and a chance to see the great optimist Clive Sinclair at work in The Anatomy of an Inventor.
A woman I was talking to at the luncheon said her son was in electronics and I said oh yes,
so is mine and she said what's his name and I said and she said oh the little car and everybody
always says now the little car about the you know the really big failure which I think is
so sad because there've been so many things that weren't failures. The name Sinclair stands for
cheap new electronic products aimed at a mass market. Some Sinclair gadgets have changed our
lives, others have sunk without trace. Various Sinclair companies have come and gone. They've
made and lost millions of pounds. Sinclair enterprises have been with us for 30 years.
They began with miniature transistor radios and hi-fi. Some had style, even beauty. Sinclair
created the first pocket calculator and the first digital watch. He invented the first
miniature television. Its tube crammed into six inches of plastic behind a two-inch screen. The
greatest Sinclair success was in home computers. This was his first, the ZX80. The author of these
devices is a visionary and a salesman who sees both these roles as aspects of being an inventor.
There are a lot of people around who might consider themselves inventors but unless the product is
eventually sold it hasn't gone through that test of actually reaching the public. It's of no use
if it doesn't. An inventor's not there to produce an idea that pleases him. An inventor's only makes
any sense at all if he produces an idea which improves the wealth or happiness of men. As he
strives to improve our wealth and happiness Clive Sinclair has had commercial disasters
like the C5 electric vehicle which was condemned by critics for being unsafe.
But the new ideas which flow from his mind are unending. Failure has never deflected him for
long. Today he's still trying to solve our transport problems by redesigning the bicycle.
New companies founded by him but independent are having success with this lightweight computer.
There's a personal phone aimed at the new telepoint market
and a smart satellite dish nicknamed the Squish.
He himself is working on a new kind of silicon wafer which won't have to be cut up into
separate chips. What is it that feeds this endless and restless flow of ideas?
Well in a strange sort of way the whole business of invention is a non-material thing.
It's very hard to know why it gives such pleasure. Clearly it's something that's evolved in us.
It's a very spiritual sort of feeling but my own personal life is enriched by poetry and literature,
novels and by music and in particular by opera.
I do find that living alone in the solitude that provides very comforting, soothing. Not to say I'm
I'm lonely in any sense at all because I have a great many friends or acquaintances and a few
very great friends. One of his friends drew him into publishing. They offered a prize for new
fiction. They also toyed with a sci-fi novel under their joint names of Clive Sinclair
and Patrick Brown. There's been an escape of a virus, a retrovirus you see from the laboratories.
Perhaps and it gets what this virus does it gets into people and it affects their brains so that
they they don't have to start talking sense well the gin virus it's got uh it's um makes me
split personalities you see in the sense that there are two actual completely separate personalities
in the brain. He's a very whole human being. Many of the people that we meet in the high tech area
are either boffins, a head full of scientific knowledge but very little social life or else
they're the entrepreneurial craving and grasping people and Clive doesn't fit that bill at all.
He's a very nice human being, relaxed, nice voice, awfully good manners, charm.
Family is important to Clive Sinclair. Every week he meets his father for a chat.
Bill Sinclair trained as a mechanical engineer and later ran his own machine tool business.
Clive was born in 1940, the first of three children destined for a conventional upper
middle class upbringing and education. Well he went away to school when he was seven.
