Electric Vehicles - not Zoom Zoom, but broom broom ... the Sinclair C5

[Pat Pending]

[amspire]

Clive Sinclair was totally brilliant, but unfortunately his judgement was always a little off.

The C5 was just a disaster - two slow and dangerous to ever use on the road. The idea of a super lightweight electric vehicle that can move a single passenger with a tiny fraction of the energy of a car does make good intellectual sense, but the C5 and roads full of cars and trucks just did not mix.

Where I saw his brilliance was in designs like the ZX80. It had something like 2K of ROM and in that program space, Sinclair fitted a full basic interpreter, a full software driven video display generator (the ZX80 used the Z80 dynamic RAM refresh counters connected to some resistors to make the video D/A, so no video display IC's were used at all), cassette tape data I/O, and probably a few other things I have forgotten. I have never seen anyone who could fit so much functionality in so little code and hardware. His first miniature scientific calculator was programmed on a TI chip designed for a standard basic calculator. In the same memory space that others fitted + - * / and square root functionality, Sinclair implemented Logs and Trig as well.

Richard.

[G7PSK]

I grew up in Cambridge and bought quite a few if Clive Sinclair's products from the matchbox radio through the various audio amplifiers to his mini TV, just about every one failed to work straight out of the box, I went back to his shop (yes he had a shop back then) with the various items He would come out of his office look at the item and toss it into the waste bin and hand me another.
Most of his products were made with the rejects of Cambridge Transistors or Pye's.

I also had the pleasure of trying out his C5 it was fine around Cambridge but on the open road was really hair-raising when passed by a Juggernaut.