One of the biggest selling games on the Spectrum was Jetpac which has just been remade by the Rare, who were Ultimate Play the Game. It's available on the xbox360's Live Arcade as shareware. Play the updated demo for free or pay for the full game which also unlocks the original version!

http://www.rareware.com/games/jetpac/

Used to work for Amstrad & remember working on these.

The real trick that Clive Sinclair had up his sleeve was a hidden technology trick which got the price down.

He bought duff memory chips for next to nothing and retested them to find out in which half of the memory the fault was. The circuitry of his machines was designed to only use the working half of an otherwise duff memory chip.

It was sheer engineering genius to buy chips which had failed the test, and a lot did in those days, and design a box around their failings.

Because it doesn't matter how good your gadget is, if the price ain't right you don't win.

Well done Clive Sinclair, hero of the common man.

Remember playing a football manager type game, stick players oh the joy of wasted youth! Then progressed to an Amiga 500

Sir Clive is one of the great figures of British 20th century innovation. Even the C5, which was almost universally derided on release, was years ahead of its time, and would be hailed today as some kind of a breakthrough against global warming.

I've still got two Speccies and a QL in my garage, along with a Speccie emulator on my PC... mmm Elite, the greatest computer game ever...

Remember the QL - could so easily have been a standard apart from those stupid microdrives.

Quill, Easel and superbasic included...

#6 Absolutely right - the Sinclair QL was the first computer to ship with bundled office software - totally ahead of its time. They introduced the floppy disks too late, but it really was an amazing machine.

I fondly remember my rubber-keyed Spectrum, and eventually sending it away for an upgrade to the moving-key version.

It inspired me to do a degree in Computer Science, I think like many others. Clive Sinclair really inspired a generation to tinker and learn about computers, rather than just load games and play.

The IBM PC was a computer. The Sinclair was a toy, as was the BBC.

I've still got a working ZX81 - only 1k of RAM though as the 16K addon pack seems to have given up...

That 16K RAM pack cost me £30 when I was a bairn... if prices were still the same for RAM, a 1Gb chip would be just short of £2,000 :0)

I still recall you could get games to run in 16k (and really basic ones in 1k) of memory.

In the UK anyway, Clive Sinclair is the father of the modern computer revolution.

#8 Utter rot. The success of the PC is entirely down to standardisation and commoditisation - essentially, down to IBM's inspired decision to publish the blueprints and allow clones of its desktop machines to be sold. In terms of technology and development, computers like the Beeb, the Spectrum, the Amiga and others were far more daring, interesting and accessible to the public, and inspired far more kids to careers in IT.

ZX Spectrum? Bah! modern new fangled device. Who could have wished for more than my trusty old ZX81? Now that was a real machine.

10 PRINT Hello
20 GOTO 10

Ah the hours of endless fun that could be had :-)

#11 and got even better if you added a semi-colon
- shame if the ram pack wobbled though !

The original home computer was the Altair released through a hobbyist mag in the 70's. The best in the UK market was the BBC micro and Acorn
electron. The Spectrum was the first , but it was also a piece of s**t. It was difficult to expand due
to the custom (ASIC) chips and the quality of manufacturing was sub-standard. It had slower access times due to a serial interface to the audio cassette ,and it was costlier than the others.

From a engineering and educational point of view
it was poor. Game buffs liked it because it used the
popular and more powerful Zilog z80 processor and they could use joysticks. Games were written in assembler and not basic. I dont think the guy was a genius as 5 other computers were already in the market based on the Z80 - Apple I, Apple II, Commodore PET 64, and TRS-80. The drawing for the original home computer had been published in popular electronics mag and was there for any entreprenuer to copy or modify.

#10. Duncan in Edinburgh
You hit the nail on the head. I taught programming to schoolchildren in the early 1980s. There were quite a few Spectrums, Commodores and Victors, and an Atari around our school at the time.

I had the first BBC-B (with its massive 32k memory!). I liked the BBC for its user-friendliness. BBC BASIC was a nice tool to teach elementary programming, even if loading software from tape was a pain. I did balk at the price though (£440 as against the £125 Spectrum). Compare with today's PC prices and mega-spec.

Clive Sinclair should be applauded for his part in opening up a whole new world to a generation.

"... 5 other computers were already in the market based on the Z80 - Apple I, Apple II, Commodore PET 64, and TRS-80."

Uh... no.

Apart from that being only 4 computers, you are wrong 3 times out of 4:

Unit: Year: CPU

Apple I: 1976: 6502
Apple II: 1977: 6502
Pet 64: 1977: 6502

You may have been thinking also of the Atari 2600:

2600: 1977: 6502

The only Z80 machine in your list:

TRS-80: 1977: Z80

That would get you up to 5 machines, but also make you 80% wrong.

And the Sinclair ZX80 was launched long after all of these, in 1980, using the Z80 processor. By that time the Z80 was serioulsy obsolescent, which was why Sinclair used it: it could be bought for almost nothing as no-one else wanted them. It was used by the BBC and Amstrad computers for the same reason.

#16
seem to recall my apple 2e had a 65C02 CPU