And it was really like sending a baby away but as he was the eldest of the family it didn't seem
like that to me. I think I was a strict mother so it wasn't much good crying or anything and taking
any notice of that sort of thing. As a child I was fascinated by mathematics and also by almost any
object um whether it was a piece of cloth or a piece of paper or a piece of paper or a piece of
whether it was a piece of cloth or a mechanical device. I have felt a compulsion to understand
how it worked so I was and indeed I felt very um concerned about something. I didn't understand
it and so I was pursued it until I did. When he was 10 the prep school he was at which was a very
good one said they couldn't teach him any further mathematics. He was up toward beyond the level of
his own teachers so that he's he's had a pretty good brain ever since. Clive was still impressing
his teachers when there was a major breakthrough in electronics. The days of the valve were numbered
expensive and unreliable as it was. The new invention was the transistor built out of
semiconductors first germanium then silicon. Transistors would be the basis of Clive's whole
career but before he'd even heard of them he'd become fascinated by electronics as his sister
remembers. I was certainly aware of a room full of wires and connecting things and it just seemed
like a maze to me when I went into it. That's all there was in there hiding the bed hiding the tables
and books. Well when I was at Reading a boy in my house um told me about logarithms before we'd
been taught he was in a year ahead of me and and he told me that you could have these things which
enabled you to perform multiplication just by using adding and I was absolutely fascinated by this
and started to work out how to compile logarithm tables and I it occurred to me um since I wanted
to use these for a calculating machine which was a passion of mine that if I form the logarithms out
of just noughts and ones which was a possible a possibility that this would make it very much
simpler for the machine and I was terribly excited by this discovery that you could have
a numbering system just using noughts and ones and thought this was a wonderful discovery until
I found that it had been discovered not a century or two earlier but it was still was a good idea
I was a bit late with it Clive's education was disrupted by a family disaster. He was only 12
when Bill Sinclair's business collapsed and he was forced to sell up and move.
Over the next five years Clive was sent to one new school after another.
We had um you know we had we hit a very bad patch and he was then about 13 or 14
and so it hit him pretty hard but he was very supportive and he took it very well indeed and
you know and um he didn't grumble or anything. Clive became even more immersed in electronics.
He dreamed of starting his own business and he was soon designing circuits
like the ones he read about. University seemed a waste of time. He didn't of course pursue
a formal education beyond the A levels and in many ways this could have increased his ability
to be creative. You know children are very creative, enormous imagination and as we get
older and we get more and more education a lot of that creativity can get knocked out of us
and it wasn't knocked out of Clive and that's I think one of Clive's great secrets that he never
specialized in the education sense. He was offered as you probably heard from other people this job
you see quite a high salary at the time and he wanted to do that and he spent several days and
weeks persuading me that it was a good idea and in the end of course that's what he did.
The job was that of technical writer and later editor for a publisher of hi-fi books. Clive
pursued it for four years. He got his name and even his face known to the readers of practical
wireless. By now he was married and living in London. His second career began when he started
putting together kits for the home constructor. These were aimed at a growing market of enthusiasts
for the new transistor gadgetry. While he was searching out components Clive came across his
first and most loyal collaborator a 15 year old sales assistant. I was working in a radio and tv
shop selling bits and Clive was a frequent visitor to the shop. He'd written a few books on electronics
which we sold and one day when he came in I said look I've built this and I've improved it a little
bit by adding an extra transistor and talked about it a little bit and another time he came in I said
if you've ever got any jobs you know I might be quite interested to uh move across and then one
day came and said you know not many months later you ought to you ought to come I've had a word
with your boss and uh that was the beginning of the adventure I suppose. In 1962 Clive started
his first company Sinclair Radionics. The products were sent out from this unpromising shed. To
distribute them Clive roped in a group of impoverished Cambridge intellectuals. At that
time Clive was just beginning to produce his mail order kits and was looking for some sort of
organization to put all the little bits together in bags and send them out and so if you look at
the early Sinclair Radionics advertisements you'll see that they have as their address 69
Heston Road which was uh my offices at the time and we suddenly discovered that there was all
sorts of mail for a company called Sinclair Radionics coming through the letterbox. Great
piles of beautifully colored postal orders were amassing and there were all sorts of little pieces
to be put into envelopes and sent out all over the world. The product always was highly technical,
read beautifully, had beautiful copy on it. It read a good mugs eyeful and it was cheap so if it
didn't work I don't think the customer had the heart to send it back and if he did send it back
Sinclair would of course give him a new one. We hadn't met anybody like Clive before and uh
and we were sure that he'd either become a millionaire or go broke and uh subsequent events
will show which of our opinions was right really wouldn't they. In 1966 the radio and television
exhibition at Earls Court saw a demonstration of the first Sinclair Microvision. It just about
worked. What do you see as the use of a set as small as this? Well radios have become personalized
um I think televisions will follow the same trend because people are on the move a lot.
