Spectrum Computing

Very sad news indeed and, like pretty much everyone on here, I can say that without that small black slab of magic I wouldn't be where I am today.

That box of electrical wizardry got me my first job as a CAD Operator in 1991 when my boss said to me:

'You know about computers don't you?'

"Well I used to have a Spectrum'

'Well you can use one of these then'

And proceeded to sit me down in front of a 386 running DOS 6 and Autocad 11.

The rest, as they say, is history.

RIP Sir Clive

RIP Sir Clive - as others have posted, thank you for the career kick start

Absolutely gutted, RIP Sir Clive. I posted this on the QL Forum:

It's hit me hard, really has, I'm a self confessed Sinclair fanboy, always have been and always will be. My Sinclair journey started watching my Uncle's 48k speccy around 1983 as a four year old, and I was just totally enthralled. It was like a mythical item, the things it did, the games, all the words on the machine, how it looked. That super crisp futuristic looking SInclair logo.

My Uncle left school around 85-86 I think, and he wanted to sell his Speccy as he needed the money, which made my Grandparents very upset as they knew he loved it, and he had spent loads of time and money on the games. Unknown to me, my Gran decided to buy it for me off my Uncle, and I can vividly remember watching on puzzled as she handed out notes from her purse to my uncle, and us coming home with boxes and bags full of piles of tapes and magazines. I was totally smitten with it, and had years of happy memories working my way through all the tapes and games.

When it got to the early 90's and amigas etc came along. I still stood by my speccy, in the mid 90s, I got an Acorn A3010, but I also used that with speccy emulators etc To screenshot graphics and tinker about. During that time I also bought a +2 off someone at school, and his mam's car followed me on my pushbike to deliver it. In the mid 90's I kept getting more speccies, and I used to email my PC owning friends, using a viewdata called Silicon Village, and they couldn't believe I was sending them emails from a speccy. I used to get tape fanzines, and other fanzines such as ZX FIies and Classix, all before retro internet craze came back.

I can remember going shopping in Newcastle with my Mam, and buying the penultimate issue of Your Sinclair, and reading it was closing. Just so many memories.

From then on my Sinclair collection grew, and I finally got a QL and we ended up here.

When you think of all the great machines, spanning 40 years, all the friendships with people all over the world, the companies, the cottage industries, the people who have come and gone, total enthusiasts with a genuine love, all united under the Sinclair banner. Sir Clive lit fires, created passions and set us all on journeys that would change our lives. Total legend.

RIP and Thank you!

I'm so sad, one of the last heroes of my childhood is gone...
Thank you, Sir Clive, for introducing my generation to the magic world of computers and for (still) providing many many amusing and productive hours with your wonderful machines!

RIP Ser Clive.
I will never forget the day I got my first computer ZX81.
My mom bought it in a local shop and brought late in the evening, when she returned from work.
I've never been so excited before, I barely waited the morning, to turn it on.
Spectrum came a little later and brought his irresistible magic, which holds me all this years.
I don't know what a person he was, but I know that without his computers, I would be deprived of a lot of beautiful moments in my life.

R.I.P. Sir Clive

Thanks for having the vision to invent things that brought so much happiness to so many people all around the world.

With the passing of Rick Dickinson in 2018 and now Sir Clive it only leaves Richard Altwasser and Steve Vickers from the core design/development team of the Spectrum.

Sad day indeed yesterday.

I can only echo what many others have said, it's a sad day, but at the same time this thread has inspired me. All these people who took that little box of wonder in their hearts and it changed their lives as a result. There is no greater tribute than that. Sir Clive changed lives.

My personal experience of seeing Sir Clive was not at anything computer related. I saw him on a station platform in Surrey, I want to say Woking but it was the 80s and it could have been Guildford. I didn't go and bother him, instead I just stared a little...

RIP Sir Clive.

Our hero and icon, that touched so many of us during childhood is gone.

I know he surely steered me into computers instead of mechanics, as soon as I got a 48K.
A whole new world opened up, for discovery.

This man changed a big chunk of the world.

RIP Sir Clive.

A day after the fact I'm feeling quite celebratory of Sir Clive's legacy and proud to be such a stupid nerd for it.

Like it's one part of childhood culture that I don't feel like a total spod twat for still liking because it is just so undeniably good.

It's a weird thing to think of and admit but I think those early days with my Speccy have helped shape who I am. Especially as my main interaction with the internet is as someone who reviews games.

Very sad day losing Sir Clive.

Its ironic that he didn't really create the Spectrum to be a games machine, but, as a side product from being well designed, cheap and big-selling, it created a huge games industry and ultimately inspired a whole generation.

