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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

We had one of his op-amp home hifi kits from before his computing days. I'm not going to gloss things up here, it was shit. Noisy, bad circuit design, bad instructions.

Delivery was often fraught: he had no supply chain and always went to market before stocks built up.

Sinclair is notorious for overpromising and under delivering. The calculators were highly approximate trig functions, the Sinclair e-car was a joke.

I curse the membrane keyboard to this day.

Smart man. Crap product. A joke of the times from British TV: the Sinclair digital penis: 1 inch long and takes 28 days to come.

I understand how many people bootstrapped into computing from the spectrum btw, a friend made significant money from writing sw for it. Tiny compilers, games.

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> The calculators were highly approximate trig functions

This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one. He did this by using a chip designed for four-function math and using a series of brilliant (if, yes, slow and approximate) hacks to fit arithmetic and trigonometry in the same 320 assembly instructions and three registers. It cuts basically every corner, but my favorite one is that it didn't have room for constants like pi in the ROM. No matter what they did they couldn't fit it in. Eventually, they just printed pi on the case. My impression of Sir Clive is that he always tried to take shortcuts no other company would dare, and while this often flamed out, sometimes he pulled it off and brought a lot of technology to a lot of people.

Here's a fantastic breakdown of how the calculator worked and why it was so impressive:

http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul...

> This is true, but not the whole story. The Sinclair calculator undercut its only competitor at the time by 75%(!), bringing a scientific calculator to a lot of people who otherwise would never have had one.

Same with his computers. At least before the QL. They were affordable for people not on IT salaries.

And for Eastern Europe/Russia, for some values of "affordable".

Looking back, maybe the lesson is that there are some occasions when giving up on quality in order to make a cheaper product is an excellent idea, and 8-bit computers in the early 80s was one of those occasions.

(While, for example, electric road vehicles in the mid 80s was not.)

Yes. Hooking up with Timex (a very stodgy, cheap product company at the time) was a big move. Ultimately commodore did for them, but it took Sinclair to the US.

The Sinclair car would sell well now the market for escooters is established.

If I recall, it was the "micro penis". The 28 days to come was based of then then rather standard 28 day (4 week) delivery time for much of this mail order stuff.

Yeah, some Sinclair products were solid, and others were flakey, but all were cheap and seemed very futuristic at the time.

genuinely appreciate your anecdote, it is interesting to know, but perhaps a bit distasteful in reply to his death.

Yes, perhaps it is. Eulogies and Obituaries are different things. I'm not here to eulogise him, for sure. He was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, a brilliant self promoter. Lord Alan Suger learned a lot of marketing tricks from him.

There's something quintessentially British about promoting tech wizards as heros for making remarkably average product, but making it mass market. Sinclair electronics and Amstrad unquestionably took computing to the masses, in all its buggy variety.

Sinclair's calculator made the V&A design gallery as an icon. It was pretty unusable, but stunningly beautiful. My dad refused to let me get one (he was a compsci professor) and I got a Texas instruments handheld instead.

It really irks me when someone is misrepresented when they drop dead. I’m personally fine with the parent poster’s comment because it’s exactly a fair representation of the guy’s products. They were mostly awful to some degree.

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