Sir Clive Sinclair – My Inspiration
It was a very sad day for me – the day I heard that Sir Clive Sinclair had died because without him I would not be where I am today. Sir Clive started by inventing the pocket calculator. Calculators had existed before but only as large, desktop machines. Sir Clive had the vision to see that a calculator small enough to be carried in a pocket would be extremely popular.
But his greatest invention was the personal computer. Before 1980 computers were expensive. The most popular being the Commodore PET at £700 (almost £2800 in today’s terms). In 1980 Sir Clive´s company produced the Sinclair ZX80 (the UK’s first mass-market home computer) for less than £100, and, in the early 1980s, the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum
I learned to write code on the 48k Sinclair Spectrum and I used go to the local library every week and write programs on Sinclairs´ systems.
Without Sir Clive Sinclair´s genius computers would not be what they are today and Lee Harvey Computing would never have existed. Which means that computer users in Cornwall and Devon – both home users and businesses – would have been without the services of a mobile expert to solve their computer problems.
So, next time your computer woes are ended by Lee Harvey Computing you can thank not only me but Sir Clive Sinclair – my hero!
