I’m one of many people who started their computing life with a Sinclair machine in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and ended up in the industry. I started with a ZX80 and took a Spectrum to college with me, thanks Sir Clive, I learnt a lot on those machines.
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I have fond memories of my ZX Spectrum which played a big part of me being in the computer industry.
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I remember my little Sinclair scientific calculator for secondary school….r.i.p Sir Clive
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The sort of things that twenty years from now will be in museum
Indeed, my first digital watch and my first scientific calculator were courtesy of Sir Clives genius.
RIP
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Very sad to hear this. 
Owning and programming ZX81s and Spectrums helped me in my career.
I still have an '81 and Speccy. Oh, and an Enterprise programmable calculator still boxed and bought from Shoppers World.
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He was a very clever bloke and that C5 was way ahead of it’s time. If it was later, it may have sold better. Strange world.
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Fascinating to remember just how influential he was in the early home computing/electronics world - @RichardPW’s picture is an excellent testimony to that…& @Ian2001 these are already in the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley
A legend - remember buying a 16k RAM pack for my ZX81 for about £30
Blows my mind to think how much my 12TB NAS would have cost.
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And how many cartons of milk it would have taken to cool it down. (I think it was my ZX80 with RAM pack that overheated and required the milk carton strategically placed.)
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Same here. I wouldn’t be doing programming today if I hadn’t started in 1982 with a 16k zx spectrum.
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Let’s not forget the Sinclair 2000 and 3000 amps back in the 60’s. They were advertised in the hi-fi mags at the time and I believe you could buy them in kit form too. I think the 2000 was in silver and the 3000 in black (could be wrong, it’s more than 50 years ago)!
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I started with a ZX81 and Basic Programming language, 16KB RAM pack, and an I/O board, moving into Z80A Assembler, in my early teens. A few years later (6 or so) was doing Zilog CPU & UART architecture in my Electronics Degree Course. Post Graduation was Enterprise Servers & Mainframe design. So Sinclair gave low cost entry access to computing at home.
Blimey - UART… haven’t heard of those for years. Probably 30 !
Sorry to hear of Sir Clive’s passing. RIP.
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Very sad, what a clever chap he was.
ZX81 then BBC micro for me. Wish I’d never sold the ZX81. BBC B was working until last year when I tried to show the kids how to use it and the PSU went up in smoke unceremoniously.
My pal had a Spectrum which was great fun.
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Also, the DIY modules, IC10, Z30, Z50.
Used them all but I made the preamp from one of the magazine designs using veroboard. At one stage, a three box affair, power supply, pre and power, connected by Bulgin plugs, because that was what was pocket money prices from a surplus store offered. A single box was too expensive.
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The world has lost one of the geniuses!
I used his machine (ZX Spectrum 48K) with a binary camera as basic tools for my postgrad research into Robotic Vision in mid 80s.
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