Sir Clive Sinclair doesn't use a computer, exceeds recommended irony levels
By Vlad Savov 
posted March 1st 2010 5:41AM
posted March 1st 2010 5:41AM
posted March 1st 2010 5:41AM
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Just get his manservant to read him engadget and he will be at the apple store buying his perfectly designed mac :)
@Shanebenn NO, HE LIKES FLASH AND WITH THIS ECONOMY I THINK HE IS BUILDING A HACKINTOSH.
@Toshiba Caps lock is cruise control for cool.
@Toshiba
The economy is so tough that you can't afford to fix your caps lock key... time are tough.
hmm... i see an apple fanboi in the making
'Appalling designs'...
Coming from the man who sank his company by trying to develop pocket sized CRT's and a godawful mini ripoff?
The irony is delicious
@camroncake
First thing I though too, although I must admit to bidding on a C5 last week (-;
@camroncake And have you seen the ridiculous folding bike he is now selling. It has wheels the size of shopping trolley casters. For a genius inventor he cannot spot the obvious:
Sinclair C5: A tiny recumbent electrically assisted bike that would "replace cars". Sir Clive, we live in a country that is wetter than Borneo, what happens when it rains.
- No problemo! We sell C5 branded anoraks.
But they are so low profile that trucks can;t see them and will simply run over us.
- No problemo! We sell special little flags on a stick which you attach to the back of your C5.
The A Bike: Sir Clive, your new bike has wheels that are so small that encountering any kind of pothole will result in my flying through the air and landing under a truck.
- No problemo, just avoid potholes.
etc etc etc
@camroncake Pocket sized CRT would be amazing.
The technology is still picture quality king.
I see hes still insufferable.
Looks like a genuine smile to me.
He has reason behind his madness, on top of which; he did not "grow up" with computers either. Hes already made his career before they played a large role in his life. I can see why hes saying so.
We should all go back to our Samsung R225's for a week, and drop the TV for the same period jst to put things into perspective.
I haven't owned a TV in 6 years. I applaud the man.
@Sean Connery And you're posting your comment on a Sinclair ZX80? Oh wait ... that would be impossible. The man is an insufferable luddite who will live out the remainder of his pampered and sheltered life in the privileged backwaters of the computer illiterate and cultural elite.
//this rant brought to you by someone who hasn't watched television for 18 years. Yeah ... I'm that old.
"Sinclair, who is not an especially tall man, has always been a great one for the smallness of things"
I'm glad the Guardian writer stopped there.
@igb
Is this an appropriate place for a "That's what she said" joke?
Well, I would imagine all this trite computing nonsense is far beneath his reptilian upbringing on his home world.
Just sayin'.
I guess he doesn't realize that computers are capable of, you know, doing things now; hence all the memory they use.
@Zorque
He is not complaining about them using memory, he is complaining about the waste of memory usage. I agree with him to a point too. Although memory is so cheap now that it does not really matter too much in most cases.
I remember back in the 90s when SWOS took something like 8MB memory and a 32 MB install on the PC where on the Amiga it used only 1MB memory and came on 3 (or was it 4) 880kb disks. But then the Amiga Workbench OS was one mighty feat of genius coding.
@coolblue2000
Your comment about the Amiga is a PERFECT example of what Sinclair is complaining about. And for the most part, I do agree with him. Modern computers are a joke - they have amazingly fast processors, yet are crippled by 3 decades of backward compatibility and saddled with bloatware from the OS and the actual programs they are asked to run.
Computers in general are simply not as fun as they used to be. Of course anyone under 25 probably doesn't even understand that concept since they all grew up not knowing anything other than Windows. They can not fathom a time when there were actually many different choices in the marketplace and everything wasn't controlled by some huge corporate entity.
@coolblue2000
Totally, the man has point. Computers of today are woeful when compared to fierce beasts like the Amiga.
Full multitasking, colour OS on one disc.
The other thing is, today's box might have more in it but rarely are they Doing more and quite often they aren't actually doing it faster.
It's quite pathetic mostly.
@Cy Starkman
Workbench 1 was on 1 disc not including kickstart and extras. Later versions added the couple extra discs vs extra gigs to do the same thing.
I dunno, my first computer was a TI-99/4A and it took, what, one second to hit the home screen and all of a second and a half to get into BASIC/Extended Basic? I get that it's not the same as loading into an operating system that does as much as Windows does, but hell, it takes the better part of a minute for my computer (granted, it uses an ULV processor) to get to the login screen and a bit longer to hit the desktop.
The TI-99/4A had a sorta-16-bit processor at 3.0MHz. The SU2700 processor is 433.3x faster based on clock-speed alone (and is certainly much more than 433.3x faster when you consider that it's a 64-bit processor and a much more complex architecture). So why does it take so much longer to get to doing something useful on today's computers?
