Submission + - Sir Clive Sinclair, 81 years old, dies after long illness (theguardian.com) 1
LoTonah writes: Sir Clive, 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 15th after battling a long illness.
Sad (Score:3)
Although I disliked a lot of his inventions, he did at least invent. He created things that were remarkable for the time. Unreliable, sure, but remarkable. I still have a Sinclair transistor amplifier. I don't know if he ever tried moving forwards with his idea for wafer-scale RAM (it was to use the same sort of bad sector marking as floppy/hard drives, so that it simply didn't matter if bits of the wafer didn't work), but as this was early 90s, there's no question the idea was well ahead of its time.
His downfall was to use the cheapest components he could find. Chips that had failed tests, for example, on the grounds that home users never used chips under the loads they were tested under. He also resorted to selling products he hadn't actually made yet in order to fund making them.