They can watch sport during the day and if they're traveling they don't have to
miss their favorite programs and um each person in the family can have their own set now and not
interfere with other people's viewing. But the components were packed too densely to be reliable
and the set never reached the market. There are an awful lot of ideas quite a few of them never get
beyond the drawing board but just about all of them are like banging head against a brick wall
and just sometimes it gives way. We've never Clive and I we've never ever done anything that's easy
and it's probably because the thing's very difficult that other people haven't been there
before or they've been there before and they've turned away. Hi-Fi equipment really exemplifies
one of the sort of chronic and recurring mistakes of of that Sir Clive manages to make from time to
time um an almost obsessive emphasis with with compactness that that in fact many of his Hi-Fi
sets if you just made them a little bit bigger they probably would have worked far more reliably.
I mean trying to pack an awful lot of circuitry into a very small space which generates heat
um doesn't help um the things to carry on working. The Hi-Fi sets were notoriously unreliable.
The par for the call seemed to be that they'd go back to the factory four or five times before
the the buyer actually got one that would work for a while. It does terrible things to your cash
flow. It does nothing for staff morale. Morale of the people at the factory obviously tends to crumble
when when your service managers have a career lifespan of about five weeks before they're
carried out in a stretcher um and you're tremendously reliant on the next product to bail you out of the
of the disasters of the old one um which is all very well if you actually have a a winning next
product but um that can't always be guaranteed. The problem was that Clive was way ahead on
technology but way behind on production and quality control. As always he wanted to get the
products out and was bored by delays. He had anyway become gripped by another idea one which
he'd toyed with since childhood. I remember um his mentioning this thing which I didn't
understand what he was talking about at all that he had this idea for a thing like a pocket computer
and um he he didn't had no idea how it would take but it was going to be you know getting
rid of the slide rule and so on and um in fact of course it was the pocket calculator.
It was the advancement of silicon chips that made Clive's new invention possible.
So many circuits were now being layered onto the chip that the thousands of microscopic transistors
could carry out mathematical instructions to add, subtract, divide and multiply.
But the miniaturization of the circuits wasn't enough to produce a pocket-sized machine.
Clive's real problem was the batteries. If they were too small they didn't last long enough to
power the display properly. If they were too big they defeated the whole object.
The breakthrough came with a lucky discovery. We got some chips and um tried them out and Clive
noticed that one day while I was I disconnected the leads and then putting them back a few
moments later the digits on the screen came back as they'd been before the power was taken off.
So it was obvious there was some um storage happening inside the chip when there was no
power applied. So we managed to turn that into um a power saving feature whereby we powered the
chip up for about one thirtieth of the time but did it so quickly you couldn't see it on the display
because it only took a thirtieth of the power. We were able to power the chip from tiny hearing
aid batteries and make a very small and lightweight pocket calculator. Clive also slashed the cost
by making the expensive gallium arsenide digits very small and mounting them all together on one
circuit board. He then put a magnifying bubble over each digit to make it visible. This ingenious
innovation was copied by every other manufacturer. At less than 80 pounds a Sinclair calculator was
the perfect executive gift. The product ideally should be pleasing in every sense in its function
and in its appearance so the aesthetic should grow from its utility.
Clive's demands for good design impressed one new recruit whose background was in engineering.
One of the major characteristics of Sinclair products was that they were compact and that
compact to the point where if it were to be a slim calculator then it was the last half millimetre
that mattered and this could of course sometimes be a source of some frustration for the designers
who felt if only I had an extra half millimetre it would be that much easier to package it.