A commercial games market that lasted a full 10 years and what we have now, a very large appreciation and preservation society that will last for decades more.

Its very difficult to imagine his equal or that of the humble Speccy.

Back in 1984 I started my venture into the world of IT and computer science.
...Yes, and gaming on home computers, too...

The very first program I wrote produced a bit of beeper music.
The second one was a training program for Latin verb grammer.
Designing, writing (on paper) and doing a dry run (with that paper) produced a program that worked without errors once it was hacked into the Speccy's RAM via those rubber keys.
Thus startet my career as a computer scientistc, project manager and IT consultant.

I owe this ingenious tinkerer a lot!
The ZX Spectrum was the perfect tool back in the day to do the first steps in software development.

Ruhe in Frieden, Sir Clive!

Before I got my Speccy, back in '83, I would have been lucky to get grade 3 in CSE Maths (you needed grade 1 to get anywhere with CSEs). The teachers at my school were useless at explaining things, and made no attempt to encourage me. They just expected you to 'get it right', and if you didn't, they would shout at you. They would tell me I was 'stupid', or I was just 'messing about'. As a result, I was several years behind with my maths. Maths homework was purgatory! I would struggle to even recite my 2 times tables. (Although, ironically, I was top of the class at English - work that one out!)

By learning to program on my Speccy, maths suddenly because accessible, fun and, more importantly, it made sense to me (and it didn't shout at me, when I made a mistake)! I quickly climbed my way up to the 'Set 2' class for maths (for those expected to get a C or a B at 'O' Level, not CSE), and I left school with a grade C in 'O' Level Maths (a passing grade at the time), which I'd thought I'd never achieve, and this enabled me to go to college, pass my A Level in Computer Science, graduate from University, and have a career in IT.

And I owe it all to a little black box of magic called the ZX Spectrum, bought for £130 by my Dad for my birthday (who wanted to get me a BBC Model B, but the cost was prohibitive).

Thank you, Sir Clive, for changing my life for the better!

A lovely article in the Guardian that captures the essence of Sir Clive’s little wonder and its contribution to popular culture:

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021 ... brilliance

So long, and thanks for all the POKEs.

I would just like to add that contrarily to many of us, I took a professional path completely different from IT, yet what I learned from the Spectrum helped me immensely with many things that I do practically every day, including at work. I believe this is testimony to the greatness of Clive Sinclair's vision - bringing technology to the man in the street.

I can safely say that the ZX Spectrum was the most influential device I've ever used in my whole life.

It was also somewhat the start of my career but not how I expected it to be. In secondary school I was convinced I wanted to go to university to study computer science. But after visiting an open day and learning more about those programs in-depth I could not imagine myself going there. Somehow it was all too serious, too dry.

Instead I went to art school to study graphic design and while doing that discovered that my main passion was all about type. And it brought me back to my teenage years when I made my own modified copy of Character Generator (from the Horizons tape) that allowed me to make complete pixel fonts. I enjoyed making 8x8 pixel fonts back then and I still do for fun.

While pursuing a career in type design I reacqainted myself with programming and now both designing and programming are part of my daily life. The ZX Spectrum taught me a lot about how computers work and that experience is still helping me.

Thank you Sir Clive for making that happen.

Very sad.
Like many others, I would not have the career I have now if it wasn't for the ZX81 and later the Spectrum. It changed my life forever.

A little bit of him is in every ZX80, ZX81 and Speccy...

This week I feel like part of my childhood has died. The Spectrum was a big part of my childhood, giving me hours of fun. Yes the games were not as deep and graphically slick as their modern counterparts, but they were magical and wondrous and fuelled my creativity and imagination like nothing else. It felt like no two games were the same and, with every new title, came an exciting (often quirky) new format to play.

As a child I used to look up to Sir Clive with awe, as I was proud that a British guy had come up with this invention and was taking the world by storm. Sir Clive you were a genius and will always be remembered as being the forefather of modern home computing. Thanks for the magic!

clebin wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:40 pm A lovely article in the Guardian that captures the essence of Sir Clive’s little wonder and its contribution to popular culture:

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021 ... brilliance

That really is a well-written article. Obviously written by someone who experienced it all alongside us.

Just think how different the UK game development scene would have been without Uncle Clive's marvel. Would it have existed? Who knows. I'm just very glad to have been there at the start of it all. I feel privileged to have seen it grow from those small beginnings that were so exciting to the behemoth it is today, being the biggest entertainment sector on the planet by a country mile.

