I was gifted the 48K when I was 6 yrs old - it changed my life. I am here because Sir Sinclair built a machine whose setup instructions said:
Now that you have set up the computer, you will want to use it. The rest of this
booklet tells you how to do that; but in your impatience you will probably already
have started pressing the keys on the keyboard, and discovered that this removes
the copyright message. This is good; _you cannot harm the computer in this way._
Be bold. Experiment. If you get stuck, remember that you can always reset the
computer to the original picture with the copyright message by taking out the '9V
DC IN' plug and putting it back again. This should be the last resort because you
lose all the information in the computer.
"You cannot harm the computer in this way."
That single sentence started a life long journey. I doubt I would have been bold enough at that age to mess around with one of our most valuable possessions.
My story is so similar to yours (and I’m sure many others).
Santa brought my house a Spectrum 48k Lo Profile when I was a kid with a cool KnightRider style keyboard.
Over the years I haven’t seen it talked about much if at all, so I always assumed it was a fairly niche model. After hearing about Sir Clive, I looked it up to find out how many sold and was surprised to learn that it never actually existed as a standalone device.
My dad must have bought the add-on kit, and an 81, and quietly upgraded it and just never told us kids. I’m gonna call him when I’m done typing this.
All I ever wanted to do on it was transcribe the programs from my magazines and try to learn how to make something of my own someday. I’m not sure what I’d be doing now if he had just brought home an Atari, but I almost certainly wouldn’t be in tech.
Cheers, Clive. I hope I see you down the road when the last of my cyan and red bars have run out.
FYI since I've seen this mistake a few times in this discussion: Sir Clive or Sir Clive Sinclair. "Sir" and "Dame" are attached to the given name, never the surname. I don't know why it's different from other titles, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to explain, just states the rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir
Mine was smuggled into the country due to currency crises and import/export controls. I owe thanks to my mother for arranging that so that I could graduate from writing programs using paper and pencil to using an actual computer.
Thank you Psion's Horizons cassette for teaching me about computer architecture. Thank you Toni Baker for teaching me Z80 assembly so I could program x86 with no problem.
But, thank you Sir Clive, above all, for making such an affordable and approachable computer. What I learned on the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum is still with me.
> "You cannot harm the computer in this way. Be bold."
What an empathetic, caring, tactful way to teach tech to kids. The whole instruction is like that, a really well composed message. No hypes or overpowering, just guiding children to quiet explorations.
It definitively the gateway drug that hook me into computer.
Bought $6 book on how to program Sinclair computer and copy the Basic Code from the book into that computer and record that program into audio cassette tape and output to analog TV.
Now I working daily with systems that have 128 cores, 256 threads, 256-768MB of L3 cache memory, 1TB DDR+ 8xGPUs each with 32GB of HBM.
I still think I got more "High/Rush" from the sinclair 1000 37 years ago than the latest 128C/256T CPU. Now is a job, back than it was an adventure, exploration to whole new world!
Same here, but it also reminds me, the first programming lesson in school (not on a Spectrum but on an IBM PC), our teacher told us "there's nothing you can do with code that will harm the computer in any way" (these computers did not have a hard drive so you could not wipe anything).
This immediately set us on a quest to find ways to prove him wrong - the basis of hacker thinking. Not that we did find anything with our limited knowledge but it was a nice thought exercise (our best bet was to create a program that constantly switches between graphics mode and text mode. The monitor would make a clicking sound when this happened, so we figured if we do this enough times we'll probably burn some circuit, but we never tried it).
This seems quite likely to have been inspired by some of the intro documentation for the Apple ][, apparently written by Jef Raskin. Short comment about it from a few years ago:
Dad bought a ZX Spectrum. I was very curious and wanted to play with it. Dad gave me the huge manual and told me to study that first. I didn't. Instead i tried every key and this started my huge computer adventure that will probably only end when i'm dead.
I've long suspected that Star Trek trained people to be fearful of pressing the wrong key, as it would always send a huge electric shock through the hapless keyboardist and send him flying across the bridge.
I've said before on HN that fear of what may happen stops many people from experimenting with computers, coupled with locking everything down and hiding the non-consumer-friendly aspects out of site.
Starting with a blinking cursor, the worst you could do was format a floppy disk with your work on it - or blow a fuse because you were tinkering with the internals.
It's fascinating how empowering knowing just how safe you are can be.
I used nearly this exact phrase the other day with someone who appeared fearful of a dashboard tool and once they realised they could basically do no harm whatsoever it freed them up to experiment and learn.
