone else were newbies, starting their business in small rented flat with 20 year old guys as main engineers. Sometimes they never got a real start like Sam Coupe and sometimes experienced a crazy growth like Atari.

Sinclair actually has always been a small player. I remember that at the peak Atari employed 11000 people. Sinclair at the peak employed 30 people, ordering production and distribution to other companies.

But both Atari and Sinclair eventually went bankrupt, they didn't know how to follow their success.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Alessandro wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 9:48 am As Ralf pointed out, all that Altwasser and Vickers could create after they left Sinclair Research was the Jupiter Ace - the less said, the better.
It would be more accurate to say that what they CHOOSE to create after they left Sinclair was the Jupiter Ace. They could have come up with any old box of electronics with yet another version of BASIC but decided to go with what they really wanted to spend time, money and effort on creating

Being an original owner and user of the machine I am probably biased but I certainly didn't buy mine to play games on, the idea was to learn FORTH on a dedicated machine free of the tangled mess that BASIC is which I did. Adverts for the ACE at the time concentrated on its FORTH language rather than the gee-whiz games you might play on it (there weren't any anyway) which probably put a lot of game players off but certainly attracted those of us who knew the difference between a computer and a games machine.

To call the Jupiter Ace a failure based on build quality, performance and sales figures is one way of looking at it. For the way it taught me a second programming language and managed to unlock the mysteries of Z80 code almost as a byproduct I'd say it did exactly what it was meant to do. Something for which I will always be grateful.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by 1024MAK »

Acorn, Sinclair, and others all suffered problems with a rapidly expanding market, where they had trouble keeping up with demand. So they kept increasing the production. Only for the demand to plateau, or fall. What had appeared to be an ever expanding market suddenly was no longer. But they did not foresee this.

Sinclair found itself in a situation where it had a huge amount of money tied up in stock piled up in warehouses, with not enough money coming in to pay the large bills that were becoming due. Before the slowdown, this had not been a problem, as cash from sales always meant that there was money in the bank. Acorn also found itself with similar problems. It had stockpiles of Electons it could not sell in any quantity, but got funding from (and eventually bought by) Olivetti.

And so, the solution for Sinclair, was to sell out to Amstrad (who had the cash to pay the creditors).

So it was not just Clive Sinclair's other projects that took down the business. Part of it was that running a business that relied on expected future sales, that was partly seasonal, then a change in demand, was always going to be difficult.

Would a new Spectrum model have helped? Who knows. My feeling is that in late 1983 / early 1984 Sinclair should have realised that a game's machine was a money spinner, and produced a ZX Spectrum with more RAM (80K bytes of RAM would have been very easy to do), Sinclair joystick ports (again, very easy to do, just wire them into the keyboard matrix), and add a sound chip (another easy thing to do). If the The AY-3-8910 or the AY-3-8912 had been chosen, the I/O port(s) could have been used to provide a parallel printer port as well. It could then have been launched in the Winter ready for Christmas.

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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by 1024MAK »

Ralf wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 9:59 am Actually if we think about computer revolution from the 80s, almost everybody has lost in a long term.

Where is Commodore today? Where is Atari? Where is Amstrad?

We are all using PCs now. PC means "personal computer" suggesting that it's just a computer, PC=computer. But our PCs use IBM technology. We don't call them IBMs anymore but they are technically IBMs even if are manufactured by someone else.

IBM was the winner of the 80s althouth in let's say 1983 you would never guess it.
Except that, IBM got out of the PC market many years ago...

And many of the IBM compatible computer manufacturers have either gone bust, closed or been absorbed by other companies...

It was inevitable that some standardisation would occur somewhere along the line. The ironic thing being that modern PCs running Windows are now not very compatible with the IBM machines the architecture was based on!

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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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If Sir Clive Sinclair hadn't existed, would the British home computing scene in the 1980s be a straight-up fight between Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC users? I'm sure it'd have been a bit more nuanced than that of course, but I do wonder if some of the 'second division' 8-bits would have had more visibility. MSX or Acorn maybe?
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

Post by Alessandro »

PeteProdge wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 2:48 pm If Sir Clive Sinclair hadn't existed, would the British home computing scene in the 1980s be a straight-up fight between Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC users? I'm sure it'd have been a bit more nuanced than that of course, but I do wonder if some of the 'second division' 8-bits would have had more visibility. MSX or Acorn maybe?
Not only the British one. The Spectrum was either first or second in almost all countries where it was imported (also taking into account unofficial distribution markets like Yugoslavia). A notable exception was Germany, where it had to face a strong Commodore and Amstrad/Schneider presence. The Italian market in particular would have been dominated by Commodore for sure, since Amstrad machines were extremely rare and MSX-based systems even more than that here. Maybe other systems like the Olivetti Prodest would have known a little more diffusion, but that's anybody's guess, and they arrived much too late to play a significant role anyway.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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1024MAK wrote: Fri Jun 22, 2018 3:41 pm
At the time of the launch of the ZX Spectrum, all video monitors and TVs were CRT technology. LCDs were only used in watches, clocks, calculators, handheld computers, handheld game machines and some expensive portable computers. So a low cost portable CRT may have appeared to be a good idea.
He was a bit odd as an inventor. He'd pursue the wrong track in a stubborn manner. The CRT's were a demonstration of this. The Japanese had LCD screens but he thought his CRT's were better. Microdrives were another example of this. Floppies expensive but falling in price fast and Clive goes out and re-invents the 8 track!

The interviews he did about the MSX were also quite telling. He argued that people didn't want standardisation and it would limit technology. OK so the MSX failed but standardisation is indeed what we got. Just not at that point.

That pursuit of the wrong idea at all costs is what did for Sinclair. The C5, wafer scale integration, micro drives etc.

Sinclair hitting on the computer revolution was foresight but it then bankrolled a load of daft projects. Of course companies need to take risks but Sinclair bet the entire farm on a series of projects that lost huge amounts of cash.

And tellingly, since then he hasn't had any high profiles successes despite pushing ideas. The truly great inventors/creators keep on producing new and innovative stuff that sells. What we looking at with Clive? The Zike? The Z88?
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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PeteProdge wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 2:48 pm If Sir Clive Sinclair hadn't existed, would the British home computing scene in the 1980s be a straight-up fight between Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC users? I'm sure it'd have been a bit more nuanced than that of course, but I do wonder if some of the 'second division' 8-bits would have had more visibility. MSX or Acorn maybe?
As you'll have seen from my coverage of PCN, the Speccy is pretty much top dog in the sales charts every week for the magazines entire run. Without it what would have happened?

Well the C64 would have probably have been top. It's hard on the heels of the 64 most weeks. Acorn? Well that depends on if they had still decided to release the Elk and if it hadn't be crushed by being late and the might of the Spectrum.

Amstrad? They would have still have released the CPC. You may have seen the Dragon and Oric hanging on for longer. The cost reduced Atari 8 bits may have gained more traction as well.

MSX, not sure. It was a mess of a launch with a load of consumer confusion around it. Never really gained traction.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Ralf wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 9:59 am
Where is Commodore today? Where is Atari? Where is Amstrad?
Amstrad the only company that continued to produce electronics and Alan Sugar sold up at a time of his choosing (IIRC his 60th birthday) and eventually it was all merged into Sky. Today they are now a division of Sky working a few doors down from the old Amstrad HQ which is now a hotel.

Nobody lost their job, nobody went bust. Like it or not they were the last guys left standing.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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@chinnyhill10, so tell us who you know of that has managed at least three good inventions say within the last 50 years or so.

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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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1024MAK wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 2:26 pm

Sinclair found itself in a situation where it had a huge amount of money tied up in stock piled up in warehouses, with not enough money coming in to pay the large bills that were becoming due. Before the slowdown, this had not been a problem, as cash from sales always meant that there was money in the bank. Acorn also found itself with similar problems. It had stockpiles of Electons it could not sell in any quantity, but got funding from (and eventually bought by) Olivetti.


So it was not just Clive Sinclair's other projects that took down the business. Part of it was that running a business that relied on expected future sales, that was partly seasonal, then a change in demand, was always going to be difficult.
Alot of emphasis is put on Sinclair and Acorn having warehouses full of computers at Xmas '85 . There's a very pertinent point in the Amstrad Story book where Dixons are trying to tap up Amstrad for cheap CPC's because they claim they knew Amstrad had lots of unsold stock.

In fact the Amstrad warehouse was empty because Sugar had made sure he wasn't reliant on the domestic market from day 1. In fact the biggest problem was France and Spain selling machines as fast as they could be got into the country. Dixons kept ringing and they were assuming Sugar was playing hard ball but he just had no stock.

So its not so much the state of the market but just being a bit crap at business that did for Sinclair and Acorn.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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1024MAK wrote: Sat Jun 23, 2018 4:18 pm @chinnyhill10, so tell us who you know of that has managed at least three good inventions say within the last 50 years or so.

Mark
Sinclair is as much a person as a brand name. Apple seem to be doing nicely as are Dyson. Both are run by the same kind of 'visionaries' that Sinclair was (or at least Apple was until Jobs died).

And there is Musk of course. Depends on if he ends up in the same hole Sinclair did.
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Re: Clive Sinclair: hero or zero?

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Yes, I know Amstrad did alright and indeed prospered. It has to be said that Alan Suger was a far better business man than anyone else in the U.K. home computer market. And I like the CPC machines (well designed and nice to use). But this thread is about Sinclair. No one is saying that Amstrad were bad or anything like that. So can we move on from talking about Amstrad...

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Step up to red alert. Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb :dance
Looking forward to summer later in the year.
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