It was always the crazies who ruled the world. And this included the good crazies and the bad crazies over time. One of the such good crazies is Sir Clive Sinclair who died yesterday.
Clive made among other things the ZX80 Spectrum home computer. It was my first computer at home bought in 1983 during my university years. It had a cassette based BASIC programming language where I learnt both BASIC as well as coding in assembly language for the Zilog Z80 CPU.
This was used connected to a black and white TV set as monitor and of course the ubiquitous cassette tape recorder to load and save programs. And more so my first introduction to games. Though calling them games in today’s context would be giving a lot of leniency - Pong, Pac-Man and Space Invaders started here.
The ZX80 was later followed in my life by the even more ubiquitous Commodore 64 and my first pocket computer the Casio PB100 with single line display, 8K memory and built in BASIC. The last one was stolen from me at university in 1985. Another (painful) memory that I can still relate to.
Today’s generation take a lot for granted, but what we have now is built upon the innovation, building blocks and resolve of countless people who are probably forgotten and taken for granted. We owe our thanks and gratitude to their craziness and persistence, without which we wouldn’t be here with what we have today.