Home Computing Pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair Dies Aged 81

LoTonah writes: Sir Clive Sinclair, the man behind the Sinclair Spectrum and the first computer to retail for under a hundred dollars (the Sinclair ZX-81, A.K.A. The Timex/Sinclair 1000), died September 15 after battling a long illness. His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness.

Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices. Many modern-day titans of the games industry got their start on one of his ZX models. For a certain generation of gamer, the computer of choice was either the ZX Spectrum 48K or its rival, the Commodore 64. Belinda Sinclair, 57, told the Guardian: 'He was a rather amazing person. Of course, he was so clever and he was always interested in everything. My daughter and her husband are engineers so he'd be chatting engineering with them.' He left school at 17 and worked for four years as a technical journalist to raise funds to found Sinclair Radionics.

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