Sir Clive Sinclair dies at 81

Home computing pioneer leaves a legacy of groundbreaking inventions

Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the pocket calculator and pioneer of home computing with the hugely popular ZX Spectrum devices has died at the age of 81.

His daughter Belinda told The Guardian the inventor and entrepreneur had passed away after a long battle with cancer.

For decades, Sir Clive's name has been synonymous with the UK electronics and computing industry.

In 1972 his company Sinclair Radionics release the world's first slimline pocket calculator, the Sinclair Executive, but it was in the 1980s that he became a household name with the ZX series of home computers, which were significantly more affordable than anything else on the market and were snapped up in the millions by the burgeoning ranks of enthusiasts, gamers and hobbyists.

The ZX80, introduced in 1980, which came in kit form (£79.95) or assembled (£99.95), was immediately popular due to its simplicity and low price, but the follow up, the ZX81 was even more successful, selling over 1.5 million units, including in the US under the Timex brand.

The ZX81 is credited with starting the careers of many successful IT professionals and games designers. Many thousands of games were produced for the device, many of which are still remembered and played today by nostalgic fans. Some of these have even been re-architected to work on modern mobile devices.

Born in Surrey in 1940, Clive excelled at maths as a boy, leaving school at 18 to sell electronics kits by mail order. He founded Sinclair Radionics in 1961, and also worked as an editor for a technical magazine. Always fascinated by the promise of simplification and miniaturisation, he worked on many electronics products and businesses ideas before finally finding huge commercial success with the ZX Spectrum. He was knighted in 1983.

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Sir Clive never stopped inventing, according to his daughter, but of course not all of his inventions were successful and he occasionally misjudged the market, most famously with the electric trike, the Sinclair C5, but the mini-TV, the Sinclair TV80 was another invention that was perhaps ahead of its time.

In the late 1990s he expressed an enthusiasm for Linux, seeing it as a way to reduce the cost of home computing.

"I think the situation is frightening. The manufacturers should be forced to unbundle. People shouldn't be obliged to pay for having Microsoft software. There ought to be a choice - one price for Microsoft and one price for Linux," he told Computing.

In later years, he was extremely critical about the way coding was taught in schools.

"We've certainly gone backwards," he told Computing in 2016. "In the 1980s, Britain was the world leader in coding for children, and the government should have put computing on the school syllabus then, not wait decades to do it.

"I feel very sad that it happened that way. We could now still be a world leader, but many other countries have embraced coding and IT in their education systems considerably more than we have done."

Famously, Sir Clive rarely used his own inventions, preferring a slide rule to a calculator and telling the BBC in 2013 that he didn't like computers.

"I don't like distraction," he explained. "If I had a computer, I'd start thinking I could change this and that, and I don't want to. My wife very kindly looks after that for me."

Sir Clive Sinclair is survived by three children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.