Shredding him.
His business acumen was nil and his cost cutting nailed shut the coffin of every venture he started.
I don’t get the hero worship.
His business acumen was nil and his cost cutting nailed shut the coffin of every venture he started.
I don’t get the hero worship.
There's definitely a time for robust debate about his legacy and potential flaws, but that time and place should not be this thread.
I love the positive remembrances here. I also appreciate the full picture, like the joke about the "Sinclair digital penis" in another thread.
Sinclair did well for himself & his family. He did a lot of good in the world, from the people he introduced to tech.
Neither he nor his legacy are harmed in the slightest with an honest recounting. Instead, the memory is improved with realistic texture.
I don't know (and I know very little about him, tbh), but I was raised to not speak ill of the dead, and it's stuck.
He made a very valuable contribution to the industry however.
People have rose tinted glasses about it but the reality was products not turning up, not shipping, not working and a sour taste for many against technology.
He even bought faulty RAM in which was discarded for the Spectrums and sold the ones that booted.
The only reason it worked out for a lot of people is we have pretty strong consumer protection laws here!
Such cost cutting made it affordable to a large number of people - had it costed a couple of time more it could be a hard sell for my Eastern European parents. Fortunately, that didn't happen and now, 40 years later, I have a nice career and I'm still enjoying dealing with computers just as when I was a kid with ZX Spectrum.
My father had a nice business for a few years doing adhoc repairs and then started his own PC import business in the end with the cash he earned fixing people’s stuff. That was a world of difference.
Agree with your comments about affordability. As you say about Eastern Europe, even the clones were more expensive I understand.
Though this shop just did it for profit margin. Sinclair did it to make computers available to the masses.
Yes, it's very common. Even companies like Intel sometimes test a CPU at umpteen GHz, then retest the ones that fail at umpteen/2 GHz and sell them at a lower price if they work reliably at the lower speed.
People can have great legacies in spite of their flaws. This is true for all of our heroes.
It doesn't matter everything else didn't work out, I'd be pretty damn happy with that legacy.
When you look at the microscopic view of owning one computer from him that worked it does somewhat rose tint the overall view of things which was not good.
There were lots of home computers available with proper keyboards. As a kid I couldn't afford any of them.
That horrible keyboard did me just fine.
sure it would have happened anyway, but he definately made it happen earlier
almost 100% of the people who work in IT (in the UK) over a certain age had one of his affordable computers
I know which I'd want to be my legacy.