So, Sir Clive Sinclair has predicted that we’ll all be in flying cars in a few years time? You’ve got to love this man.
Clive is something of a legend. Having got off to a good start by popularising the pocket calculator and cheap, cheap home computers, things didn’t really go as planned.
It’s a sad thing to admit; but I have a great personal affection for this beardy weirdy. Sir Clive developed the first Microcomputer I ever owned; the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3. A wonderful piece of engineering. The disk drive of the +3 used to make noises akin to angry bee trying to escape from inside a frog, and the 290 by 190 screen used to bleed colours like a punctured Chameleon. The only game that looked right on the spectrum was ‘Rainbow Island’; and that was only because it was meant to look like a mess.
Following Clive’s success with the electric car, surely we should all be buying shares in the polar opposite of the flying car. Subterranean motorbikes, perhaps, or the concept of staying at home and having a nice cup of tea.
4 July, 2008 at 1:54 pm |
I was reading the “Observer book of inventions” that came free with the paper, and was amused to see that in the list of ‘10 worst inventions of all time’ (as voted for in the 2007 BBC Focus poll) that the Sinclair C5 electric car took joint place with nuclear power. My claim to fame is that I’ve actually ridden/driven one of them (the cars, not nuclear power) and it was a terrifyingly exciting experience! Poor old Clive.
15 October, 2009 at 3:58 am |
No he didn’t design your computer. The +3 is an amstrad computer. The ZX Spectrum 128 was the last one of the sinclair spectrums, from that point on the spectrum brand name was bought by amstrad.