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Old 18th Jun 2020, 8:44 am   #41
crackle
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Default Re: ( Sir ) Clive Sinclair ?

Lots of great memories of Sinclair products, and the exciting times saving up for the next range of amplifier modules.
I used to drool over the adverts in "Radio Constructor"
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 8:46 am   #42
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Originally Posted by ITAM805 View Post
In the late 60's I built a a little AM reflex radio using Sinclair circuit and transistors and it worked well. I found that if I tuned up above the end of medium wave I could hear strange undecipherable voices, my sister's then boyfriend said it's radio amateurs, ssb on top band I presume?
Back in those days most activity on top band was AM which is how I discovered radio amateurs. At that time we lived not too far from a large cemetery but if there were any interesting emissions my set wasn't sensitive enough to receive them.

Interesting if it is true that Sir Clive has eschewed computers. In this current weird world we are now inhabiting, it is proving somewhat difficult to get by without one. I have been doing a bit of mentoring of the locked-down elderly. A lot of it is about avoiding scams. Imagine, now public transport is to be avoided, having to ditch your bus pass and learn to drive at 80 years of age.

(However, for someone who had a mobile phone in the 1980s, I'm using a 'dumb' phone, and after several decades of being stuck in front of a screen I have found time away from it doing other work most liberating.)
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 9:05 am   #43
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Default Re: ( Sir ) Clive Sinclair ?

the entire programme is on youtube here;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 9:42 am   #44
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There was a very good Horizon documentary in the early 80's called 'Clive Sinclair - anatomy of an inventor.' Superb viewing. I wonder if it can be found on You Tube or iPlayer?
I have Rodney Dale's book 'The Sinclair Story' (I think from the same-ish time) That I must have read three or four times now. Very enjoyable.
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 10:12 am   #45
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Default Re: ( Sir ) Clive Sinclair ?

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Quote:
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One of my school friends built one of those miniature FM radio kits circa 1960. No On/Off switch, you had to bend the switched contact of the skeleton earpiece jack so that it made when the earpiece plug was inserted, thereby turning the radio on. AFAIR it worked well, but we did live in a strong FM signal area. It seemed miraculous compared with the valve radios I was used to.
I remember having a "Sinclair Micromatic" MW-only radio, which ran off a couple of hearing-aid batteries. It too used the 'bent contact on the headphone socket' switching method, and the 'tuning capacitor' was a mica compression-trimmer with the adjustment screw replaced by a longer 8BA screw with the tuning-knob on the end.

Only 2 transistors and 2 diodes, in a reflex arrangement aided by a bit of regeneration (you bent a RF choke on its leads to move it closer or further-away from the ferrite rod antenna to adjust the regeneration) but it could receive Radio Luxembourg!
I still have mine in a drawer somewhere.
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 10:16 am   #46
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Default Re: ( Sir ) Clive Sinclair ?

I remember taking a book out from the library about inventors in the 1980s, he most recent of which was Clive Sinclair.

While I was aware of his computers and the C5, I hadn't heard about his earlier work in audio equipment, calculators and mini TVs at that time.

I think we have mentioned in other threads an earlier Sinclair TV project that never got into production, and a push button phone that the GPO rejected.
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 10:49 am   #47
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Back in those days most activity on top band was AM which is how I discovered radio amateurs
Me too

The mysterious voices sounded like SSB without the carrier, unless of course I unwittingly stumbled upon a nearby Russian spy ring
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 11:06 am   #48
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Thanks for that input re Clive's confrontation of a rival Martin [p28*]. Given that you supply direct evidence, it seems clear that Siralan was not a participant. However, was he there? Perhaps not! I don't think he was a best buddie of Clive's either. I'm wondering how this this urban myth came into being. As I recall, there was a perception that there was some sort of a class distinction involved and frequently articulated between Sinclair and Sugar. The newspaper says it was a pub and not a wine bar and many people have the impression it was those two involved so perhaps separate incidents have been conflated I agree with those commenting about the Sinclair Ads and futuristic products but they weren't cheap and in a way, the selling point ie relatively miniature size symbolised rather less for your money [if you had it to spend that is].

