Clive Sinclair died

[Andrew]

Never did get a QL, something I was tempted by at the time.

Andrew

[Andy Burns]

Got lent the BT "tonto" version to play with, it didn't immediately inspire us to do anything with it ...

[N_Cook]

I wouldn't if I was you, leave the little tape microdrive thingy in the QL and switch off, yet another corrupted file results

[Bob Eager]

I was selling the Sinclair Micro-6 ("radio the size of a matchbox") back in the 1960s. And his PWM amp boards.

[newshound]

I built one of them, and used Z12's in my HiFi for a number of years. Also built the ZX81 £50 kit. Never tempted by a Spectrum, though, much less the QL.

[Steve Walker]

I had one. In fact I probably still have it in the loft. I certainly still have the dedicated Microvitec monitor.

I also had the 512K memory pack (to take it to 640K) and twin, 3.5",

720K floppy disk drives (the Microdrives were somewhat iffy, although useable).

I did my O-level computer studies (the first time our school had offered it and only in the 6th form) project using it. No compatible printer, so I had to type the whole listing (about 16,0000 characters) out on a mechanical typewriter - throwing the sheet away and starting again if there was a typing error :( And as the typewriter had no $ sign, using an S, backspacing and using a / had to do ... but as the / (Shift-7 IIRC) key stuck, it often messed up the sheet.

I then had to take my QL and monitor in to school to demonstrate the program, as they only had BBC model Bs.

The upside is that I sold the program to QL World magazine and was paid enough to buy my first CD player and some CDs. I might have got more (50p per copy sold by them) over time, but the magazine collapsed later on.

The SuperBasic language was quite elegant for a BASIC of the time, with proper functions and procedures, parameter passing, output windows, loops, etc., so my whole program (unlike many of the time), did not have a single GOTO or GOSUB in it and it set my up nicely for learning PASCAL during part of my degree a couple of years later, although moving from the "coercion" of SuperBasic (being able to assign the contents of one variable to another regardless of the variable's type, as long as the contents could be converted) was completely opposite to the hard-typing of PASCAL.

[Michael Chare]

I recall a friend having a Sincair sound amplifier which he had built him self about 1964. Apparently if you disconnected the speakers it would kill some of the electronics, maybe the output transistors.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

on 16/09/2021, Bob Eager supposed :

I built one of those.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Me too, they sounded good at the time :-)

I was way ahead of ZX81's by that time.

Likewise, but I was given a dud QL to see I could do anything with it. It didn't seem to be worth the effort even then.

[N_Cook]

Sounds like the "Texas" amp, not Sinclair ISTR, (used Texas Instrument power trannies ) that would blow whenever a fridge thermostat on the same mains ring clicked over at peak mains voltage , otherwise bad clicks in the speakers on clickovers .

[John Walliker]

I had an IC10 audio amplifier. It was sold as a 10W amplifier, but after peeling off the nice looking label (after it had died) it turned out to be a Plessey chip rated at about 3W. I also had a Sinclair Scientific calculator which for some calculations turned out to be less accurate than my slide rule. John

[Tim Streater]

Not the only issue I had with Pascal:

1) No return statement, so no early return from a function or procedure. 2) Strings of different lengths were different types. 3) A single compilation unit - no libraries.

Pascal was OK to a point as a language to teach concepts, but not much use as a practical language unless extended.

[Tricky Dicky]

I built the stereo amp in 1969, remember the ball ache involved in twisting the shaft connecting the twin potentiometers to get the balance right once done it soldiered on for a fair few years. I cannot remember what happened to it as I left it with my parents who were not really into listening to music and probably ditched it after I moved out.

Richard

[Vir Campestris]

I had a brief association with ICL's One Per Desk (which BT bought as Tonto).

Some of the guys at ICL made the microdrives work.

Andy

[newshound]

Yes, it was the Z12.

Their advert said "If you ever break it, we will repair it for (iirc)

50p". Eventually they stopped honouring that offer. I broke a couple when I tried to use them on a carnival float and managed to disconnect the speakers. I forget whether you had to be putting a signal through it at the time.

[newshound]

Pascal was *designed explicitly* as a teaching language. Even so it was infinitely preferable to any the versions of basic that I used, because it protected you from so many run-time errors.

[pinnerite]

He was self-taught. He designed lots of simple but interesting circuits that were published by Babani.

During the early 60s I was working for the Stern-Clyne group. Although I was designing Hi-Fi systems for the Waycox subsidiary, I and my colleague Roger Steele were sometimes asked by one of the directors to test proposed purchases for their wholesale or retail companies.

Oner day we were asked to test a class-D amplifier. It was a clever design because it could output considerable power from cheap transistors.

It worked but the harmonic distortion was horrendous. It also affected all AM radios within a considerable distance and even FM models could not cope.

When we reported back, we were instructed to contact Mr Sinclair (not yet a knight). His office was conveniently not far away in the square close to Angel Underground station. However we had to lug our demonstratio equipment up the front steps and even more once inside.

He was very gracious but it transpired that he couldn't hear the distortion but accepted the instrument displays in front of him.

Hilariously, he bought all our test equipment thus saving us from lugging it all down again.

Great guy.

I am sorry he has passed away.

Mint 20.04, kernel 5.4.0-42-generic, Cinnamon 4.6.7 running on an AMD Phenom II X4 Black edition processor with 8GB of DRAM.

[alan_m]

Around 6 weeks ago I dumped 4 off Texas Instruments hard cover books. One of the books had the circuit, board layout and full instructions for building the the Texas Amp.

At the time of publication of these books I was working for a Marconi company and the stores had been raided for the output transistors (2N3055???)

[alan_m]

I built his scientific calculator from a kit. Key entry was reverse polish logic and an answer appeared after a delay of a second or two.

[John Rumm]

Which to be fair most real world implementations were.

And by the time you get to implementations like Turbo Pascal or Delphi, you can do pretty much anything you can do in C/C++ (except make it look as fugly!)