💾 The Man Who Started It All: My Tribute to Sir Clive Sinclair
Past and Present
Christmas, 1983. The wrapping paper had barely settled on the floor when I unboxed what would become one of the most influential gifts of my life: a Sinclair ZX81.
It came with the works — a thermal printer, 16K RAM pack (that infamous wobbly peripheral.. the workaround.. Blu-Tac and a paper wedge), a cassette recorder, and three unforgettable games: Escape from Manhattan, Krazy Kong, and Puckman from PSS.
That little black box didn’t just start a hobby; it lit the fuse for a lifelong love affair with technology.
🖥️ The Long Nights of Code and Curiosity
I can still remember one late night spent hunched over the ZX81, copying line after line of BASIC code from an issue of Sinclair User — the game.. a rudimentary version of the board game Invicta's Mastermind. It was an act of pure dedication (or perhaps youthful obsession.. listening to my cassette of the 1984 The Hits Album on repeat.
When I finally finished and proudly typed RUN, the game came alive…
..for about thirty seconds.
Then I made the rookie mistake of tapping the RAM pack. The screen flickered, and — just like that — the entire program vanished.
That night, I learned my first great lesson in technology:
Always back up your data.
And though I didn’t know it then, that lesson has stayed with me through decades of digital transformation and service delivery work.
If only I had used the cassette recorder to back up the program over listening to The Hits Album.. All Through The Night by Cindi Lauper..
Indeed.. "We had no past".. or back-ups either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWam8M46i6k
🎮 From Pixels to Passion
The ZX81 gave way to my cousin’s Sinclair Spectrum, and my mind was completely blown by Trans Am from Ultimate Play The Game — one of the earliest open-world experiences ever created.
Subsequent Christmases brought me the Spectrum Plus (1985) and later the Plus 2 (1987).
Yes, I eventually dabbled with a Commodore 64 and even inherited a rather temperamental Amiga, but it was never quite the same.
My heart always returned to that elegant little ZX81 — the hum of the cassette player, the crude but charming graphics, the way every line of code felt like a small act of discovery.
Those evenings were magical. Games back then required imagination over reflexes, patience over pixels, and curiosity over convenience.
⚙️ The Spark of a Generation
For many of us, Sir Clive Sinclair wasn’t just an inventor; he was an enabler of creativity. He handed an entire generation of curious young minds the tools to build, tinker, and dream. He turned bedrooms into laboratories and children into programmers.
His legacy is not just the hardware he made — it’s the mindset he inspired:
“Why buy it when you can build it?”
As much as I respect Sir Alan Sugar and Amstrad, the day Sinclair sold the company marked the end of something special. The soul of home computing — that homebrew spark of genius — dimmed just a little.
🕹️ Full Circle
Recently, I watched the brilliant documentary Rubber Keyed Wonder (available on Amazon Prime), and it brought everything flooding back. Last Christmas, my wife gifted me Retro’s ‘The Spectrum’ — a love letter to that golden age.
It felt like life coming full circle. Because while I now work in AI, digital transformation, and service delivery — all of it, in some way, began with a small black box in 1983 and the vision of one remarkable man.
Thank you, Sir Clive Sinclair, for sparking curiosity, creativity, and careers. Your machines didn’t just teach us to compute — they taught us to imagine.