Dave W

This class war element reminds me of the "consultations" held when the BBC was being decimated in the early 80's by a "new broom" known to Dennis Potter as "the Robot". One of these was Broadcast on Radio 4 and open to all comers from the Media Industry. Even without vision you could tell that BBC Execs were somewhat shaken. When some upstart suggested that it would be better for the Beeb if it concentrated on what it did best a posh member of management did a Mandy Rice Davies effectively saying "Well you would say that wouldn't you? as the head of a private company. He didn't actually say get back to London Weekend Television or use the term "barrow boy" but others did elsewhere. It was therefore a deep irony when Greg Dyke became the Director General and possibly the most popular one ever. He even had the right initials but "not necessarily in the right order" as Eric Morecambe would say. There was great upset when he [inexplicably] left Broadcasting House. I recall that he was going to open "our" the Archives to License Payers but now they've become monetised of course.

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Old 18th Jun 2020, 11:21 am   #49
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When I was at university in Bangor back in the early 70's studying Electronic Engineering, we had an evening lecture given by two young engineers, probably not much older than us students, from the Sinclair company on some electronic subject. I've forgotten what it was, but certainly not on Sinclair products.
However probably all the audience had some experience of Sinclair products, generally not good, amplifiers blowing up and so on.
The evening degenerated into a 'bash Sinclair' session, most unfair on the presenters, who were nearly reduced to tears.
With hindsight, their company should have had more sense than send two inexperienced engineers, they were 'lambs to the slaughter'.

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Old 18th Jun 2020, 11:28 am   #50
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Default Re: ( Sir ) Clive Sinclair ?

Referring to post 44

Clive Sinclair - anatomy of an inventor


it's not a great quality copy
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 11:29 am   #51
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the entire programme is on youtube here;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM
Thanks for that link - absolutely riveting!

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Old 18th Jun 2020, 11:45 am   #52
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Default Re: ( Sir ) Clive Sinclair ?

I remember back in the 80's everyone had the Spectrum or the ZX computer, not me, I had to go one better, I bought the much vaunted Sinclair QL, described at the time as a 'business' computer, it vaguely resembled a long keyboard with a sort of weird microcassete thing, a bit like a tiny 8 track tape, that went in the end to store data, it was horrible and put me off computers for many years. Still you had to admire the man, along with Alan Sugar (Amstrad) he made a fortune buy buying discontinued circuit boards from the likes of Pioneer and Sony, and slapping them into his HiFi units. You could open up two identical units and find different component parts inside, hence why some sounded better than others.
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 11:46 am   #53
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dave walsh View Post
Thanks for that input re Clive's confrontation of a rival Martin [p28*]. Given that you supply direct evidence, it seems clear that Siralan was not a participant. However, was he there? Perhaps not! I don't think he was a best buddie of Clive's either. I'm wondering how this this urban myth came into being. As I recall, there was a perception that there was some sort of a class distinction involved and frequently articulated between Sinclair and Sugar. The newspaper says it was a pub and not a wine bar and many people have the impression it was those two involved so perhaps separate incidents have been conflated I agree with those commenting about the Sinclair Ads and futuristic products but they weren't cheap and in a way, the selling point ie relatively miniature size symbolised rather less for your money [if you had it to spend that is].

Dave W
It's not impossible that Alan Sugar could have been present at the confrontation, though it's unlikely because the Sinclair/Amstrad relationship was probably from an earlier era. in an archived interview ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrTmvqwpZF8 ), Chris Curry reported that Sugar used to buy Sinclair amplifiers to incorporate into Amstrad products. He would turn up at Sinclair's premises in his Transit van and collect the items he'd ordered.

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Old 18th Jun 2020, 12:11 pm   #54
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Referring to post 44

Clive Sinclair - anatomy of an inventor


it's not a great quality copy
My goodness, that IS bad! It seems to have been flipped left to right as well...
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 12:18 pm   #55
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I remember back in the 80's everyone had the Spectrum or the ZX computer, not me, I had to go one better, I bought the much vaunted Sinclair QL, described at the time as a 'business' computer, it vaguely resembled a long keyboard with a sort of weird microcassete thing, a bit like a tiny 8 track tape, that went in the end to store data, it was horrible and put me off computers for many years. Still you had to admire the man, along with Alan Sugar (Amstrad) he made a fortune buy buying discontinued circuit boards from the likes of Pioneer and Sony, and slapping them into his HiFi units. You could open up two identical units and find different component parts inside, hence why some sounded better than others.
Oh, the dreaded 'Microdrive', which worked, kind of. Sometimes. There's a whole chapter about the QL in a book I have. One good story is that as usual Clive wanted to rush ahead with the case design before the PCB had been finalised, and it was such a snug fit that disaster struck when the designers realised that the operating system needed an extra ROM and there was absolutely nowhere to put it as the case fitted so tightly.
My mate Pete bought a QL at about the same time I got my BBCB. He used it for years and said it wasn't a bad machine as long as you knew the bugs and how to work around them.
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 12:39 pm   #56
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Default Re: ( Sir ) Clive Sinclair ?

