Back in the day, my Dad bought me a Cambridge Scientific calculator for school, a Sinclair Black Watch, and a ZX81. Having also recently lost my Dad to cancer, I would like to pass my sympathies and condolences to Sir Clive's family and friends.
Sir Clive wasn't the best businessman and made some poor decisions, but cheating people or fraud were never his aim. He just wanted to fund his ideas and see if they worked, as all inventors do. Several of them didn't, including the C5 that everyone bangs on about, but the calculators, ZX81, and Spectrum were great successes and made him his fortune.
As an inventor he inspired a great many people and many (myself included) used his creations to learn, develop, and grow. Those of us who used his creations extensively, learned to work around or fix the defects. My ZX81 ended up with a decent keyboard, 64kB Ram soldered to the motherboard, and a decent quality cassette recorder made saving and loading programs much less fraught. My Dads QL ended up with disk drives and was used for several years. I have now carved out a career fixing things (software support in the Cancer treatment field) and I owe much of that to Sir Clive and to my Dad encouraging me in the fields of electronics, radio, and computing.
Would there have been more programmers if Sir Clives creations had been perfect? Maybe, but the ZX80/ZX81/Spectrum were so cheap that that alone exposed more people to computing than any other computers did. I also used Apple 2e, early IBM PCs, Commodore PETs and 64s at school and various friends houses but as a family we could not afford any of those. The BBC model B came along after I'd finished school and even that was 5 times the price of the kit form ZX81.
RIP Sir Clive, and thanks for all the inventions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
