For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By eltonioni
#1871086
An amazing man. If he'd been in California in his heyday ( or maybe Texas at the time) he'd have had Elon Musk as his student today. We're getting much better here at tech investment but it's blimmin slow and it's like pulling teeth to get investors to take on similar risk / reward profiles. Hopefully he had a good time doing things he enjoyed.
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By StratoTramp
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1871097
StratoTramp wrote:More of an Acorn man myself (read child) but yes seriously clever cookie. I think Acorn / Sinclair / RISC are all great examples of UK innovation punching above it's weight.

People still buy originals and replicas of the various spectrums today. Like the red display on the Sinclair Cambridge. Words never said before in history - it was a very stylish calculator. :lol: Guess a bit like apple these days with from as well as function considered. 8)


At the risk of sounding like my dad did... the 80's is my chance for nostalgia, being a mid 80's kid. Despite still being in the cold war there was something hopeful and high tech about it. Rose tinted glasses :lol: But I love it!



Ok it is sped up and complete BS, but the low flying is nuts.

How accurate do we think the BBC documentary "Micro Men" was about the rivalry?, maybe a good point for them to air it again. Adding to the above. Must admit my friends had them but I was BBCB > Acorn A3010 (green F keys) > IBM 486

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92

I passed a computer science A-Level when I was 13, but then burnt out and went into mechanical engineering. But interest in technology stems from dad bringing these personal computers home that you could program (and putting Jam toast in the rented VCR... so I could watch the repair man take it apart & learn).
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By Sir Morley Steven
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1871105
My first Sinclair was the 2x Z 30 amps and the Stereo preamp sold as a kit from a shop in Edgware Road along with an ali box and everything else you needed for a pretty good quality hifi amp.
By Colonel Panic
#1871113
Propwash wrote:I have always thought that Clive Sinclair was a good example of how this country tends to let itself down. It is a world leader in innovation but so often it is foreign countries and their corporations that exploit the inventions/discoveries because of an apparent lack of faith here that prevents proper backing and funding.

True, but WRT Sinclair I always felt that it was a travesty selling out to the arch peddler of tat, Alan M Sugar Trading, otherwise know as AMSTRAD. A sad day that was...
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By FlightDek
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1871139
I also had a ZX81 in my youth and believe or not I had a flight sim for it. Graphics were basically non-existent and it could only accept 1 key press every 9 seconds. It then took the 9 seconds to work out the effect of this key press before accepting the next input. Not exactly in MSFS's league but it seemed great at the time

Ah, happy days :thumright:
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By jaycee58
#1871142
StratoTramp wrote:How accurate do we think the BBC documentary "Micro Men" was about the rivalry?, maybe a good point for them to air it again. Adding to the above. Must admit my friends had them but I was BBCB > Acorn A3010 (green F keys) > IBM 486


I only recently discovered that Sinclair is played by Alexander Armstrong of Pointless! The entire programme is on YouTube. It's definitely worth watching again. And Sinclair really did have a fight in the pub with Chris Curry!
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By Rob P
#1871149
FlightDek wrote:I also had a ZX81 in my youth and believe or not I had a flight sim for it.


I had MSFS1 for my TRS80 clone.

Rob P
By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1871164
In the UK we have proud history of innovators, but as the 20th century wore on fewer and fewer attracted investment to take their ideas into volume production and in most cases the Americans took the ideas and made the money. I've never really understood why, because it was never a problem in the 19th century......
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By eltonioni
#1871175
I suspect what happens is that 'people with money' (ie investors) get to like having it once they have lots of it and so they tend to lean into safe investments. Even VC's rarely use their own money now, it's fractions of larger funds which have risk spread.

The 17th / 18th / 19th Centuries are riven with massive investment failures. Toll roads, canals, railways and shipping not being the least of them. And tulips!

If you disagree, I have an airport deal for investment, who's up for it?
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By stevelup
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1871180
Colonel Panic wrote:WRT Sinclair I always felt that it was a travesty selling out to the arch peddler of tat, Alan M Sugar Trading, otherwise know as AMSTRAD. A sad day that was...


To be fair, the Amstrad built Spectrums were much better than the Sinclair ones - proper keyboards, more connectivity, built in storage.

Sinclair's next project, the Z88 was a nice device - we had them at school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88
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By kanga
#1871182
eltonioni wrote:I suspect what happens is that 'people with money' (ie investors) get to like having it once they have lots of it and so they tend to lean into safe investments...


Also, during WW2 and until '80s, many innovative technologies which were eventually world-leading but which started small (often under WW2 or Cold War military requirements) started in UK governmental R&D centres. These were not only the military RDEs (eg RSRE, A&AEE, ..), but also, for instance, the GPO and NCB research centres. Some of these innovations were, of course, failures, sometimes expensive ones, and were publicly derided; but others were great successes, with their 'public sector' origins quietly forgotten by those who lauded them. But it was the fact that 'government had money' and Ministers and officials were prepared to spend some of it on 'experiments which might not work', which had got such projects 'off the ground' (sometimes literally). Oh, and none of the innovators in the public sector got rich off the ones which worked (the few individual ex gratia payments were pretty small), but the Treasury sometimes did very well indeed out of the licensed IP.

Then, in '80s, there were the privatisations, outsourcings, cheap sale of the IP often to foreign investors ..
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By kanga
#1871183
stevelup wrote:.., the Amstrad built Spectrums were much better than the Sinclair ones - ..


I do not recall a Sinclair product in the family in that era. We had a contemporary TI99-4A (with attached dot-matrix printer for word processing!) in the US in the early '80s, and got an Amstrad 6128 (ambitiously high-spec, the cheaper 464 being much the better seller at the time) on return to UK. The BBC Acorn was just starting to be marketed (in stores, and pitched to Elementary school boards, with limited success) in the US as we left, and the associated 'programming programmes for children' shown on PBS. All our children were coding at Primary age (somewhat flummoxing their first IT teachers at Secondary :wink: ), and for two of them it has been an essential part of all their employments.

My first coding was on a mainframe (IBM 360, Fortran IV, compiler and link assembler, internal and external storage provided) in the late '60s, which rather lessened the attractions of coding Basic on a micro; but I did that, too, for a while.

This in no way lessens my admiration for Sinclair, of course; just sharing the personal nostalgia drift :oops: