The Paradoxical World of Clive Sinclair

Now 42, and with his company, Sinclair Research, recently valued at over 200 million dollars, Clive Sinclair can reflect on a 20-year career in electronics which has established him as Britain’s leading high-technology entrepreneur.

He has many ‘firsts’ to his name, from the world’s first pocket calculator (1972) and pocket television (1977), through to the first home computer under $100 (1983). Ignoring those who believed that only experts were interested in computers, his aggressive marketing has taken Sinclair Research to the top.

He is both inventor and entrepreneur, points acknowledged recently by two major British awards.

First, the leading industry weekly Computing made him ‘person of the decade’, in recognition of a 10-years’ radical and successful new product and development. Shortly after the Guardian newspaper made Clive its ‘young businessman of the year’ — and the latest in an august line which included Sir Michael Edwards, savior of the country’s onetime ailing car giant, BL.

Yet his response was typically enigmatic. Td have done anything to avoid this,’ he joked at Computing’s lunch presentation, and, speaking to the prestige audience packing London’s Mansion House, at the Guardian award ceremony, quipped, “I’m neither young nor a businessman.”

“Uncle Clive ” to the British man-in-the-street, he remains essentially shy, shunning personal publicity, except where it furthers his company or his products.

“Money,” said this multi-millionaire in a recent interview, “is only a means to an end, not to make me wealthy but to produce useful products which I think people will enjoy.”

He himself lives modestly — his company reflecting the same restrained and polished style. His ‘highs’ come, he says, “from doing for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar” — to translate a favorite English phrase.

Sinclair has no formal electronics training and opted not to go to university, preferring to learn on the job. He worked briefly as a journalist before setting up his own company in 1962.

Radio and amplifier kits were his first products with hi-fi systems ad¬ ded in the late 1960s. During these formative years he established the principles which govern almost all Sinclair products — miniaturizing approach, low-cost for high performance, and a high-quality appearance.

His aggressive style has not always met with approval. Once in the late 1970s as Sinclair worked on digital watches, pocket televisions and industrial instruments, his concentration on research and development led the company into a troubled period.

Government financial aid and intervention, via Britain’s National Enterprise Board (NEB), followed. Disagreeing with the NEB’s cautious policy on consumer electronics, Sinclair moved out to establish a new company, Sinclair Research, and to vindicate himself entirely with the personal computer.

Beginning with the ZX80 and an initial staff of only seven, Sinclair Research has grown extremely rapidly. It grossed 130,000 sales with the ZX80, and now well over a million with the more advanced T/S1000/ZX81.

Measuring just 6” x 6 1/2” x 1 1/2”, the ZX81 took miniaturization to its logical conclusion. Utilizing a four-chip design based on a Sinclair-designed ULA it maximizes high-performance for low-cost — currently just $69 in the United States — and presents a high-quality appearance, confirmed by the U.K. Design Council’s 1982 award.

Behind this product lies an integrated design approach, stemming from a clearly defined business philosophy. Sinclair firmly believes in keeping his company small — even today there are only 55 direct employees — enabling complete cooperation between all departments.

That way he aims to avoid problems of large management superstructures and a bureaucracy which might stifle creativity, so vital to a fastmoving and increasingly competitive business. Sinclair subcontracts all manufacture and most distribution.

Out of its major relationship with Timex grew the present agreement which, in return for a royalty on all sales, licenses Timex to use Sinclair’s technology and name to manufacture and market personal computers, computer peripherals and software throughout North America.

Sinclair believed that Timex’s manufacturing expertise with the ZX81, allied with its acknowledged marketing expertise in North America, where it has around 70,000 outlets, would prove a formidable combination — a belief well-proven by T/S1000 sales.

Interestingly, the agreement covers present and future developments at Sinclair together with Timex’s own developments of the basic technology. There is no theoretical restriction on the potential of new computers.

Beyond the T/S1000, Timex expects to introduce later this year its version of Sinclair’s Spectrum, dubbed the T/S2000. Spectrum, currently priced from about $185 in the U.K., follows the usual innovative Sinclair pattern and with its powerful 16K ROM and maximum 48K RAM has opened a major new market. More than 200,000 have been sold in the U.K. alone.

The agreement exemplifies Sinclair’s whole approach — subcontract wherever appropriate, simple communication and flexibility. He abhors unnecessary fuss, producing a withdrawn yet aggressive business style which matches the personality and helps explain the enigma.

He believes his ideas illustrate a fundamental change now evolving in the West’s economic structure. Increasingly he sees manufacturing employment declining — with work moving out to the Third World once products become traditional.

Then, he says, you start again — creating something new. By the 1990s, he hopes that Britain will have turned to the ‘products of the mind’ — books, video programs, computer software, design and consultancy services, health and education packages.

Sinclair Research, he is confident, has a major role to play in that kind of world. Later this year, it will launch a new 2″ pocket television, incorporating advanced flatscreen technology. A color version will follow and there are tentative plans to incorporate an enlarged screen into future computer developments.

Sinclair is currently exploring new ideas, many of them perhaps years from commercial exploitation, and his explanation of the process offers a fascinating insight.

“What one does, in fact, is to see a distant objective — an office robot, say — and to plot back from that all the steps that would need to be taken to achieve it. Having done that you might find that some of these steps couldn’t be taken, so you would drop the idea for a while — or try to find solutions to those problems.

“Take for example the electric car that 1 propose to bring out in 1985. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing an electric vehicle for about 12 years, and done various little experimental vehicles to try out this idea or that. But it wasn’t until two or three years ago that there had been enough innovation in all kinds of fields to give us a package that clicked.”

One might imagine that the man’s life is devoted solely to electronics but he has a wide range of outside interests, ranging from mathematics — interestingly, he prefers a slide rule to calculators or computers — to the theatre. Perhaps his greatest personal love is poetry.

He is also a trustee of the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra and chairman of the British Mensa Society — an organization which encourages intellectual contact among all walks of life.

Somewhere between the inventor and the entrepreneur, between the aggressive business style and quiet individual, between the electronics ideas and the cultural interests, lies the resolution of the Sinclair enigma — and the sparking point for a very successful man.