British inventor and entrepreneur, Sir Clive Sinclair had died at the age of 81, IgbereTV reports.
The computing pioneer who was instrumental in bringing home computers to homes, 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.
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.
His 57-year-old daughter, Belinda Sinclair confirmed his death. She said;
“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.”
Sir Clive was born in Richmond, London in 1940 and knighted in 1983. He left school at 17 and worked for four years as a technical journalist to raise funds to found Sinclair Radionics.
His first home computer, the ZX80, named after the year it appeared, revolutionised the market, although it was a far cry from today’s models. At £79.95 in kit form and £99.95 assembled, it was about one-fifth of the price of other home computers at the time. It sold 50,000, units while its successor, the ZX81, which replaced it, cost £69.95 and sold 250,000.