I grew up with a PC and that already wasn't as straightforward; we were Told in no uncertain terms that we should make sure to use the 'shut down' option in the menu or else Bad Things would happen (= disk parking). And changes in the system were permanent, so I never really experimented with the computer until my mid-to-late teens when I went to school for computer stuff - my dad was the expert until then.
I love that attitude and I totally agree with the sentiment. Just experimenting is how you learn best.
Especially in those days it was a unique sentiment. Most devices came with long instruction manuals which people would actually read, and even schematics. Until the home computer came, only educated professionals were allowed to go near computers. I think Steven Levy called them the IBM high priests in his book "Hackers". It's old but a good read.
Now nobody reads the couple of pages that come with their new phone. Good.
I try to keep this in mind with my kids. I try to not worry too much about them breaking stuff, and where possible put them in situations where they can experiment and try stuff without risk of screwing something up. Although I also like to repair stuff, and I think there's something nice about them breaking it and then us fixing it.
It's why things like the RPi and the Micro-bit are so cool for education, you can experiment with them and if it all goes wrong just reset them and carry on.
However I'm also concious that I and my kids are lucky to be able to absorb any financial/time cost from them breaking something. Not everyone can.
It was easily the most popular home computer in the UK at that time, though I imagine a large number of people started with the BBC - via the school integration.
I still have my manuals, and recently paid for a print of the keyboard to hang on my wall. (I almost bought a dead 48K model, and framed it, but getting a poster/print was slightly cheaper.)
I had a similar experience with a ZX-81 (and a TS-2000). What's interesting related to your "You cannot harm the computer in this way" quote is that I see that experimentation embodied in my kids (who grew up with a PC in the house) but also the anti-pattern in my mother and my in-laws who clearly didn't have a computer in the house until middle-age (note that I left my dad our of this category as he was an EE building embedded systems for instrumentation for much of his career).
I'm curious how a generation of us grew up curious what a computing machine could do, just because it had all those fancy keys to press. They pushed us into creating stuff.
But these days, we have smartphones with a hundred times more computing power, but it fails to trigger any creative curiosity into kids these days.
Maybe I'm wrong, but is there any co-relation with how many ways the device could interact with the operator vs the level of creative curiosity it triggers?
The Spectrum and ZX81 are (rightly) the computers for which Clive Sinclair is remembered. But it was his unsuccessful follow-up, the QL, which inspired a certain Linus Torvalds to write Linux:
Whilst my first programs was on the acorn atom, Zx80 and zx81
the zx spectrum hold a special place in my memory because the manual was fantasic - I learnt almost everything from it.
and then progressed on to typing the monterous (using the aweful rubber keys) blocks of programs from magazines - THEN I learnt how to debug and rewrite the games that I'd just typed in from the magazines, because they never worked first time.
Oh wow, it turns out the QL hardware was reused in the ICL One Per Desk. We had one at home growing up (for some reason?!). Kind of funny to read that it's greatest success was in networking hundreds of bingo halls together across the UK.
My Dad had a QL at home and even had a small business selling software for it back in the day. It was a bit of a daunting machine for me as a child (I got more mileage out of the BBC Micro), but I have fond memories of playing around with it, and loading games off of microdrives.
I have memories of my father using a QL. also, he was very lucky as he got a late version with many bugs fixed.
He like it too, that when got a IBM PC compatible with a 8086, he thought that the QL was better.
Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro.
Very sad. For American readers it may be difficult to explain quite how much Sir Clive and his products shaped tech and a large number of British engineers. So many of us found a love of programming from Sir Clive's computers.
The beautiful thing about Sir Clive's products (particularly the ZX Spectrum) was that they were cheap. Basically a Zilog Z80, a ROM, RAM, membrane keyboard, and a single asic. No sound chip, no video chip, no disk drive, bring your own tape deck (connected directly to Z80 IO pins).
By designing for cost Sinclair Research were able to make a home computer that working class families could afford. Rather than being an enthusiast purchase, kids could bug their parents for one - and millions did. Thousands of these kids turned their programming experiments into businesses and careers.
RIP. Many a programming career, including mine, was started thanks to Sir Clive. There was a sense of wonder and awe around those machines that is no where to be found these days, even though we have so much power computational power. Something was lost.
Sir Clive Sinclair was a hero of mine for realizing that computing could be for children of poorer families. The Apple II is lauded for the classroom, but it was way too expensive for my family. Without people like Sir Sinclair, I and many other would have never been able to enter this profession we so love.