At the end though that attention to detail was what really mattered to allow the calculator to
become half a millimetre thicker meant that it perhaps would become an extra half millimetre
thick or an extra millimetre thicker and that would take away from the overall appearance of
if it was supposed to be a slim product of of this slim product and the half millimetres did matter.
Clive wasn't satisfied with selling stylish toys. He wanted to get into the academic market with a
reasonably priced single chip calculator that would be useful to scientists and mathematicians.
What happened was a test of mathematical ingenuity. A great friend of mine and mathematician
Nigel Searle suggested that we ought to be able to take an existing chip which had been designed
or intended for as a four function calculator chip and reprogram this with scientific functions on
but the problems what was that the chip that existed had very few registers and very little
space inside it if you like for the program. So I devised new algorithms for the transcendental
functions which are the trig and log functions that we wanted on the calculator and Nigel and
I flew to the states and shacked up in a hotel for a couple of weeks and he and I did the
algorithms and he did all the programming and we reprogrammed a tex influence chip to become a
full scientific calculator chip. With the exception of one slight thing which wasn't as we intended
and called for some rather creative writing of the instruction manual it worked superbly.
Once again Clive's willingness to gamble on his own ideas had paid off. He'd spotted a new market,
developed a fresh concept, then pioneered a technical advance that others would follow.
His love of taking risks spilled over from his business life into his leisure time.
The Consumer Electronics Show is held every year in January in Las Vegas and I'd heard that they
played poker there and I hadn't played much poker but I played some and I thought it was very
exciting to play in Las Vegas and I went and did that which was highly entertaining,
marvellous characters there. I was a bit nervous never having played before in such an august
company and they came around and asked if we wanted any drinks. There were girls coming around
all the time to get free drinks, most people having chivis regal or something, and I asked
for a hot chocolate and it caused a bit of a stir but the girl didn't bat an eye and said
would I like it with cream or not and I did fairly well sort of beginner's luck there and before the
end of the week everyone was having hot chocolates at other places, thought it was a new formula.
By the mid-1970s the Japanese had entered the calculator market.
Their new models had liquid crystal displays and used much smaller batteries so they could be
cheaper and lighter than ever. Though he'd got in first, Clive had no interest in developing a new
version and was forced to sell off his old ranges at lower and lower prices. He was suddenly in
financial trouble. His reaction was to rush in with a new product. It was the first digital watch.
It was doomed to fail. There was a fundamental design fault in it and what you need out of a
watch is something you can just look at whenever you want to know the time. The fact that because
the energy the the display was so energy hungry you can only you can only look at it if you pressed
a button on was a bit of a flaw and even if if if you you you just press the button once or twice
a day the batteries would run out very very quickly, and I think that's the most important
thing. Now that's just unacceptable. Relying by now on government money, Clive pinned his
hopes on a new pocket television. This is claimed to be the world's first truly commercial
pocket television. It's being launched by an English company in London today in America later
this week. There's a million pounds gone into the research and development for this model,
650,000 pounds of that comes from the National Enterprise Board. So this is one of the things
we hope will be making money for Britain abroad this year and in years to come. Whether it does
or not you can at least say that it works and that it goes into your pocket. Well do you think the
businessman's going to use it or will it be with the trannies in the park? Well I hope in the parks
they use an earpiece which cuts out the speaker but I'm sure it will be used in parks, though I
think the businessman is probably one of the most important customers in the first stage. He can
carry it wherever he goes, he can use it in his hotel, on a train, in a car, an ideal means of
keeping in touch. But even the new television didn't sell enough to rescue Sinclair Radionics.
The National Enterprise Board who were brought in to save the company presided over its breakup.
Blame naturally fell on Clive.
I think the stresses in business in running a business have been something that I found
very difficult. I find the sort of stresses of the financial worries of the business
or the growth problems of the business can often be very considerable for me because I think they're
fighting with what I want to do some of the time. I want to go on and build the business, I want to
be interested in the technology, creating a new product and very often I've got to divert my
attention to the financial side or the management side of the business which is less exciting to me.
