Yes. I grew up with a ZX Spectrum which I loved dearly, so it pains me to say it, but Sinclair didn't really deserve to be "titans". Their machines were kludges

Yes. I grew up with a ZX Spectrum which I loved dearly, so it pains me to say it, but Sinclair didn't really deserve to be "titans". Their machines were kludges with corners cut, pre-order money taken from the public when they didn't even have a working prototype, and Sir Clive was disdainful of the gaming market which made his machine successful and tried to move away from that instead of embracing it. Some of the corner-cutting was ingenious (the calculator where the power pulses just often enough for the screen and memory to stay on, allowing a watch battery to be used for a more slimline design) and some of it less so (iirc the same calculator displays 8 digits but is only accurate to 3 significant figures...)