Apple gets the credit, but it was Sir Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, and TI that raised a generation in computing.
Our first computer was БАЙТ - Belarussian clone of ZX Spectrum. It was mid to late 90s and it was already super obsolete at the time, but every time we took it out and connected to TV it filled me with a sense of wonder and unknown that started my fascination with electronics and programming. What an amazing impact Sir Clive had on so many lives.
Even my nickname on this very website comes from my favourite game I played on Spectrum when I was a kid. Now I'm a game developer myself.
The ZX Spectrum was my first computer. So many good moments with it... It's hard to describe it for the current generation - if you were there, you know what I mean.
Sir Clive Sinclair had an enormous impact on my life and career. Today is a sad day for me :(
Oh dear. My parents smuggled (!) a ZX Spectrum in 1985 into Hungary and they knew they will do it and while they were on their tour to Western Germany I was at a summer daytime camp at the nearby community center where we learned BASIC on them. And , of course , played games , mostly Horace And The Spiders :) I was ten.
Fast forward two decades and I was contributing to Drupal core (first core commit 17 years ago was https://i.imgur.com/ZGemjVc.png although Dries forgot to credit me, boo :) ) and another five years later I was working on a Top 100 website.
One of the legacies from Sinclair's era is the profound understanding of the power of young hobbyists working on cheap computers, and how that leads to a workforce trained in STEM. This idea directly inspired the development of the Raspberry Pi which has been beyond wildly successful and may be the most popular line of British computers in history.
I also owe a lot to Sir Clive. At 13 years old in 1981, My friends father bought a ZX80 for him. Some days after, I was at his home and he explained, what he had figured out about it. The same evening at home, I wrote my first program on paper (a Russian roulette game, I think). I couldn't wait until the next day, when I came home to him again, to see if my program would work. After some work we got it working :-) and I was hooked. I began buying the magazines "Your Computer" and "Byte", and even though English was a foreign language, I managed to understand some of it. A few months later, on my birthday I got my own ZX81, and after that an Acorn Atom, and then an Acorn Electron, and then a PC clone, and then... Still working with programming, now in data science :-)
Uh oh. Soviet ZX spectrum clone was my first computer, and the first I ever wrote a program on using a built-in basic at an age of 10. This was a magnificent device that brought me a lot of joy. Rest In Peace, Sir Clive.
Now, I'll go play some Manic Miner or Nether Earth in your honor.
We had one of his op-amp home hifi kits from before his computing days. I'm not going to gloss things up here, it was shit. Noisy, bad circuit design, bad instructions.
Delivery was often fraught: he had no supply chain and always went to market before stocks built up.
Sinclair is notorious for overpromising and under delivering. The calculators were highly approximate trig functions, the Sinclair e-car was a joke.
I curse the membrane keyboard to this day.
Smart man. Crap product. A joke of the times from British TV: the Sinclair digital penis: 1 inch long and takes 28 days to come.
I understand how many people bootstrapped into computing from the spectrum btw, a friend made significant money from writing sw for it. Tiny compilers, games.
The ZX Spectrum+ I grew up with still works (only had to replace the keyboard membrane). What an amazing piece of tech. I have fond memories of it, and I also keep my collection of Microhobby Magazine [1], which is effectively how my career started.
I had some earlier contact with a ZX81 but I don't remember much of it - really only playing 3D Monster Maze [2], a very early ancestor of 3D shooters.
The ZX Spectrum+ and the ZX81 are so meaningful to me, you could argue they're the focus of my book's dedication [3]. Would I be where I am today, would I be who I am today, if back in the day it wasn't as easy as PLOT 6,5?
For its time and price vs. performance, the Spectrum might have been the best personal computer ever made. It was my first machine, and I loved it so much.
Grew up in a house surrounded by many wonderful machines, but by far the most beautiful and alluring were the Spectrums. My dad wrote some reasonably popular books on these things in the 80s which pretty much set me on my way:
[+] [-] ghoul2|4 years ago|reply
I was gifted the 48K when I was 6 yrs old - it changed my life. I am here because Sir Sinclair built a machine whose setup instructions said:
Now that you have set up the computer, you will want to use it. The rest of this booklet tells you how to do that; but in your impatience you will probably already have started pressing the keys on the keyboard, and discovered that this removes the copyright message. This is good; _you cannot harm the computer in this way._ Be bold. Experiment. If you get stuck, remember that you can always reset the computer to the original picture with the copyright message by taking out the '9V DC IN' plug and putting it back again. This should be the last resort because you lose all the information in the computer.