It's an unfortunate truism that successful businessmen are usually really rather simple
and stable in their personalities. It's the very stability and self-confidence that gives them the
you know the means to be successful. Now I think Sir Clive's very volatility which is
of course his enormous asset and his enormous strength at the same time
inevitably I think dooms him to failure from time to time. I'm just reminding you of a
a dinner if you can call it a dinner in a pizza house in Sweeney Todd's here in Cambridge.
When my ex-wife was trying to persuade me and you that I shouldn't go into publishing.
Oh yes. It said how risky it was that you said you mustn't worry about money for goodness sake
Gerd I've had my troubles I mean three weeks ago I had to sell my Rolls Royce.
Do you remember that? The girl exploded with indignation that I'd sold his Rolls Royce.
I must be desperate. You didn't actually mention that you'd sold the house.
I was. I left out the details yes. Although he'd lost his home his company and his Rolls Royce
Clive started again from scratch. The latest silicon chips were able to carry out more and
more complex tasks. As a result computers were becoming smaller and cheaper. Clive seized on
the idea of producing a low-cost computer designed for the home and family. To keep the price down he
insisted that the computer had to work with an ordinary domestic television. Baffled as to how
he turned to the ever resourceful Jim Westwood. Clive was very worried and uncertain as to whether
in fact somebody that hadn't designed computers etc before, if he didn't realize I'd made one at
home anyway, could actually get him out of this latest major fix. So at the end of October I
brought him up and showed him the prototype in the lab and I had it carefully arranged to demonstrate
that the screen would work and I'd got numbers going down the side you know one two three four
etc and approximately in the middle of the screen I had a little message which said Jim has done it.
I think he even smiled.
Clive was on the way up again. He acquired a smart new car and moved his family into an
elegant new home in Cambridge. The ZX80 was launched at a price of 99.95 just under the
magic hundred pound mark. The children were roped in as guinea pigs to try out the new product
and Clive was proud of his son Crispin's first attempts. Looks quite complicated because
it's got these peak signs. We'll try it. Okay. Says it doesn't random. But in the middle of success
came a shattering disappointment. In 1981 the BBC decided to have its own micro computer made for
a series of programs on computing. Clive drew up a specification based on an improved ZX80
but the BBC decided to modify a much more expensive computer produced by a rival company Acorn.
Why do you think you didn't learn that? Oh well um because the BBC had made up their minds before
they spoke to us. I mean I think that that was one of the most outrageous um steps in the whole
home computer business. The BBC shouldn't have given a contract to anybody but if they did do it
it should have been an open bid and it wasn't. We said we could have made the machine they wanted
half the price that that Acorn did and they just didn't want to know. They were making a cut and
that was that. Are you very bitter about that? Yes I'm bitter is not the right word I suppose
because I don't go around feeling bitter but I think it was an outrageous thing to do a very
damaging thing to do and it shouldn't have happened. I seem to remember that when the BBC were
considering who to who to have for their um as their supplier for that BBC computer project they
they did ask around a lot of sort of industry observers including me as to what they thought
about um Clive's um business and because of my past experience with some of his consumer products
I I had to say at the time that I was a bit concerned about the reliability of the the
products he was producing um and I guess the BBC being sort of fairly conservative operation
quite rightly were off put by the by his by his history there although to be fair the the the
computers he did actually end up producing were I guess much much more reliable than those that
have been produced in the past. Within a year Clive launched his Spectrum which got government
approval for use in schools. It was a huge success in nine months 200 000 had been sold.
In 1983 Sinclair Research made a profit of nearly 14 million pounds
but the pressure of day-to-day management was relentless. An associate of Clive's in the
software business she happens to have the same name began to notice his exhaustion.
