Clive Sinclair

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“The C5 Had An Almost Instant Image Problem”

December 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

AI can kill all of you humans, and Sir Clive Sinclair will not give a fig. But until that fine day when we’re eminated by machines even more unfeeling than ourselves, let us meditate for a moment on a product the entrepreneur thrust upon the world in 1985, the Sinclair C5. It was a battery-powered EV tricycle, and it was a gigantic flop, the Edsel of pedal transport, a DeLorean dreamed up without the aid of cocaine courage. Was the vehicle wrong or just the time? From Jack Stewart’s BBC piece “Was the Sinclair C5 30 Years Too Early?“:

The C5 had an almost instant image problem. The press and public saw the C5 less as a new mode of transport, and more as a toy – and an expensive one at that. Yours for only £399 (£1,120), and if you wanted to go uphill, you would have to pedal. But the C5 went from drawing board to prototype without any market research, according to Andrew Marks, who wrote an investigation into the vehicle’s failure for the European Journal of Marketing four years after the C5 was released. Sir Clive believed he could create a market where none had existed before, using changes in legislation that allowed electric pedal vehicles and improving battery technology. But, as Marks argues, the C5 programme seemed to be dictated by the company’s conviction, rather than by public demand.

The C5 was also immediately criticised for its safety, or lack thereof. ‘I don’t like the ideas of driving it in traffic, frankly,’ says [BBC reporter Dick] Oliver in [his] report. The driving position was extremely low, making it effectively invisible to other vehicles. It could also be operated by anyone over 14 years old in the UK, without a license or helmet. Famed racing driver Stirling Moss expressed his concerns too.

‘If people get into it and in any way think that they’re in a car because they’re sitting down, then they’re in trouble.’

Media reviews were also harsh about the range – the battery did not live up to expectations – and there was too much exposure to the elements. In retrospect a January launch in London may not have been the most enticing demonstration to carry out. The poor reception meant orders were minimal, and production ceased around eight months later.•

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“Imagine a vehicle that can drive you five miles for a penny”:

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“The Lid Of Pandora’s Box Is Starting To Open”

December 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Computer pioneer Clive Sinclair has been predicting since the 1980s that self-designing intelligent machines will definitely be the doom of us, but he’s not letting it ruin his day. Che sera sera, you carbon-based beings. As you were. From Leo Kelion at the BBC:

“His ZX Spectrum computers were in large part responsible for creating a generation of programmers back in the 1980s, when the machines and their clones became best-sellers in the UK, Russia, and elsewhere.

At the time, he forecast that software run on silicon was destined to end ‘the long monopoly’ of carbon-based organisms being the most intelligent life on Earth.

So it seemed worth asking him what he made of Prof Stephen Hawking’s recent warning that artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

‘Once you start to make machines that are rivalling and surpassing humans with intelligence it’s going to be very difficult for us to survive – I agree with him entirely,’ Sir Clive remarks.

‘I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. It’s just an inevitability.’

So, should the human race start taking precautions?

‘I don’t think there’s much they can do,’ he responds. ‘But it’s not imminent and I can’t go round worrying about it.’

It marks a somewhat more relaxed view than his 1984 prediction that it would be ‘decades, not centuries’ in which computers ‘capable of their own design’ would rise.

‘In principle, it could be stopped,’ he warned at the time. ‘There will be those who try, but it will happen nonetheless. The lid of Pandora’s box is starting to open.'”

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“Texas Instruments’ Engineers Said This Was Impossible”

September 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of “Reversing Sinclair’s Amazing 1974 Calculator Hack,” Ken Shirriff’s fun (if somewhat technical) blog post which explains how Clive Sinclair re-engineered a calculator in the 1970s and made something far better and cheaper:

“In a hotel room in Texas, Clive Sinclair had a big problem. He wanted to sell a cheap scientific calculator that would grab the market from expensive calculators such as the popular HP-35. Hewlett-Packard had taken two years, 20 engineers, and a million dollars to design the HP-35, which used 5 complex chips and sold for $395. Sinclair’s partnership with calculator manufacturer Bowmar had gone nowhere. Now Texas Instruments offered him an inexpensive calculator chip that could barely do four-function math. Could he use this chip to build a $100 scientific calculator?

Texas Instruments’ engineers said this was impossible – their chip only had 3 storage registers, no subroutine calls, and no storage for constants such as π. The ROM storage in the calculator held only 320 instructions, just enough for basic arithmetic. How could they possibly squeeze any scientific functions into this chip?

Fortunately Clive Sinclair, head of Sinclair Radionics, had a secret weapon – programming whiz and math PhD Nigel Searle. In a few days in Texas, they came up with new algorithms and wrote the code for the world’s first single-chip scientific calculator, somehow programming sine, cosine, tangent, arcsine, arccos, arctan, log, and exponentiation into the chip. The engineers at Texas Instruments were amazed.”

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