William Macdonald Sinclair (1850–1917) was an eminent Anglican priest and author in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

<person> Sir Clive Sinclair (1939- ) The British inventor who pioneered the home microcomputer market in the early 1980s, with the introduction of low-cost, easy to use, 8-bit computers produced by his company, Sinclair Research. Sir Clive also invented and produced a variety of electronic devices from the 1960s to 1990s, including pocket calculators (he marketed the first pocket calculator in the world), radios and televisions. Perhaps he is most famous (or some might say notorious) for his range electric vehicles, especially the Sinclair C5, introduced in 1985. He has been a member of MENSA, the high IQ society, since 1962. sinclair/">Planet Sinclair (http://nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/). ["The Sinclair Story", Rodney Dale, pub. Duckworth 1985] (1998-11-09)

<computer> (Quantum Leap) Sir Clive Sinclair's first Motorola 68008-based personal computer, developed from around 1981 and released about 1983. The QL ran Sinclair's QDOS operating system which was the first multitasking OS on a home computer, though few programmers used this feature. It had a structured, extended BASIC and a suite of integrated application programs written by Psion. It featured innovative "microdrives" which were random-access tape drives. It was not a success. The microdrives were innovative but probably a mistake. Though reliable and quite quick, they sounded like they were going to jam and explode, releasing a shower of plastic shavings and tape into your face. The QL and QDOS only supported two graphics modes - ominously named high res and low res. High res had four (fixed) colours at a resolution of 512 by 256 pixels. Low res had 8 colours (black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, white) plus a flash mode with 256 by 256 pixels. The sound was next to useless - single channel single oscillator with various parameters for fuzz, pitch change. There was one internal font, scalable to 2 heights and 3 widths. Peripherals and enhancements included a GUI on a plug-in ROM, accelerator cards (Motorola 68020, 4 MB RAM), {floppy disks} and hard disks. In 1996 there is still some interest in the QL, spread by the Internet of course. Emulation software, source code, "The QL Hackers Journal" and similar are still available, and many QLs are on the net. http://imaginet.fr/QLgodefroy/english. (1996-08-01)