I've just watched BBC Four's Micro Men, a vaguely comic dramatisation of the British computer boom during the early 1980s. It centres around the exploits of Clive "Spectrum" Sinclair and Chris "Acorn" Curry, as their companies battled for the contract to produce the BBC Microcomputer.
As someone who grew up in that era, loved computers, but was too young to care about the actual people whom made them, it was an interesting retrospective. It's easy to forget Britain was once at the forefront of the industry and created one of the most popular microchips in the world, the ARM. However, it shouldn't surprise anyone to know that Micro Men was biased towards Acorn Computers, given they won the BBC contract. In fact, it goes so far as to paint Sir Clive as some kind of sinister Gordon Gekko character. How much of all that is true, I don't know, although rumour has it Sinclair himself was much more flexible about the screenplay than Curry.
What was true and what was fabrication is neither here nor there. Micro Men is very enjoyable look back at how all this home computer malarky first took root. It evoked fond memories of my own Acorn Electron and waiting for Ghouls, Frak! or Boffin to load from tape.
Oh and here's the real version of Sinclair's awful QL advert, made before the computer was even built.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc3kGyYyqgQ
If you missed it, you should be able to catch Micro Men on the BBC iPlayer.
Micro Men - one off TV drama about Sinclair and Acorn
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