OT: cost of reneables part II

[Fredxx]

Sounds like sour grapes to me. He knows more about electronics and computing in his day than most others. Did you write as many books as Sinclair?

Practical Transistor Receivers Book 1; 1959. (30 circuits) Practical Stereo Handbook; 1959. Transistor Receivers Book 2 - Transistor Superhet Receivers; 1960. (50 circuits) Transistor Circuits Manual 2; 1960. (13 circuits) Transistor Circuits Manual 3 - Eleven Tested Transistor Circuits using Prefabricated Circuit Units; 1960. (11 circuits) Transistor Circuits Manual 4; 1960. (11 circuits) Practical Transistor Audio Amplifiers for the Home Constructor Book 1;

1961. (32 circuits) Transistor Subminiature Receivers Handbook for the Home Constructor; 1961. Transistorized Test Equipment and Servicing Manual; 1961. Transistor Audio Amplifier Manual; 1962. (32 circuits) Modern Transistor Circuits for Beginners; 1962. (35 circuits) Transistor Circuits Manual 5; 1963. (14 circuits) 22 Tested Circuits Using Micro Alloy Transistors; 1963. (22 circuits)

No, didn't think so.

[Fredxx]

Quite he had an open mind and saw market opportunities for his engineering effort.

Others, who think they're engineers, haven't got a clue, and have a chip on their shoulder; where real engineers innovate and grasp the opportunity.

[Jock]

That is over stated, nukes can make it directly not via electricity.

But the move to heat pumps could be reversed, like the endorsement of diesel cars was. But piping hydrogen instead of natural gas is a lot easier said than done given how much harder it is to do with hydrogen.

Depends on how you define business. Boris did, in journalism.

Maggie did too, in industrial chemistry.

That isn't really true of Boris or Maggie.

Or that.

Or that.

Unlikely that Boris does anything like that. That's what advisors are for.

Corse the problem is then the duds they choose to have like that fool Cummings.

That's overstated too.

[Martin Brown]

The big difference was that old cast iron pipes relied on wet towns gas to keep the cording that made their joints gas tight damp and swollen.

Natural gas was very much drier and as the cording dried out pipe joints leaked like crazy. The escaping gas followed the path of least resistance to the surface which very often was into a telephone kiosk!

AT least that was by far the most noticeable mode of failure.

[Martin Brown]

Or the ill fated QL for that matter but he insisted on it having those accursed tape microdrives that regularly chewed up data.

C5 was probably by far his most disastrous venture. There were large stacks of the body shells sat in a compound near Winsford for ages.

[Tim Streater]

Just heat zirconium and steam at 600C or greater, that'll do it.

[Jock]

No, the claims made can still be discussed.

And google will find the source. Its a comment here

But that isn't useful because the commenter has just got a first name.

[Clive Arthur]

Must get a new keyboard, I typed [Dyson's] but the keyboard substituted [Sinclair's]. Honest.

[newshound]

That's not really fair. True, he used "known" technology although he had to do a lot of experimentation to optimise it, but he changed the paradigm for domestic vacuums which used to suffer from loss of suction as well as pollen leakage.

He now employs quite a lot of good engineers, and is managing a very successful business. His expensive fans seem a bit daft to me, but the airblade dryers seem to be pretty good even if you don't like the vacuums.

[Chris Hogg]

I still have an original ball barrow. I can't say I find it any better than a conventional wheelbarrow. A bit of a gimmick, I'd call it.

[Chris Hogg]

I had the first one of those. Bernard Books IIRC. I confess I never realised it was the same Sinclair as produced the ZX80, or that ingenious little TV. But then, there was quite a big time gap between the two, at least in my being acquainted with them.

[Steve Walker]

The BallBarrow did have the advantage that the ball shouldn't sink into soft ground as much as a conventional wheelbarrow and, while tilting for cornering, the contact point shifted to the same side that the centre of gravity did, likely making it easier to control and not topple.

