Sinclair Research

~ the goodbye ~

Company number 01135105 was incorporated on 19 September 1973 under the name Westminster Mail Order Limited. It became Sinclair Instruments in 1976, Science of Cambridge in 1977, Sinclair Computers in 1980 and Sinclair Research in 1981. The register keeps all four, which is a tidier record of what Clive Sinclair was doing in those years than most accounts of it.

The method never changed across any of the renamings. Find the cheapest possible way to build something people had been told was expensive, ship it before it is finished, and let the price do the arguing. The ZX80 arrived in 1980 under a hundred pounds. The ZX81 followed at £69.95 as a kit and sold about a million and a half. The Spectrum landed in April 1982 and became the machine an entire British generation learned to program on, because it was the one their parents would actually buy.

Then the same method produced the Sinclair QL, announced before it worked and shipped with part of the operating system hanging out of the back on a dongle, and the C5, an electric tricycle launched on 10 January 1985 that sold about 17,000 units and cost the group somewhere near £7 million. Sinclair Vehicles went into receivership that October. The computer business had no cash left to absorb it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ five million pounds and a name ~

On 7 April 1986 Alan Sugar's Amstrad paid £5 million for the entire computer range and the right to the Sinclair name. What it did with the Spectrum afterward is the Spectrum's own story. The detail that matters here is what was excluded from the sale: the company itself. Amstrad bought the products and the brand, and Sinclair Research Limited walked away from the deal still existing, still registered in Cambridge, with nothing left to sell under its own name.

~ the shell years ~

What followed was thirty nine years of a company that was really one man and a filing obligation. Sinclair Research became a research and holding operation with stakes in whatever Clive Sinclair was working on next. Headcount fell to three by 1990 and to one by 1997.

The output over that period was bicycles, mostly. The Zike, an electric bike, came in 1992. The A-bike, a folding bicycle small enough to carry onto a train, came in 2006 and sold reasonably well through licensees. Neither was a computer, and neither needed to be, because the computer name had belonged to Amstrad since 1986. Clive Sinclair died on 16 September 2021 at 81. The company he had incorporated at 33 outlived him by four years.

~ the certificate ~

The dissolution went through on 14 October 2025. There is no announcement to link to and no trade coverage, because nobody reports a dormant company being tidied off the register. The record is a line on a public filing page giving the status as dissolved and the date it happened.

sinclair-research.co.uk resolves today to a health blog with no connection to any of this. A second Sinclair Research Limited sits on the register with a Nottingham address and an incorporation date of 8 October 2025, six days before the original was struck off. The name is available again. That is the whole estate.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »