View Single Post
Old 25th Sep 2021, 9:11 pm   #72
cmjones01
Nonode
 
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Warsaw, Poland and Cambridge, UK
Posts: 2,669
Default Re: Sir Clive Sinclair. R.I.P.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak View Post
I wonder how many of us even remember the £139 Amstrad Sinclair, let alone with affection?
Perhaps I'm wrong. When Mr Sugar dies, maybe this forum will be packed with fond reminiscences of the AVS systems, unopenable tower music centres or perhaps the CTV2200. Perhaps.
That's a very interesting point. From what I've seen in the retro computing world, the "Amstrad" Spectrums don't seem to have a bad reputation - quite the opposite. They add useful features to the machine, though of course they don't have the cachet of the original Spectrum. However, they were produced in such vast numbers that they're relatively common.

As a snobbish technically-minded teenager at the time, of course I turned my nose up at the Amstrad/Sinclair computers. But looking back, the computers marked a real change for Amstrad. While the tower systems and TVs were unashamedly cheap and simple dressed up to look like something they weren't, the computers were the opposite. They were affordable machines that turned out to be capable, reliable (if you can excuse the hard card issues in the later PC1640 et al) and practical, and were wildly popular as a result.

I think we have Lord Sugar to thank for a reasonably happy ending to the Sinclair computing story, which could have been so much worse for all involved, including the hobbyists and users like me.

Chris
__________________
What's going on in the workshop? http://martin-jones.com/
cmjones01 is offline