Comment by whobre
5 hours ago
Ironically , Clive Sinclair will be remembered for affordable home computers, but his real passion were small screens and electric vehicles. A true visionary - he was a couple of decades too early.
RIP Sir Clive…
5 hours ago
Ironically , Clive Sinclair will be remembered for affordable home computers, but his real passion were small screens and electric vehicles. A true visionary - he was a couple of decades too early.
RIP Sir Clive…
He was a crazy, inspired individual that is for sure. The Elon Musk of his time, replete with relevant temperament.
Sure is interesting to wonder where todays’ 21st Century Clive is, and what they’re up to. My guess is, somewhere way on the edge of the lunatic fringe, doing wild and kooky stuff.. and I think if I look close enough at the hardware hacking community today, I could probably spot a hundred Clives’ pretty easily.
More of a UK Steve Jobs - similar marketing flair, filtered through British austerity.
He kept the same pitch throughout his career - make consumer goods as small and cheap as possible, wrap them in state of the art industrial design (superficially futuristic and memorable, but also as cheap as possible), and market them aggressively.
He did ok with his calculators, surfed a trend with his computers and (accidentally IMO) created a national ecosystem, but his other attempts were less successful.
He seemed to enjoy miniaturised downscale engineering for the sake of it, whether or not there was a market there.
He did have his showman side certainly -- but I'd argue that Alan Sugar of Amstrad was more the UK Steve Jobs because Clive Sinclair really did have deep technological knowledge himself (even though he obviously also had a staff of talented engineers like Richard Altwasser who rarely got their due in the public eye)