The Natural Philosopher coughed up some electrons that declared:

You all forgot the frequent rapping over the knuckles for "Sir Clive"
because he used to sell products that he didn't have and make ludicrous
inflated claims for them.

Tell me about it. I worked for him for a year..and left in utter disgust.

Was that pre or post ZX80-Spectrum period?

I thought that was a reasonable set of efforts. OK, the ZX81 was a *******
for overhating and the pikey lack of a decent expansion connector (unplated
copper PCB edge exposed to the outside FFS) was a big let down. But the
rest of the ZX81 did bring computing to the home user for 100 quid. The
software was better - he did at least have the interrupt vector table
copied out of ROM into RAM so you could replace the interrupt handlers.

And the Spectrum at least had a dialect of BASIC that could actually use the
features on the machine - unlike the Commodore 64, which was a genius piece
of hardware engineering with a **** poor old mouldy BASIC interpreter
wedged in.

From a public POV, the rot set in with the C5 (saw one going up Reigate
Hill, at the bottom - no chance or ever getting anywhere near the top!

Cheers

Tim