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Sinclair's Answer To The Segway
slumos writes "BBC News Online is reporting on Sir Clive Sinclair's reaction to the Segway. The British inventor thinks it's fine for factories, but not for crowded streets, and he's even planning some competition in the form of a top-secret follow-up to the Sinclair C5."
I believe the article makes reference to Sinclair's other efforts at transportation: the Zike (a folding electric scooter) and the Zeta (a motor which attaches to a normal bicycle, harnessing energy when you go downhill and using it to propel you uphill at a stately 8mph, as I remember).
These relatively unknown inventions were peddled in the small ads sections of newspapers for a long time. The electric scooter sold for about 500, the bike motor for about 200. But no, I don't know anyone who had one.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
That would be the Sinclair QL then.
You mean like the Loki super Spectrum?
Stick Men
I don't think he bashed it! To the contrary, Sinclair said:
Later in the article, he says it is not suitable for British sidewalks, but has applications elsewhere, and I think that is correct. It is a vehicle comparable to a bike and belongs on the street.Reality or nothing.
It didn't have a disk drive or tape deck, so if we wanted to play a game we had to type the program in (in BASIC) from scratch every time the computer was turned off.
My dad used it for his budget at first, but since we had to keep everything on paper and re-enter the data anyway, he soon dropped it.
Oh boy, those were the days.
If it isn't safe, it fails for practical use. The segway circumvents this as being reliable sturdy (heavy) US alteration it seems. Of course I'm merely a young chap[sic] residing in the US who has never heard of it before now.
Before I depart, I was wondering just how dangerous it was. Proceeding to google it, I found an interesting interview that appears to have taken place August 1986.
Of course relational interests are too much so I had to look into the Clive Computer. I came across some interesting information since my inception was the NES ;-]
in UK it's illegal (IANAL) to ride a bike on pavement ("British sidewalk"), they're for roads.
Segways should not be on roads.
Project Loki was the design for a "Super Spectrum" that Sinclair came up with before Amstrad bought them out. Two ex-Sinclair engineers, John Mathieson and Martin Brennan, left and set up their own company called Flare, drawing on the Loki designs to produce a new multiprocessor games console. Atari brought the console to market as the Jaguar. More info here.
and it excels in it.
On a visit to Disney in Orlando last month, the parking lot attendants were whishing up and down the lanes on Segways, directing traffic, scooting over to their colleagues, and so on. This struck me as something the Segway is ideal for. If they had a better cargo carrying capability, I could also see postal workers using them, and maintenance people or anyone who has to cover long distances in factories, campuses, and the like.
But as a means of serious personal A to B transportation? Forget it; bikes and cars beat it hands down.
Maybe unicycles? Or more seriously, small-wheel, possibly folding bikes, such as Bikefriday or the Moulton. These have the advantage over Segways and conventional bikes of being portable, in the sense that youl can carry them inside, on an elevator, or a train to complete your journey.
Well, perhaps Sinclair's products weren't the sturdiest things around but they hit the right price point to allow for large consumer adoption. How many folk in say, West Midlands would have been able to buy a 2 grand Apple Mac for a personal computer? Speccy cost a tiny fraction of that and that's why it was such a hit. It wasn't perfect but for me it was a lot better than having no 'puter at all.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Segway would really work well in these environments, have a problem 3/4 of a mile away at the other end of the asspebly area? You can be there in 2 or 3 mins or less instead of 15 or so to walk.. thats the difference between making $500,000 or loosing $700,000 in down time.
Postal workers that walk their deliveries would also find this to be a heart attack saver.
You can get more police out of their cars and actually walking/segwaying the beat so they can get to know the community better.
I agree that with the "common" person the segway is more of a useless toy, but there are so many nitch areas that it could easily be used to help.
Try an eGO Cycle. It's a a battery-powered cycle that looks more or less like a bike but with a step-through design, uses mostly bike components for easy repairs, rides like a bike and uses bike lanes, but goes 25MPH (range 20 miles). With baskets you can easily get to work and go to the grocery. They're $1400, and no, I don't work for them.
How long do you think it takes to change the world? It's not like overnight there's a billion of the things on the streets. Takes time to rebuild cities.
I'm serious. Take one of his other inventions, the iBot. Or the portable dialysis machine. Don't you think that both were clunkier and more expensive than existing solutions? Both could be said to change the world for the people who need them. But not overnight. Not until they become so popular that they become the *only* thing, instead of just the next big thing. Once a person in a wheelchair has navigated a street curb or flight of stairs, or looked a standing person in the eye, do you think they could ever go back? I want everyone who compares Segway to a scooter or a bicycle to use a Segway for a month or so and then your opinion will matter.
Look for Segways to gain popularity overseas first, where population (and hence, pollution and traffic) are bigger problems. In a few years people will be whining that we're behind the times on the whole Segway thing.
Had we only known Steve Jobs' initial reaction, I think the let down may have been softer and the backlash much easier.
Actually now that Codename: Ginger is out, it paints a much different picture. The story is told of how Jobs wouldn't get off and let other people ride, and when Dean made him, he sat impatiently by before grabbing it away and telling the person "Ok, get off now" so he could ride it again.
Jobs' big contribution was to say "You'll never own this market, Asia will kill you. Put it in the public domain and slap a $100 royalty on every one built." But Dean wasn't having that.
There are also some excellent stories about Jobs basically trying to buy the whole thing. Dean was trying to raise $50million in capital and Jobs basically showed up late, after most of it had been raised, and practically offered the whole figure by himself. Said that unless he was the main investor he didn't want to play at all.
I'm not finished with the book yet so I'm not sure how much he finally bought in for. :)
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
This doesn't happen in the US because of the automobile industry lobby -- honestly! There are "standards" for building streets and roads (not the same thing -- roads are for cars, streets are for everyone). If you don't adhere to these standards (making sure theres enough room for cars, small/no sidewalk, no "dangerous" shade trees, straight, boring ROW) you won't get any money from either the state or federal coffers. Who sets these standards? It varies from state to state, but back in the 30's and 40's, the big auto companies lobbied state and federal governments to legislate bike and trolley lanes out of existence. What they couldn't legislate out, they bought (trolley companies who wouldn't die to do the quality of their service) and ran into the ground.
The Netherlands, on the other hand, has not bowed down to automobile interests as much as the US has. The government also taxes its citizens very heavily to provide their advanced infrastructure. The US government is afraid to spend real money on anything but building new roadways that will give the perception of solving the traffic problems, while all they're doing is providing more capacity which will actually get congested faster than the previous roadway.
What does this all mean?
#1. The US isn't the Netherlands, nor is it Europe, the UK, or even Canada.
#2. Due to the automobile culture in the US (sprawl development, big-box stores in the middle of nowhere), it is highly difficult to get people out of their cars.
#3. Because of the sprawl development, most Americans travel further on more trips, on more dangerous roads than most other Highly Developed Nations.
#4. It would take a huge influx of federal, state, and city money to make only ONE city segway-friendly. This would require new ROW's, new traffic patterns, and diminished capacity to move automobiles. Is it worth it? Who knows.
#5. Because of the high cost (monetary, time, congestion during construction, etc) of completely overhauling current cities' transportation infrastructure, it is highly unlikely that the segway will be anything but a fun toy in the US.
Also, the US will never look as cute as Amsterdam because we don't tax our houses by the width of their property frontage.