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I remember back in the 80's everyone had the Spectrum or the ZX computer, not me, I had to go one better, I bought the much vaunted Sinclair QL, described at the time as a 'business' computer, it vaguely resembled a long keyboard with a sort of weird microcassete thing, a bit like a tiny 8 track tape, that went in the end to store data, it was horrible and put me off computers for many years. .
Myself and a friend got shoo'd away at Compec (Earls Court) probably 1983 (might have been 84) by a very Ginger haired man with a ginger beard (Clive) Compec wasn't yet open to the public I was helping to set up the Crystal Research stand which was just a few metres from the Sinclair stand.
Clive was setting up the Queer Lump. My friend tried to pick it up and found it was screwed to the stand we heaved our selves up to look behind to see ribbon cables going from the bottom to a machine that looked suspiciously like a VAX.

Clive wasn't impressed with our antics. ISTR the release of the QL was delayed several times and Sinclair was taking orders many months before release. It always stuck me that Clive never received decent funding so each product was "hand to mouth".

A great innovator I bought many of his products in my youth including the Scientific calculator in around 74 and the Black watch where the purple LED lens used to fall out on a regular basis you could still buy spares from Sinclair for a couple of years. I lived in Torquay for many years and you could hire his C5's to go up and down the Paignton and Torquay sea fronts.

Never found his products totally satisfactory and never owned a Sinclair Computer since I already had far better machines.

I have several of his Babani books some going back more than 50 years.

Cheers

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Old 18th Jun 2020, 12:42 pm   #57
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A mate bought a QL, and wrote a quick test program that he could check with a pocket calculator (not a Sinclair one!). The QL gave a tantalizingly close answer, but with a significant error. What??

Turned out that he'd used root(2). The QL operating system looked for standard numbers, and grabbed them out of ROM, for speed reasons. Except in the rush to get the thing out, someone in the dark watches of the night put a slightly wrong value for root(2) in the ROM.

My mate replaced the number with root(2.000001) or some such small delta, whereupon the calculation was correct. The QL spotted that it was not an integer, and ran an algorithm instead.

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Old 18th Jun 2020, 12:45 pm   #58
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My mate bought a s/h ZX80 back then and we spent hours inputting a code that supposedly would make a dash do a 'snake' around the TV in ever decreasing circles eventually filling the screen, well that's what supposed to have happened but all we could get was a flashing dot !
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Old 18th Jun 2020, 12:52 pm   #59
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Mike T mentioned the Scientific. I bought that as my first ever calculator. Of course I tried to fool it, and asked for arcsine of 1.5. Of course that is a perfectly valid complex number, except the Scientific knew nothing of complex numbers. But it tried valiantly for around two minutes, with the display occasionally fitfully flashing. And then returned a number.

Much out of Uncle Clive's stable was *almost* OK. It either blew up, did not meet the hype, gave wrong or randomly incorrect answers. Or the wonderful collectors piece, the C5.

There is a rumour, possibly just that, that he had box loads of reject transistors sorted for ones that could be used. And the pallet loads of dead ones were used as hardcore under Sinclair's drive.

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Old 18th Jun 2020, 1:52 pm   #60
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Sometime in the late 1970s I was asked to help review a pocket calculator by some market research organisation. The anonymous manufacturer wanted to know what technically qualified people thought of it. Several of us from the university attended a meeting where we were asked our opinions of the current state of the calculator market and given some of the manufacturer's prototypes to play with. It wasn't a very sophisticated calculator at all, not much more than a standard four-function calculator. Companies like HP and Casio already had much better ones on the market. It also seemed to have a mind of its own getting stuck in loops with the display flashing. We came to the conclusion that it was probably obsolete before reaching the market and was the sort of junk that Sinclair would produce. After we had finished the market researcher revealed that the anonymous company was indeed Sinclair.
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