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I think Clive Sinclair's achievements were pretty remarkable. He created a market, or a segment of the market, that hadn't previously existed (and would arguably vanish again until the Raspberry Pi took up the torch decades later). Home computers were already starting to become a thing, but were more expensive than many wanted to pay for a gadget they had no particular use for. Sinclair realised that by choosing components carefully and stripping the machine down to its bare essentials it would be possible to make a functional, mass-produced home computer with a broad appeal that would be substantially cheaper than the competition. The £100 ZX80 was followed by the £70 ZX81, which fell to £50 pre-assembled (originally the price of the kit version) before it was discontinued. The cheapest 16K Spectrum, with colour and sound, launched at £125 and was down to £100 before long. Suddenly, a new technology was accessible and a whole generation of kids whose families might never have bought one of the pricier models from Commodore or Acorn or Atari ended up with a real computer in their Christmas stockings, complete with a programming manual. Turning it on just launched a command prompt, a line editor inviting you to write your own programs. Many, perhaps, never got further than typing LOAD "" so they could get down to the serious business of playing Manic Miner. But for those who started to explore what the machine could do, this would often be the start of a lifelong interest and a future career.
It goes without saying that this was not all the work of one man, any more than Apple was just Steve Jobs. But making this sort of enterprise work is an enormously difficult task. Most of the home computers of the early 80s are long-forgotten, and there were far more failures than successes, even from major companies. A couple of the talented Sinclair engineers mentioned above had a go at setting up their own company to make the Jupiter Ace, a product that sank without trace. But for a few brief years, Sinclair kept the plates spinning long enough to put computers into the hands of millions of people. And we continue to see the influence of this period in various ways today. A teenager in Finland, Linus Torvalds, bought himself Sinclair's overambitious followup to the Spectrum, the QL, which would never become popular or receive much support, especially outside the UK. The lack of software for this quirky machine would force him to write his own, so that by the time he became a student and acquired a PC he was already an experienced system-level programmer. His next major project, of course, was Linux.
It goes without saying that this was not all the work of one man, any more than Apple was just Steve Jobs. But making this sort of enterprise work is an enormously difficult task. Most of the home computers of the early 80s are long-forgotten, and there were far more failures than successes, even from major companies. A couple of the talented Sinclair engineers mentioned above had a go at setting up their own company to make the Jupiter Ace, a product that sank without trace. But for a few brief years, Sinclair kept the plates spinning long enough to put computers into the hands of millions of people. And we continue to see the influence of this period in various ways today. A teenager in Finland, Linus Torvalds, bought himself Sinclair's overambitious followup to the Spectrum, the QL, which would never become popular or receive much support, especially outside the UK. The lack of software for this quirky machine would force him to write his own, so that by the time he became a student and acquired a PC he was already an experienced system-level programmer. His next major project, of course, was Linux.
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