Vocal Voices

RIP Clive Sinclair.

He did more to get people into computing than probably any other person with his ZX models. Take his little keyboard thingy, hook it up to a B&W portable TV and a single deck mono cassette and off you went. Along with a magazine called Everyday Electronics you could have a bouncing ball game, ping-pong, bombs dropping from the top of the screen that you had to catch, a sort of etch-a-sketch thing and, of course, a typewriter (word processor). Basic was the language but it was amazing what you could do with it and the ZX Spectrum's 48k of RAM.

I also had one of his little TV's. It was a battery drainer but it still worked up to the digital age.

The other thing about the ZXs, Commodores, Amigas and BBC-Bs was that there was a large group of 'tinkerers' who either added to the main boards or who produced some sorts of 'peripherals' to extend them. Instructions were in EE and you could get the bits form Farnell or Maplin.

We have come a long way in a little over 40 years.

A bit too techy for the crochetters and knitters - get the iron out, and put the washer on.

He did change your world, though.

Yes I had a Spectrum back in the day. Wasn't the keyboard sort of flexible rubber, from memory? It was innovative, fun, Basic was reasonably easy to master considering we were all starting from scratch, and it set me up for when the big Commodore machines arrived in the office environment in due course.

I had one of his calculators. Made my life significantly better. More, 3 years before, the school had paid £100 each for 4 function calculators. I bought a scientific one out of my earnings pushing trollies at Tesco.

Man on a mission and made our world a very different place. If only for the others who tried to keep up and overtake him.

Wonderful time.

I was leaving the RAF, preparing to get married, and buying a house, so in about 1985-6 the Spectrum went in a box and never came back out.

Our first home computer (1992 ish) was a DAN: 1MB RAM (4 x 256k) upgradeable to 2MB; graphics card; sound card; US-Robotics 96k modem for dial-up; wired keyboard and mouse and various peripheral ports. I think the HDD was about 32MB, but don't quote me on that - I do know it wasn't big. It ran on Windows 3.11 with Windows for Workgroups embedded in.

Hooked up to a printer (almost as costly as the computer) you could run a small business just on the installed programs. We did - a convenience, newsagents and off licence.

If someone today offered to sell you a phone with that sort of spec you would laugh them out of town.

Then there were the computer fairs where you could buy hardware to upgrade, and OEM software such as office, sound and graphics suites. Where did my life go!?