Clive Sinclair is a dinosaur, the ZX81 was pathetic, the Z80 was a horrible processor, the 6502 based BBC B, Apple, and ALL the Commodore machines were MUCH better, yep even the PETs and the VIC 20! We still have to deal with the horrible legacy of the Intel and Zilog style of CPU architecture and instruction sets!
As for memory use, hasn't he heard that lookup tables, and caches, are vastly faster than processing, that applied even back in the 80's, I was using them back then!
Yes he is British, but his stuff was dire, enough said.

I'm with Clive, computers these days are incredibly inefficient. As machines become more powerfull, programmers become lazy, bugs everywhere & 5 minutes to do what should take 5 micro seconds.

I started computer life with his kit MK14 (still got it). I learnt a lot from that machine and even improved the logic & keyboard design. I then went on to design & build an add-on that made it talk & make rude noises - how many years ago ?.

Someone needs to start up a company to rival Microsoft. Write an OS from the ground up in machine code & couple it with touch screens etc. No more fiddling and bolting on new front ends to an old struggling core.

Thank you Clive for starting my career.

Regards

From being a bit of a hero I think he has almost given up.

Maybe he was just a good 'technical manager' but not using the Internet are the words of a dinosaur.

Quite sad really and maybe Micromen was accurate.

He does have a point though right? The code now is not very efficient and I often wonder why I sit waiting on a thing that can do billions of instructions per second and can shuffle around gigs of data a sec.
And drivers or simple utilities that take 250+MB space make no real sense either.

Perhaps Sir Clive's stumped because he doesn't know how to type without his beloved Caps Shift & Symbol Shift key combinations....

I had the ZX81 and it was brilliant for games (within its limitations). Psion Flight Simulator, and hours typing in machine code from Sinclair User magazine.
I wrote a Cowboy fps in 1982 with nothing more than the standard graphics (eyes would flash a number when he was about to draw - you had to hit the appropriate key before he fired).
Necessity is the mother of invention - Coding has to be tight to get every last drop out of it.
Compared to ping-pong on the telly it was a great leap forward.
:)

Similarly to the C4, I don't remember anything called the "Sedgeway" either.

Like Clive, did the author get somebody else to write this article for him?

ZX80 popular amongst gamers? How? It couldn't process and display at the same time, as it used the same chip for both. It had 1k of memory and was hard pressed to play draughts.

I don't remember the C4, only the C5 electric car.
What I will say about that is,it was more like a 'toy' than an attempt to seriously challenge the internal combustion engine.
Had he 'scaled' it up a bit,I'm certain that it would have had a much greater impact & could well have made him, the Bill Gates of the AUTO world.
As it was,it was something of a hazard to anyone that ventured onto the roads in one.
I had a ZX80 as well,I liked it's compactness for it's time,but it's the GPU imho, that really changed things with pc's,I mwean, it wasn't really much fun playing ping pong all day long was it.
The BBC introduced,what was at that time, the most sought after machine,but again, it's gaming that drove the PC brigade ever forward & upwards to what it is today.
The evolution of all PC development, has come along light years ahead of it's early days & I can't see it stopping.
I think 'optical' PC's will be the goal for faster & eventually cheaper computing,as well as being 'greener'.

.... thank you anyway, sir Clive!

It was ZX Spectrum that introduced me to the IT world!

Nowadays I earn my bacon thanks to my early experiences with my beloved Speccy!

Nowadays I don't POKE anymore and neither I RANDOMIZE USR something; nevertheless that's how I wrote and executed my very first assembly program .... (no money for an assembler, even less for an expansion to the basic 16K).

Sorry to hear he doesn't use computer anymore....

was a Sinclair company. 256 bytes of RAM, 512 or 1024 (can't remember) ROM. Just enough room for a moon landing game with a calculator display and a hex keyboard.

Program in raw machine code

C5 methinks!