Sinclair
Being born in the UK in 1981, my articles about home computers are biased towards that time and place. This is due to both my own personal experience, and also a conscious attempt to provide an alternative UK bias to the predominant US bias amongst people my age reminiscing about home computers.
Sinclair was a small British company (technically several small British companies) that essentially aspired to be Casio, but wasn't as good.
In the 1980s, both companies made affordable digital products for common people, including pocket calculators and digital watches. Alas, Sinclair's offerings didn't work as well as those by their Japanese counterpart.
Sinclair were so determined to make their devices affordable to everyone, they even offered many of them in kit form. Alas, even the pre-assembled versions still had relatively high return rates due to being defective. It was a good idea, not so well executed.
By far their biggest successes were their home computers, chiefly the ZX Spectrum 48K. This was even more affordable and more popular in the UK than the C64. The Spectrum brought computing to the people, and taught a nation of 1980s teenagers to program.
At the other end of the credibility scale, Sinclair were widely mocked for the C5, an electric recumbent tricycle powered by a washing machine motor. The C5 looked like a very dangerous attempt at an electric car, decades ahead of such a thing being technologically feasible. Again, it was a good idea, but the technology simply wasn't there yet.
They certainly tried.
The ethos of affordable British computers for hobbyists lives on in the much more solid Raspberry Pi.
British companies: Sinclair | Warp Records
Computer hardware manufacturers: Commodore | Sinclair
Sinclair: Soviet ZX Spectrum clones | ZX Spectrum | ZX Spectrum 128
