Wow, we had a similar path...and both in the US I think. I did skip the TS lines and had a few year gap between the ZX81 in 1982 and the QL in 1989. I did keep the little ZX81 going for as long as I could, writing a terminal program, a text editor, etc... I even wrote an assembler for it that I'm still trying to recover. Last Sinclair computer I bought was the Z88 but I also invested in his mini FM radio (I have two of them) and did find a white calculator in eBay in the late 90's.swensont wrote:If I had not purchased my ZX81 in high school, I"m sure it would have eventually bought another computer, but the low price of the ZX81 made it so easy. The ZX81 allowed me to learn how much fun programming could be. That sealed my decision to major in Computer Science in college. In College I kept buying the next Sinclair computer (T/S 100, T/S 2068, QL, and eventually the Z88).
The ZX81 started me down the path of my career. When my step-father saw the ZX81 (with memory pack), he said "You spent $250 on that?". It sounded expensive at the time, but in the long term it was well worth it.
Thank you, Sir Clive.
Clive Sinclair just made stuff that I liked. I was never drawn too much to Commodore or Texas Instrument's early computers. Maybe Radio Shack a little since I have a pocket computer and would have liked to have the Model 100. The styling of those computers just appealed to me.