At my school (Haygrove in Bridgwater) a group of us along with the physics teacher Mr Shaw and a technician held discos in the school physics class every Thursday lunchtime to raise money to buy a Sinclair ZX80 in kit form. I remember that my father made us a big sign that looked like a ZX80 that we put up and we shaded in the keys as we got closer to the total. In the end we raised enough money to buy two and the technician built them with us watching on and we could then borrow them to learn the basic of coding (he also built a UK101 from a kit which was really impressive to watch). I learned the basics of programming on a ZX80 before graduating to a ZX81 (presumably also borrowed from school) and then, finally I got a BBC Micro Model A (I remember I ordered this pretty much on the day it was launched and had to wait over a year for it to arrive - imagine that happening these days). I went on to do a lot of programming in my work (in BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, Visual Basic and, more recently, MATLAB) writing data logging software and computer models for my MSc and PhD and subsequent research. So, in a very direct way, Sir Clive Sinclair was a major part of how my life/career has unfolded.
I look back very, very fondly to those early days when I spent my time typing in code from magazines, debugging programmes and working how to get a computer to do what you want it to. To be honest, I'd give quite a lot to go back to that time and, with hindsight, I should probably have gone into software engineering or something similar rather than become a scientist/academic.