Jobs, Gates, Dell, Sinclair (Who?)
Clive Sinclair, a slender, bespectacled 42-year-old Englishman with a shy smile and a newly fat bank account, sees big changes coming in the world and offers a stunning forecast that, if true, will affect everything we do. “The 1990s will differ from the 1970s as profoundly as the 19th century from the 18th,” he told a British television audience recently.
With the advent of the silicon chip and the robot, he said, society is on the edge of economic transformations made by the automobile, telephone and airplane. The new technologies, he predicted, will create “truly intelligent machines” that serve our every need, even medicine and law. And traditional manufacturing jobs will largely disappear in advanced countries like Britain, as China, India and elsewhere become the great producing nations, because labor there is so cheap.
The Washington Post, March 6, 1983
Clive Sinclair died recently at the age of eighty-one. He got major obituaries in the British media and The New York Times, which he deserved. Sinclair was one of the true geniuses of the era that now dominates our lives.
Among other inventions, Sinclair produced the first cheap personal computer, selling at the time for as little as $80. As I wrote after meeting him in London in 1983, “In three years he overwhelmed the market by selling hundreds of thousands of computers around the world.” As a device, looking at pictures of it now, it was very basic. You bought it assembled and plugged it into your television, which was the monitor. The graphics were black and white. There was no sound.
Atari, Commodore, and Apple were also producing computers in these early days. We reporters were thrilled when Radio Shack released the TRS-80 (nicknamed Trash) which made it possible for us to send five thousand characters at a time over telephone lines with rubber cups over the ear and voice pieces — the Model-T of digital delivery. Sinclair had a partnership with Timex, then as now owned by a private Norwegian holding company, best known for its low-cost watches. My Timex Expedition ($49.95) is a lot less fancy but no less efficient than the Omega I received as a wedding present from my wife fifty years ago and, also, still wear. Clive Sinclair’s relationship with Timex began when he designed one of the first digital watches.
In the 1970s, Sinclair built the first pocket-sized electronic calculator. And later he produced the first miniature flat-screen television, which competed with Sony’s handheld at less than a third of the price. Around the time of our interview, he had decided to raise cash for other inventions and received $20 million from N.M. Rothschild for 10 percent of his computer company.
It needs to be emphasized that Sinclair’s forecast of “truly intelligent machines” and his concept of hand-held equipment came a quarter century before Steve Jobs’s release of the iPhone, which really did transform our lives, when combined with the internet, which in the 1980s was still largely unknown by most people.
So why did Clive Sinclair not become a mogul on the scale of Jobs? The answer and the difference are twofold: Sinclair was an inventor and a visionary. Jobs was an inventor, a visionary, and — brilliantly — a marketer who made products that were sleek, elegant, and pricey.
The second difference was that Sinclair was British. He left school at seventeen, which was common in Britain — unlike the cachet of the Harvard dropout culture of Americans like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg who wear that as a measure of status. And the Britain of that era was in the midst of adjusting to its decline as an imperial and economic power.
The British were best known for exclusivity and style — the Rolls Royce and Jaguar, for example — while their mass market auto industry and other consumer products were destined to be overtaken by more aggressive modes of manufacturing and selling.
In 1983, I wrote that Sinclair was “best at fast starts. The Japanese eventually overtook his calculators by making them better and cheaper. He lost valuable time in the digital watch race when there were problems with some of his components. And an early version of the pocket television floundered because of weak marketing. Britain’s National Enterprise Board eventually sunk $17.3 million into Sinclair Radionics, which folded when Sinclair pulled out.”
Instead, Sinclair had the time to think about the future he clearly understood with striking clarity.
By the 1990s, Sinclair predicted, “we must turn from products of the material to products of the mind: books, video tapes, television programs, computer programs design services…where others produce, we can design.” If that seems implausible, he argued, it was worth remembering that Britain’s labor force was once farmers, but now fewer than 2 percent of his countrymen worked the land, yet food was far more plentiful.
The transition, Sinclair said, would be painful. When I spoke with him, Britain’s unemployment rate was about 14 percent and would go higher, which is why it was so essential to make it possible for young people to get the education and skills they would need for a world in which manufacturing and resource extraction would move elsewhere.
Though some of Sinclair’s language is outdated (“video tapes,” for example), his predictions could not be more accurate. The great frontier for jobs, he told me, would be technology, as computers led to intelligent machines, biotechnology, solar energy, thermal power, leisure parks, health care, and so on. As it happens, the U.S. has proved to be much better than Britain in turning technology into almost unimaginably big businesses — Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and on and on, selling devices whose components are mainly manufactured elsewhere.
By contrast, Britain is still defining its role in the twenty-first-century world. London remains a global financial center, at least for now, and the classic English language is a great asset in the creative fields and communications.
But Britain is not, as Sinclair knew it would not be, where good ideas — his, in particular — would eventually dominate the marketplace. One measure of his lasting influence, however, was a feature in the Wall Street Journal the week he died. The headline was “Is Watching TV on your Phone Convenient or Vile?” Sinclair believed the focus for attention would be in your hands on a small screen, and he was right.
In 1983, Sinclair said that his next big project would be an electric car, which is why he was raising money from banks. He was way ahead of his time on that notion, and it never reached a place in the market. It was up to Elon Musk and the crisis of climate change to make that happen. Clive Sinclair was there, as he so often was, first.