He was obviously under enormous amounts of stress I mean he he would used to go out for for meals
and and it wasn't just with me but with other people as well and halfway through he'd fall
asleep um and he would stay asleep until the end of the meal um and he would go out
um and then wake up and and unfortunately he's always had the confidence not to sort of get
terribly embarrassed about this and so I'm terribly sorry falling asleep just carry on as usual um but
that I think shows the sort of stress he was under he's never done that in the last four or
five years. And a new British television was launched today small enough for the pocket
and a third of the price of its Japanese rival. This is the second mini television to be launched
on the market in the last few months this one is British it has a two inch screen based on a
completely new principle. Sinclair has produced an automatic manufacturing process which is why
it's so much cheaper than its rival it will sell for just under 80 pounds. We've spent six years
developing this television and we've automated most of the processes so that you can actually
make the tube at a reasonable price so that we've that's the reason for the price being so low.
This is the first new television set where all the circuitry is on one chip this chip in fact.
There are 4 000 components on this chip and it's British. The major innovation was the shape. The
tube instead of being behind the screen was bent round on itself with the picture being projected
in from the right. The tube itself was shaped by a new vacuum process and then cut by laser.
Both these techniques were innovatory too.
There were about 16 processes involved I think in the manufacture of a flat screen
tube. Two of them had never been done before. Three of them I think involved creating totally
new bits of machinery to do things which hadn't been done before and the rest although they were
uh fairly conventional processes obviously were quite risky in the sense they had to be adapted
to to a to a size of screen which nobody had ever tried to make before so the whole thing was just
a little bit on the risky side. It's by no means obvious of course that anyone actually wants a
small television set. It's a gadget for executives a little else. That's it for now I'll be back in
full size with the late headlines just after quarter to 11. Till then good night.
You just get a letter saying if this this were to be offered would you accept because rather
nerve-wracking sort of thought and obviously very excited at the idea in one sense and then I found
it very strange afterwards until I got used to it it was really like a sort of your name changing I
suppose. Within months of his becoming Sir Clive an advertising campaign for a new Sinclair computer
had him leaping over all his rivals including the BBC micro. He came to think this stunt was way
over the top and was embarrassed by it but the seeds of a greater embarrassment had already been
sown. Clive had a vision for moving into transport with a fleet of electric vehicles.
We've got chaos in our cities we've got chaos on our on our roads. I don't believe that the
forms of transport we have today can long survive. These are problems that have pretty much got to
be solved that I'm excited about. It's a very strange thing but dozens scores perhaps hundreds
of people were involved in the development of the C5 and I do believe that every one of them
was absolutely convinced that it would be successful and what a marvellous project it was
and it was a tremendous atmosphere at the Alexandra Palace when it was launched.
And then the question started and suddenly somehow the whole enthusiasm waned as it became
clear that if one was trying to drive one of these vehicles through articulated lorries on a
dual carriageway and make a right turn that perhaps it wasn't such a good idea after all
and I don't think I've ever experienced a feeling like that sudden deflation of an absolutely
brilliant idea which apparently suddenly went wrong. Some safety organisations have expressed
concern about the vehicle. What's your reaction to that? To my knowledge only one rather unknown
one has said anything like that. We've called in the safety experts right at the start and I may
say that we're the first vehicle company ever to have done so. I'm very unhappy that it's being
sold without essential safety equipment. I think there should be direction indicators fitted,
I think that there should be wing mirrors fitted and I think there should be a kind of a telescope
warning thing so that other drivers can see it because you're way down on the ground down here.
I've seen so many youngsters just come straight across the road no signals no nothing. I do I
think absolute hazard on the road. Whoever brought out that well wants putting up a wall and shooting.
I think he probably saw that the difference between his dreams his creative imagination
envisaging such a product and the actuality of it delivered out of Hoover were were bigger than
anything he'd come across before and I imagine personally that he was disappointed before it
was actually released but he was swept along by a tide that couldn't be reversed. Tremendous money
at stake and he had to publish or release it or else accept immediate failure and there was after
all in his view quite a chance but it was the wrong time of the year it was the wrong market
it was the wrong country. I'm afraid that that was the the very difficult one and the one from
which I think he will learn a great deal. You try some things and they succeed and sometimes they
don't and I don't look back on it and say to myself the seed fire was a marvelous idea which
failed because people jumped and I don't think that's true. I think it was not good enough to
succeed simply as that. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why and it doesn't altogether matter.
