Sinclair C5 exactly this tack when he purchased Sinclair Vehicles' remaining stock, saying that his company would market them as "a sophisticated toy": "If you were a little boy, wouldn't you want your parents to get you one this Christmas?" His strategy was notably successful; Ellar sold nearly 7,000 C5s at up to £700 each, far more (and at a higher price) than Sinclair had ever managed. Some commentators attributed the C5's failure to problems with Sinclair's marketing strategy; only a year after the demise of Sinclair Vehicles, the "Globe and Mail" newspaper called it "one of the great marketing bombs of
Sinclair Scientific fraction of the cost of competing calculators. In 1972, Hewlett-Packard launched the HP-35, the world's first handheld scientific calculator. Despite market research suggesting that it was too expensive for there to be any real demand, production went ahead. It cost (about ), but despite the price, over 300,000 were sold in the three and a half years for which it was produced. From 1971 Texas Instruments had been making available the building block for a simple calculator on a single chip and the TMS0803 chipset appeared in a number of Sinclair calculators. Clive Sinclair wanted to design a calculator to