And it all started in this country with a little black box, with the most iconic design in computer history, that had tinny sound, few colours and virtually zero hardware support. The guys, many of them not much older than me, produced wonders - their names, including the guys and gals from the magazine's, mean as much to me as the likes of Freddie Mercury, George Best etc.

Vampyre wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:46 pm

clebin wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:40 pm A lovely article in the Guardian that captures the essence of Sir Clive’s little wonder and its contribution to popular culture:

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021 ... brilliance

That really is a well-written article. Obviously written by someone who experienced it all alongside us.

Just think how different the UK game development scene would have been without Uncle Clive's marvel. Would it have existed? Who knows. I'm just very glad to have been there at the start of it all. I feel privileged to have seen it grow from those small beginnings that were so exciting to the behemoth it is today, being the biggest entertainment sector on the planet by a country mile.

And it all started in this country with a little black box, with the most iconic design in computer history, that had tinny sound, few colours and virtually zero hardware support. The guys, many of them not much older than me, produced wonders - their names, including the guys and gals from the magazine's, mean as much to me as the likes of Freddie Mercury, George Best etc.

Do you think the C64 had as big an impact or was the Speccy another one of many quintessentially British inventions?

stupidget wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 4:26 pm

Vampyre wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:46 pm That really is a well-written article. Obviously written by someone who experienced it all alongside us.

Just think how different the UK game development scene would have been without Uncle Clive's marvel. Would it have existed? Who knows. I'm just very glad to have been there at the start of it all. I feel privileged to have seen it grow from those small beginnings that were so exciting to the behemoth it is today, being the biggest entertainment sector on the planet by a country mile.

And it all started in this country with a little black box, with the most iconic design in computer history, that had tinny sound, few colours and virtually zero hardware support. The guys, many of them not much older than me, produced wonders - their names, including the guys and gals from the magazine's, mean as much to me as the likes of Freddie Mercury, George Best etc.

Do you think the C64 had as big an impact or was the Speccy another one of many quintessentially British inventions?

Internationally (or the US really)? Unquestionably the C64, Apple II.

UK? The Speccy by a country mile. Even an internationally/industry renowned videogame magazine like Edge has said for many, many years that the Speccy was more integral by far than any other computer to the early to late 80s gaming scene. And all that talent that began on the Speccy bled into international teams eventually.

J2112Z wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:25 pm Before I got my Speccy, back in '83, I would have been lucky to get grade 3 in CSE Maths (you needed grade 1 to get anywhere with CSEs). The teachers at my school were useless at explaining things, and made no attempt to encourage me. They just expected you to 'get it right', and if you didn't, they would shout at you. They would tell me I was 'stupid', or I was just 'messing about'. As a result, I was several years behind with my maths. Maths homework was purgatory! I would struggle to even recite my 2 times tables. (Although, ironically, I was top of the class at English - work that one out!)

Thank you, Sir Clive, for changing my life for the better!

YES! YES! YES! My experience exactly.

Vampyre wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 5:00 pm

stupidget wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 4:26 pm Do you think the C64 had as big an impact or was the Speccy another one of many quintessentially British inventions?

Internationally (or the US really)? Unquestionably the C64, Apple II.

UK? The Speccy by a country mile. Even an internationally/industry renowned videogame magazine like Edge has said for many, many years that the Speccy was more integral by far than any other computer to the early to late 80s gaming scene. And all that talent that began on the Speccy bled into international teams eventually.

And that Guardian article about Spectrum gaming even has the author disclosing that he was a C64 owner who never owned a Speccy, he just admired the scene from going round to the houses of his Spectrum-owning friends.

Rest in peace, uncle Clive!

PeteProdge wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 5:31 pm

Vampyre wrote: ↑Fri Sep 17, 2021 5:00 pm Internationally (or the US really)? Unquestionably the C64, Apple II.

UK? The Speccy by a country mile. Even an internationally/industry renowned videogame magazine like Edge has said for many, many years that the Speccy was more integral by far than any other computer to the early to late 80s gaming scene. And all that talent that began on the Speccy bled into international teams eventually.

And that Guardian article about Spectrum gaming even has the author disclosing that he was a C64 owner who never owned a Speccy, he just admired the scene from going round to the houses of his Spectrum-owning friends.

I had a C64 owning mate and there was never a my-computers-better-than-yours attitude between us, which is quite remarkable for 11-13 yr olds. I used to love playing his C64 games with their smooth animation, great music etc and he loved playing the quirky Speccy games. We became great friends for a few years from primary school to early secondary that I screwed up in my teens.

One of the reasons I never really diss the C64 as I have some wonderful childhood memories of it. In fact with what's happened Ive been dredging memories up I haven't thought about in decades. Anyone else had that?