"You cannot harm the computer in this way."
That single sentence started a life long journey. I doubt I would have been bold enough at that age to mess around with one of our most valuable possessions.
[+] [-] headmelted|4 years ago|reply
Santa brought my house a Spectrum 48k Lo Profile when I was a kid with a cool KnightRider style keyboard.
Over the years I haven’t seen it talked about much if at all, so I always assumed it was a fairly niche model. After hearing about Sir Clive, I looked it up to find out how many sold and was surprised to learn that it never actually existed as a standalone device.
My dad must have bought the add-on kit, and an 81, and quietly upgraded it and just never told us kids. I’m gonna call him when I’m done typing this.
All I ever wanted to do on it was transcribe the programs from my magazines and try to learn how to make something of my own someday. I’m not sure what I’d be doing now if he had just brought home an Atari, but I almost certainly wouldn’t be in tech.
Cheers, Clive. I hope I see you down the road when the last of my cyan and red bars have run out.
For anyone interested:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/anachrocomputer/2671208818
[+] [-] mkl|4 years ago|reply
FYI since I've seen this mistake a few times in this discussion: Sir Clive or Sir Clive Sinclair. "Sir" and "Dame" are attached to the given name, never the surname. I don't know why it's different from other titles, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to explain, just states the rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir
[+] [-] nanis|4 years ago|reply
Thank you Psion's Horizons cassette for teaching me about computer architecture. Thank you Toni Baker for teaching me Z80 assembly so I could program x86 with no problem.
But, thank you Sir Clive, above all, for making such an affordable and approachable computer. What I learned on the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum is still with me.
[+] [-] marttt|4 years ago|reply
What an empathetic, caring, tactful way to teach tech to kids. The whole instruction is like that, a really well composed message. No hypes or overpowering, just guiding children to quiet explorations.
[+] [-] srcmap|4 years ago|reply
It definitively the gateway drug that hook me into computer.
Bought $6 book on how to program Sinclair computer and copy the Basic Code from the book into that computer and record that program into audio cassette tape and output to analog TV.
Now I working daily with systems that have 128 cores, 256 threads, 256-768MB of L3 cache memory, 1TB DDR+ 8xGPUs each with 32GB of HBM.
I still think I got more "High/Rush" from the sinclair 1000 37 years ago than the latest 128C/256T CPU. Now is a job, back than it was an adventure, exploration to whole new world!
[+] [-] dvirsky|4 years ago|reply
This immediately set us on a quest to find ways to prove him wrong - the basis of hacker thinking. Not that we did find anything with our limited knowledge but it was a nice thought exercise (our best bet was to create a program that constantly switches between graphics mode and text mode. The monitor would make a clicking sound when this happened, so we figured if we do this enough times we'll probably burn some circuit, but we never tried it).
[+] [-] firecall|4 years ago|reply
Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Model B and so on!
It was glorious!
It was so exciting as a kid!
Going to each of them and writing 3 lines of basic to print my name infinitely!
A truely golden age of discovery!
[+] [-] pvg|4 years ago|reply
This seems quite likely to have been inspired by some of the intro documentation for the Apple ][, apparently written by Jef Raskin. Short comment about it from a few years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077364
[+] [-] b3lvedere|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
I've long suspected that Star Trek trained people to be fearful of pressing the wrong key, as it would always send a huge electric shock through the hapless keyboardist and send him flying across the bridge.
[+] [-] dwd|4 years ago|reply
I've said before on HN that fear of what may happen stops many people from experimenting with computers, coupled with locking everything down and hiding the non-consumer-friendly aspects out of site.
Starting with a blinking cursor, the worst you could do was format a floppy disk with your work on it - or blow a fuse because you were tinkering with the internals.
[+] [-] nmstoker|4 years ago|reply
I used nearly this exact phrase the other day with someone who appeared fearful of a dashboard tool and once they realised they could basically do no harm whatsoever it freed them up to experiment and learn.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pistoriusp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|4 years ago|reply
Especially in those days it was a unique sentiment. Most devices came with long instruction manuals which people would actually read, and even schematics. Until the home computer came, only educated professionals were allowed to go near computers. I think Steven Levy called them the IBM high priests in his book "Hackers". It's old but a good read.
Now nobody reads the couple of pages that come with their new phone. Good.
[+] [-] noneeeed|4 years ago|reply
It's why things like the RPi and the Micro-bit are so cool for education, you can experiment with them and if it all goes wrong just reset them and carry on.
