The affordability of Sinclair’s revolutionary 1982 home computer let a generation of young bedroom coders make anarchic, punky games, and its hardware limitations merely fostered extra creativity
• Clive Sinclair dies aged 81 – report
One day, in the bitterly cold autumn of 1981, my dad brought something home with him which he said was a sort of present for the whole family. It was a ZX81 home computer. I’d seen them advertised on TV and in comics but I never imagined we’d own one; we didn’t even have a video recorder. I remember seeing the instruction manual for the first time, with its beautiful illustration of a gigantic starship, and I understood straightaway that the thing my dad was at that moment plugging into the TV was the future. My whole family sat around the screen and took it in turns to type in one of the BASIC program listings from that weighty booklet. The result was a game in which you had to input coordinates to throw a ball into a waste-paper basket. I can’t even begin to describe how exciting that was. There was something on the TV that we’d made, and that we could interact with. It was a revelation.
For families all over Britain, Clive Sinclair – who has died aged 81 – brought computers home. The hobbyist computer market, which introduced the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak to programming, was not as well-developed in this country and required some engineering expertise – you built computers such as the Altair 8800 yourself. The ZX81, you could buy in Boots or WH Smiths or from the Argos catalogue, and it was all there for you. For £70. A lot of money for my family at the time, but not too much.
