Clive Sinclair
A Tribute to A Man of Elegant Design, Ahead of His Time
Sadly, Clive Sinclair passed away on September 16, 2021, after a long illness at the age of 81. He was, in all senses of the word, a visionary. Looking at some of the things he built and achieved emphasizes what a rare talent he was.
Pure Design: The Sinclair Cambridge Programmable Calculator
Many years ago, I owned a programmable Sinclair Cambridge Programmable Calculator that I loved to pieces. It was a very long time ago but it remains one of the most memorable tech items I’ve ever used. It was far ahead of its time both in design and power.
The calculator design was so Jony Ive-like, but well before Ive started his famous work at Apple. Ive was responsible for the design of the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod, and the lickable candy-colored G3 iMacs.
As for the Sinclair calculator, it was white (an oddity for products of that time), perfect to hold, light, simple, effective. I think it was my first introduction to falling in love with product design features.
Compare and contrast with the standards of the late 70s and 80s:
Look at all those keys. All that complexity (not to mention, reverse Polish notation). Now, look back to the utter simplicity of the Sinclair Cambridge Programmable calculator, not to mention the large comfortable button size and the overall package that fit perfectly into hands and pockets.
The calculator came with four paperback books of mathematical formulae, the API library of its time: the Sinclair Cambridge Programmable Program Library. You can read the books at the Internet Archive.
With today’s eye, I find it hilarious that the formula for meters to feet/inches comes with a warning that, “this may take some time to run.”
Look at the formula book style: very clean, lots of white space, two-color theme. The layout is so unlike what you think of as a 1970s manual.
More often, a 1970s manual looked like a wall of text, maybe with some circuit diagrams thrown in, as in the Apple-1 Operation Manual. Contrast the Apple text with the Sinclair docs. The calculator instructions are clear, concise, and written to simplify using the product for the person who has purchased it. This kind of customer-driven technical writing exemplifies empathy with the reader and directs itself to elevating the user experience.
The Sinclair ZX80 Computer
Consider, as well, the Sinclair computer. Following is an image of the Sinclair ZX80. It cost under $200, could be hooked up to a normal TV, and weighed just 340 grams (about 12 ounces). It could run a printer. It had BASIC onboard. It included built-in ports to connect to a cassette tape for storage. In other words, it featured nearly all the selling points of its time at a price point that was unthinkably affordable and within a tiny package that was simply remarkable.
In contrast, the Osborne 1 weighed 25 pounds and cost $2000.
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I know many people whose first steps into the tech world were from using his computers, opening doorways that would have otherwise been closed.
Ahead of His Time?
The design and innovation didn’t stop with the programmable calculator or the ZX80. Guess who designed this electric one-person vehicle as well?
Image of the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle by Prioryman — CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35368166.
Image by Prioryman — CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35368168.
As for his other designs, they may not appear in museums with small labels beside them to describe their places in world heritage but they are no less for that.
So long as you respond to a piece of created material, whether it hangs on the wall of a gallery or lives in your back pocket, it is still art. We are all of us the richer for its creation.
The Success of Design
Understanding and empathizing with your end-user, regardless of whether you’re designing a product, writing tech documentation, or building code is the core of creating something great. Buttons built for fingers, layout presented for human eyes, code meant for understanding, and easy maintenance are all representative of a fundamental respect for the person who follows.
When you build something great, it is measured in the pleasure and utility it provides to the consumer; the measure of great design is the joy it evokes in its recipient.
As humans, we recognize that design, not because we’ve gone to art classes or studied proper writing style. We recognize it because it resonates with us.
Great design isn’t about cerebral approval. It’s about joy. It’s about looking at a thing of beauty and taking pleasure in how it elevates our lives and eases our tasks.
While I personally focus on code, and more specifically on well-written, maintainable, testable, and comprehensible development, the same qualities apply to calculators, to keyboards, to manuals, and more. What Clive Sinclair gave to us, and as other great designers do in other fields and other products, are artifacts that fit so seamlessly into our lives that we either marvel at their beauty or barely think of them at all. A perfect design can be invisible because it just works the way it should and gets its job done without intruding into our thoughts.
So let’s give a moment of thanks to Clive Sinclair and the beautiful and elegant items he built.
RIP Clive Sinclair.
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