However I'm also concious that I and my kids are lucky to be able to absorb any financial/time cost from them breaking something. Not everyone can.
[+] [-] stevekemp|4 years ago|reply
https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
It was easily the most popular home computer in the UK at that time, though I imagine a large number of people started with the BBC - via the school integration.
I still have my manuals, and recently paid for a print of the keyboard to hang on my wall. (I almost bought a dead 48K model, and framed it, but getting a poster/print was slightly cheaper.)
[+] [-] smoyer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lewisjoe|4 years ago|reply
But these days, we have smartphones with a hundred times more computing power, but it fails to trigger any creative curiosity into kids these days.
Maybe I'm wrong, but is there any co-relation with how many ways the device could interact with the operator vs the level of creative curiosity it triggers?
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Legacy
[+] [-] 123pie123|4 years ago|reply
the zx spectrum hold a special place in my memory because the manual was fantasic - I learnt almost everything from it.
and then progressed on to typing the monterous (using the aweful rubber keys) blocks of programs from magazines - THEN I learnt how to debug and rewrite the games that I'd just typed in from the magazines, because they never worked first time.
but it felt like I was living in the future
Thanks Clive - RIP
[+] [-] afavour|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk
[+] [-] xkeysc0re|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mzs|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/as6hSAqJ_g4
[+] [-] jhallenworld|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/
[+] [-] thinkingemote|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foldr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zardoz84|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ukd1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sedatk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dboreham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmx|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (1h24m)
Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro.
(Sinclair didn't exactly like it though.)
[+] [-] midnightclubbed|4 years ago|reply
The beautiful thing about Sir Clive's products (particularly the ZX Spectrum) was that they were cheap. Basically a Zilog Z80, a ROM, RAM, membrane keyboard, and a single asic. No sound chip, no video chip, no disk drive, bring your own tape deck (connected directly to Z80 IO pins).
By designing for cost Sinclair Research were able to make a home computer that working class families could afford. Rather than being an enthusiast purchase, kids could bug their parents for one - and millions did. Thousands of these kids turned their programming experiments into businesses and careers.
[+] [-] zarkov99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|4 years ago|reply
Apple gets the credit, but it was Sir Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, and TI that raised a generation in computing.
Rest well great man.
[+] [-] terramex|4 years ago|reply
Even my nickname on this very website comes from my favourite game I played on Spectrum when I was a kid. Now I'm a game developer myself.
[+] [-] danielrpa|4 years ago|reply
Sir Clive Sinclair had an enormous impact on my life and career. Today is a sad day for me :(
[+] [-] chx|4 years ago|reply
Fast forward two decades and I was contributing to Drupal core (first core commit 17 years ago was https://i.imgur.com/ZGemjVc.png although Dries forgot to credit me, boo :) ) and another five years later I was working on a Top 100 website.
Thanks Sir Sinclair.
[+] [-] bane|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jensgk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|4 years ago|reply
Now, I'll go play some Manic Miner or Nether Earth in your honor.
[+] [-] sgt101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|4 years ago|reply
Delivery was often fraught: he had no supply chain and always went to market before stocks built up.
Sinclair is notorious for overpromising and under delivering. The calculators were highly approximate trig functions, the Sinclair e-car was a joke.
I curse the membrane keyboard to this day.
Smart man. Crap product. A joke of the times from British TV: the Sinclair digital penis: 1 inch long and takes 28 days to come.
I understand how many people bootstrapped into computing from the spectrum btw, a friend made significant money from writing sw for it. Tiny compilers, games.
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
Those were wild little toys; and people stretched them beyond all reason.
[+] [-] ggambetta|4 years ago|reply
I had some earlier contact with a ZX81 but I don't remember much of it - really only playing 3D Monster Maze [2], a very early ancestor of 3D shooters.
The ZX Spectrum+ and the ZX81 are so meaningful to me, you could argue they're the focus of my book's dedication [3]. Would I be where I am today, would I be who I am today, if back in the day it wasn't as easy as PLOT 6,5?
Rest in peace, Sir Clive.
[1] https://microhobby.speccy.cz/mhforever/numero001.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze [3] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/d...
[+] [-] dvirsky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thom|4 years ago|reply
https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/books/working-sinclair-q...
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000420/Book/The_Worki...
[+] [-] FartyMcFarter|4 years ago|reply
The sense of wonder I got as a kid by playing games and learning how to program on his machines made for amazing life-shaping experiences.