“He was an amazing person. Of course, he was very smart and was always interested in everything. “My daughter and her husband are engineers, he talked to them about technology,” said Belinda Sinclair.
Clive Sinclair invented the pocket calculator, but was best known for popularizing the home computer and distributing it to affordable stores.
Many big players in the video game industry started out with the ZX, knowing that there was a generation of gamers opting for the ZX Spectrum 48K or its competitor Commodore 64.
The head of ZX Spectrum dropped out of school at 17 and worked as a seasoned journalist for four years to raise funds to found Sinclair Radionics.
In the early 1970s, Sinclair invented a series of calculators that were small and light enough to fit in a pocket, while most of the existing models were room-sized.
“He wanted to make things small and cheap so people could get them,” Belinda Sinclair said.
His first home computer, the ZX80, named after the year it was launched, revolutionized the computer market, albeit far from what it is today.
It cost 79.95 pounds (about 94 euros) in parts and 99.95 pounds (about 117.12 euros) assembled, about five times less than other home computers at the time.
At the time, 50,000 units were sold, and his success, the ZX81, which succeeded him, cost £ 69.95 (about € 82.02) and sold 250,000 computers.
The ZX80 and ZX81 made Clive Sinclair very rich.
In 2010, Sinclair told The Guardian that “in two or three years” he made “a profit of 14 million pounds (16.41 million euros) in one year.”
The ZX Spectrum 48K was released in 1982. Rubbery keys, strange visuals, and metallic sound didn’t stop it from playing a fundamental role in the development of the video game industry.
Late last year, the Load ZX Spectrum Museum was born in Cantanhead, Coimbra County.
Space is a kind of exercise in nostalgia, but also a tribute to the creator of those computers that emerged in the 1980s and his “unknown” connection to Portugal.