The truth is it wasn't good enough and that's that and it wasn't as if c5 itself was something I
felt hugely strongly about. What I felt strongly about was electric vehicles and what we wanted
to make and indeed had gotten an advanced state of design was an 80 mile an hour four-seater
um 300 mile range electric car. This was the Sinclair dream that never was.
That would have taken a well not a small fortune a large fortune to put into production.
My hope was intent was that the c5 would be such a success it would fund that it wasn't such a
success and didn't fund anything so he didn't fund itself so that that was for the one but but you
know the c5 wasn't that great an idea and and and the fact that it didn't work is is that some
things you try and you know they don't don't succeed. The c5 disaster wasn't Clive's only
problem. With more and more offices using computers buyers wanted their home machines to be compatible
with the ones at work. Clive's QL wasn't and it failed to sell. Alan Sugar's new company Amstrad
seized the opportunity and entered into ruthless competition with Clive. Those Sinclair computers
still had 40 percent of the market. In April 1986 Clive sold his computer business to Alan Sugar
who paid five million pounds just for the Sinclair name. So in a nutshell we've bought the
Sinclair computer business. We've bought the Sinclair brand name on computers. We
we will market the Sinclair computers worldwide. Sometimes said that Sinclair is extremely good
at invention not so good at marketing. Well I'm sure that's true. And you now back to invention.
Yes well I think the point is that we are good at the initial marketing you know the innovative
market the starting of markets that's our job we're just not in the same league as as as Alan
Sugar and perhaps some other companies in the world when it comes to the mass marketing worldwide
it just isn't we don't have that those skills. Since then Clive has been much more alone.
His major business sold off with his name. He's been alone personally too. His marriage ended in divorce.
But the ideas haven't stopped. They've been channeled into independent companies.
Shea communications has developed the personal phone. Cambridge computers is handling the
portable computer and the satellite dish and another company Anamartic is exploring new
kinds of computer memory. I think funnily enough right now some of the most promising
ideas of Sir Clive's which which may lead to great commercial success are probably those which
he's been very distanced from in the last two or three years deliberately so I think by
by the the teams which are managing those those projects I think the people there have deliberately
sort of insulated themselves from that volatility to give them the kind of stability they need to
get on with the job and and some chance of success. But what Clive really I think loves doing is is
sitting alone in his flat with a whole pile of books and inventing things and um and and that's
that's what he loves doing and that's obviously then what he does best. I don't think he's a very
good manager of people. I think he's a terribly good person to talk to somebody because he'll be
able to draw them out very well if that's what he wants to do but the trouble is is that 99% of the
time that's not what Clive St Clair wants to do. Clive St Clair wants to be going off inventing
you know um electric airplanes or something. The real thing that excites me is artificial intelligence.
I the we have this we saw in the industrial revolution the the huge improvement in in in
wealth that could be obtained by replacing men's muscles with machinery. Now the next
generation of the next change the next road to greater wealth must come by replacing men's minds
with machinery. So it's artificial minds or artificial intelligences that we need.
Clive's interest in artificial intelligence has led him to reflect on how the brain works as a computer.
The brain we know works with millions of processors working in parallel something like 10 000 million.
Clearly that's a very successful computer and that's what we're trying to emulate so we can
make the obvious assumption that parallel processing has a much more to offer us than the
single line processing that we use today. And some years ago I realized that that we would need
not just parallel processing but very hugely parallel processing thousands maybe millions of
processors but also that if we were going to go along that road we would um have a connection
problem if we had all these different bits of processors we'd have a terrible problem connecting
them together. So one of the things we needed was what's called wafer scaling to work with
was what's called wafer scale integration keeping everything on one piece of silicon.