[Steve Walker]

The QL was actually a fairly good machine, once the add-on floppy-disk drives and a proper monitor were added.

It was a pity that it was limited by using an 8-bit data bus for the

32-bit processor and the processor having to wait while one of the ULAs accessed the memory for the display.

[Jeff Layman]

Perhaps you should read this and related pages:

A quote concerning the Z-12 (which I bought in 1969, and soon found that the heat sinks were far too small): "The other problem was the power transistors: Clive sourced manufacturer's rejects. These were re-tested before shipment to us, but the test specified was quite minimal and did not always reject bad transistors. However when the Z-12 was first designed the germanium power transistors were of fairly good quality, albeit rejects from, I think, Mullard who were the main manufacturers in those days."

And this is from the Stereo 25: "And then a power supply was needed - the PZ3. This was a transformer mounted on an L-shaped bent aluminium sheet. Unfortunately Clive had specified 1/16" (1.6mm) for this - which was far too thin. The transformer was mounted via its own bracket to the base using 2 BA (about M3.5) screws and often the weight of the transformer bent the aluminium chassis whilst in post."

I'm afraid that my experience with the Z-12 should have warned me off buying a QL in 1984. As with many Sinclair things, the microdrives were poorly designed and doomed to failure.

[Spike]

In 1936, technology could supply high-power radio-frequency amplifiers, pulse generators, oscilloscopes, aerials, and goniometers.

It took Robert Watson-Watt to put them together to make an early-warming radar system.

At the end of the war, it was precisely on those grounds, of prior existence of the parts, that RW-W was initially denied an inventors award - until he mentioned that Leonardo da Vinci's paintings were made out of wood, canvas, and oil paint, all of which already existed.

He got his award. and donated it to his team.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, its called socialism. Take money from people who have worked hard to earn it and give it to people who haven't worked hard at anything ever and watch them waste it. On snake oil.

Snake oil needs no capital. Just a glib liar. And socialism encourages those.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No,

He wasn't. he had no understanding of the products he dreamed up. I knew him well, I should know.

He had a few A levels in science and maths, never made it to university and never worked in industry. He was always selling shit to simpletons from the world go.

Your engineering skills

You have no idea what my engineering skills produced, so you are just trolling. He didn't sack me, he constructively dismissed me for proving to him in

3 pages of mathematics that the sinclair microvision could not be built with the components he had specified.

And in fact it never was. I was right, he was wrong.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Those that can do, those that cannot, teach, those that cant teach write books using other peoples ideas.

Did you really think he wrote those? Rather than plagiarised application notes?

[The Natural Philosopher]

In fact his only plus was that when his vacuums started to suffer loss of suction, you could see a disgusting heap of shit in the clear plastic container

So even housewives could see it was time to empty it

It was no better at 'pollen leakage' than any other vacuum equipped with a similar filter

He is good at marketing, but is sensible enough to leave the engineering to people who know how to do it.

Airblade dryers have been around ages in one guise or another

[The Natural Philosopher]

indeed. I knew Richard very well back in the day, He was the engineer - well technician - who designed the only decent Sinclair audio amplifier that didn't blow up or distort -the Sinclair 4000. It was mostly a texas instrument application note.

I sat in a room piled high with returned scientific calculators fixing them. I think return rate was about 10%. They were utter shit. After sending the third one back most customers simply gave up.

Richard told me when I joined sinclair that they had shown a prototype portable pocket TV at a show, but the only way it could get a signal is that they erected a massive Yagi on the roof of the place they were in, ran a cable down to a booster underneath the booth and had an enormously powerful signal re-radiated by an array under the table cloth.

Sinclair's triumph was in marketing and self promotion - there are people here who actually still believe he had a high IQ, and was a brilliant engineer!

Bless.

Everything that actually worked that had a sinclair badge on it was designed by someone else.Usually in opposition to Clives own ideas.