@Cy Starkman
On the one hand, machines back in the days of the dinosaurs were "slimmer" and could "do more with less". On the other hand, the Amiga can't accomodate a single copy of the framebuffer for my current TV sized display.
Life moves on. You get more a pallette larger than 4096. etc.
@Old fogie late bloomer
Old system emulators help keep things in perspective here. While a lot of these older systems were great in their day. I think a lot of people are viewing the past with rose colored glasses here.
Any of these nostalgiac types would go off running screaming into the night if they were forced to use those machines today.
@jedi
It is not about nostalgia (and yes I do still use my amiga, plus my spectrum 48k is still in full working order). It merely stating that the current processors and OS's waste memory and resources like maniacs compared to the old computers. No one is disputing that the current computers are way more powerful that those of yesteryear and that the UI has moved on quite a bit. But that does not mean that they should not be improved upon still.
The British video games industry owes a lot to this guy. Without him, many of the best games around today wouldn't exist.
@xbit
Indeed. The Spectrum 48k was simply amazing.
@xbit But what about the C64. Sorry to bring back the rivalry but that totally stoked the Speccy ;-)
@richb93
The C64 was a pig to program, a champ none the less, but a pig all the same.
@xbit
The Amstrad 464 pissed all over both the spectrum and the c64, much better graphics ;p
@fourthletter Agreed. I had (well my older brother had) a CPC 464 with the green monitor, lol. So awesome for 1986!
The dude is correct on a few points... The IBM platform is 30 years old! Even Apple has thrown in the towel and jumped on that bandwagon. There should be whole new way of computing by now, but the industry is lazy and has no motivation to do anything about it. In spite of what both Apple and Microsoft will try to tell you, the answer to more efficient computing is NOT in a more streamlined OS, but in designing a new hardware standard for a streamlined OS to work on. But I wouldn't abandon computing for my views. I do not agree with him on the design of laptops however. I too believe that Apple has done a beautiful job designing a classy laptop line and a desktop line for that matter. DELL almost did a solid when they were teasing about the Adamo (or whatever it is called) but came up short in my opinion.
@kobioshi Look at Linux and BSD and you'll see why no real development goes on, only thing people care about id Windows and making more crap for it
@kobioshi
I agree that Macs are beautiful, but not so beautiful after being used for a few months, while it would be nice to have a whole new form of computing by now I'd rather spend £400 on a computer instead of £2000.
So unless you plan on paying for this new computing system I'd be happy with our well established cheap IBM based systems.
Shit's hilarious.
@DaftTimo
that grill's hilarious.
I don't think the guy who designed this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5
Has any business talking about other peoples designs.
@wjousts
did not you check the OTHER link?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Sinclair
it is clearly the same dude :-)
@varera : I'm sorry, what are you trying to say? Yes it's the same guy, that's why I mentioned it. What was your point?
@wjousts
The C5 looked fucking great back in the day. 80's scifi in reality.
What's so bad about the design of computers? Stop spouting off, old man.You're not god of the computer world.
His whole company was beaten by Acorn who eventually gave us ARM chips, he really missed the boat then Amstrad walked all over both of them.
Pity people with such talent are let down by their ridiculous egos !
If he feels that way, why doesn't he make or fund a better computer?
@(Unverified)
Agreed, if the current state of computing is so bad, I'd be interested to see what his solution to that would be. From the way he's talking, it sounds like there's an opportunity there.
There's one for the 'Big Book of British Smiles'
He said they were totally wasteful, and you have to "wait for the damn things to boot up".
He wants to think again about that comment. Many a time I was loading a game (Jet Set Willy FTW) and was met with the dreaded "R Tape loading error, 0:1" error message. :(
Despite his misjudgment, I loved the Spectrum and the fact that his machine was my first steps into computing many moons ago. Sir Clive is a legend!
This guy is an absolute loony, but in a good way. I just watched Micro Men a couple days ago, and it should be required viewing. It's about the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry, and about how they both went broke fighting each other. It's basically the British version of Pirates of Silicon Valley, only nobody ends up rich. It's available in the Usual Places.
I still miss my Sinclair QL computer. That was a nice machine. Sadly, the hardware got fried by a crap third party display and just plain died.
Still, the Amiga comment posted above is interesting. In 512K, it could accomplish goals windows doesn't even consider in under a gig of ram.
Anyone remember Win95 being able to run in 4 mb? Something has gone seriously amiss along the way.
He may have been way too ahead of his time... But another way to say this is that he was disconnected from the time completely... he released crappy products, he ran the company like shit, and his visions were all crap...
I had a spectrumZX80, and it was a fun gaming computer on which I learned the principles of programming.