The idea of connecting processors on whole wafers of silicon has been around for years.
In the normal process of building circuits on slices of silicon half or more of the chips don't
work. So after testing the round wafer is broken up and only the good chips selected.
If the wafer was somehow kept whole much more complex computers could be built cheaply and
easily but no one could find a way to do it. Clive was fascinated by this problem. Some years
ago he heard about a maverick inventor whose ideas about wafer scale had been dismissed by
the scientific establishment. Clive went to great lengths to form a bond with him determined to
listen and understand what others had simply rejected. He put in not only enormous time into
me at the start but also enormous thought and sympathy and one would have expected someone in
that position to want fast decisions and for me to do my homework. He was willing to talk around
the subject in its many ramifications and my attitude to to myself and the product and what
should happen in the future and the first two or three interviews with him which totalled maybe
five hours were probably the best conducted interviews I've ever had with anybody at the
beginning of of an association. It was very impressive. Ivar Cat's system was called spiral.
It works like this. A controller outside the wafer makes a connection with a chip near the edge.
If it works the chip is instructed to test an adjacent chip. If that works the adjacent chip
connects with yet another. If this proves faulty the test is applied to an alternative chip
or another or another until a good one is found. Step by step a spiral of perfect chips is formed
on the wafer. The faulty ones are simply bypassed. We developed his process and it's embodied of
course in animatic. The company that now produces the first wafer scale products in the world.
Now the first products being produced are memories but what we're interested in at Sinclair Research
is combining memory and processes so we have wafers that have got thousands perhaps of processes
on them and as a separate program we're developing the right this sort of special
processes we need and gradually these things will come together and we'll be able to make
more and more powerful machines and we can see our way now to making computers in the not very
distant future that are hundreds maybe thousands of times as powerful as the most powerful machines
today and yet won't be physically huge nor terribly expensive. The secret of Clive Sinclair
is that he believes passionately in his own ideas.
He's prepared to face the consequences of being wrong but he never ever gives up.
The most exciting time of all I find is in the early conception of a product when suddenly
things begin to come together and you realize that you can produce something that's that's
radically new. You might go for a long time a long long time it might be weeks but it could be years
as well with a particular objective in mind and then suddenly because enough elements have come
together it clicks and you know you can do it now that's that's very exciting.
I feel quite sure that he's on the ascendancy again and that's um whether it's in computer
related fields or in the satellite broadcasting field that we will see Clive's company producing
some major worldwide successes. I have a very strong personal belief in Clive.
I think we had a very confused childhood and maybe the way I've dealt with that
is if you like psychologically that I've tried to sort out my confusion internally
whereas maybe he he in a sense tries to order the world. Everything he makes, everything he designs
is to do with order making things smaller finer neater. What I've described as the sort of detached
side of him because the other I think there's a sense in which his sort of warm human
side I think perhaps he finds his own kindness and warmth actually quite threatening and it and it's
and his susceptibility to the vulnerability of others and an escape from that in a way is
to artificial intelligence where you know these these are things they're not going to have feelings.
So it's the it's this sort of swing from the the the engaged involved warm person to the detached
cold machine I suppose. He has great faith in science. I don't believe in a god but I do believe
very much in the spirituality of man. If that doesn't sound like a complete contradiction
I believe that that is very much the most important thing that that that having the spiritual
side of oneself right is is is vital. Of course that may seem a very strange thing to say if
if one says one doesn't believe in a god but I think spirituality or or the emotional side of
life or the the almost romantic side of life really is is is is the most vital part. Has there
ever been a time when you've lost confidence in your ability to emerge? Not not at all no not
remotely. What's the basis of that? Being born an optimist I think. I don't it never seems it always
seems to me that that if one path isn't too good you can choose another. It's it's um and
it's it's um and uh and I always believe I can I can sort things out.
So
so
so well now to another man of incredible skill and perception Campion.