Sir Clive, the man who brought home computers to Britain, on the Beeb

Xeni's spotted a cool inteview with Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the ZX-series computers that got England addicted to home computing.

It its day, the ZX Spectrum was a low-end machine, the little brother of fancier, bulkier 8-bits like the Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC. It's amazing how tiny and attractive it looks now, in 2008. Is it not?

The main problem for me was its unreliability. My first 6 home computers were ZX Spectrums, and my seventh was an Amstrad, if you see what I mean. I assume today that there was a bad batch at Curry's. Perhaps our home had dicky wiring ... if so, Sir Alan could deal with it!

Sir Clive Sinclair, UK home computer market pioneer (audio) [BoingBoing]

[#1 posted by pork musket , July 9, 2008 6:34 AM]

It looks cool, but I think I'd stab a nun if I had to use that keyboard for more than 5 minutes.

[#2 posted by Rob Beschizza , July 9, 2008 6:37 AM]

Yeah, the chiclet keyboard was pretty but very annoying. They replaced it with a hard one, which wasn't so geeky, but could actually be typed on.

[#3 posted by Joel Johnson , July 9, 2008 6:55 AM]

I like rainbows. This site needs more rainbows.

[#4 posted by dculberson , July 9, 2008 12:13 PM]

Care Bear Stare!!

[#5 posted by Angstrom , July 9, 2008 6:19 PM]

I had the Sinclair which came before this - the ZX81.
You got it in kit form and built it yourself - quite a thrill for ten year old me. I made my own computer!!1!!

With a whopping 1k of memory (yes, you read correctly) and a keyboard that was literally "a board". Still - I loved that thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX81