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Dating In Hong Kong On FirstClickFriend.Com Offers Online Dating Services And Online Personals For All Regions In Hong Kong. Dating In Hong Kong Can Be Really Successful Ith FirstClickFriend.Com It's Sir Clive Sinclair, although
in 1983 he wasn't a Sir. "Order today", he's saying, "so
that we have enough money to finish designing it". Clive Sinclair
was a bit like a cross between Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer and Adolf
Hitler of the Nazi Party, in that he was a technical boffin whose obsessions
brought his company to swift fame and success, and equally-swift ruin.
If only he had instructed Goering to concentrate on the factories and
airfields! If only the jet fighters had been adopted a year, two years
earlier! What a world it would be today.
Sinclair Research and Apple Computer emerged at roughly the same time,
and if you're American it's best to think of Sinclair as being a kind
of condensed Apple with only one memorable personality, Clive Sinclair
himself. Sinclair (the man) had spent the 70s designing and selling miniature
radios, digital watches and pocket calculators by mail order. They usually
weren't built very well (the digital 'Black
Watch' could, in certain circumstances, actually explode), but they
were cheap, clever, and British.
Britain's computing industry has always faced a number of persistent problems;
all the good staff go to America, there's a lot of tax and regulation,
the pound is strong, the domestic market isn't large enough to sustain
itself, and so forth. British industry in general tends to suffer from
a lack of leeway; whilst America has enough companies in a given field
so that the failure of one does not destroy the field, Britain does not.
During the 1960s and 1970s Britain's aerospace industry merged and fell
apart - BAE SYSTEMS, which survives today, does not actually make entire
aircraft - whilst the failure of Westland in the 1980s removed Britain's
helicopter industry instantly. The collapse of BL almost destroyed Britain's
car industry (it is barely surviving today). Today, if you want to design
cars or planes or ships or trains or bicycles or skateboards - or indeed
machinery in general - and you are British, you had better get
a good degree and move abroad. Britain does not have a space industry.
A 1,000lb bomb dropped in the right place would remove Britain's newspaper
publishing industry, and so on.
Sinclair were quite gratifying in the 80s. It was nice to know that there
was a British company that could actually compete with Johnny Foreigner
on their own terms. In retrospect, the company was a fluke of timing,
existing at a brief time period when, thanks to a bunch of developments
in micro-electronics, a range of new, exciting consumer electronic devices
could be created with off-the-shelf components and a little bit of know-how.
Every subsequent technological development in the home computing field
has been about refinement, and that takes money and persistence, not the
kind of random brainstorms that Sinclair was built on.
Sir Clive Sinclair differs from most of his tech-entrepreneur kin in that
he remained likeable. In interviews, he seemed slightly arrogant but unpretentious,
and although the C5 was a fiasco, it stemmed from a noble aim. Furthermore,
Sir Clive seemed to have a genuine interest in the technology, whereas
the other famous computery businessmen - Jobs, Gates, Ellison, the lot
of them - appear to be more interested in marketing, which is perhaps
why Sir Clive is a nobody and the aforementioned are extremely rich. There
isn't really a place for people like Sir Clive anymore, as Sir Clive's
subsequent lack of business success (first with the Z88 laptop, a surprising
failure, then with the 'Zike' and 'Zeta' bicycle add-ons, and latterly
with a mail-order PC business) illustrates.
The hand-held television Sir Clive is holding up - a non-working prototype
of the TV80
- seemed to be perpetually under development. Sinclair poured lots of
money into developing the television's clever cathode-ray display (the
electron gun is at right angles to the screen, with the path of the electrons
being bent by magnets). Unfortunately nobody wanted it when it was finally
released.
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