15 HN users recommended this documentary14 months2015–2026score 16
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN recommends it often as an entertaining and authentic dramatization of Sinclair versus Acorn, the story from which ARM grew.
Micro Men is a 2009 BBC comic drama about the early 1980s British home computer boom. It follows the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Acorn founder Chris Curry over the BBC Micro contract and the ZX Spectrum.
I can highly recommend the BBC drama "Micro Men", about the early years of the British home computer boom and the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn. It gives a real flavour of the mad, maverick years before the IBM clones took over. [this video]
Flavor of early British home computer boom and Sinclair-Acorn rivalry.
If you haven't already seen it, 'Micro Men' is an excellent TV drama that details the history of the BBC's computer project and the battle to be the chosen computer: [this video]
Excellent drama on BBC computer project and the battle to win it.
The excellent Micro Men docudrama ( [link] ) has somehow been on Youtube since 2013: [this video] (1h24m) Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro. (Sinclair didn't exactly like it though.)
Excellent docudrama on Sinclair-Acorn rivalry, available on YouTube.
Nice reference there! Micro Men really is a great docu-drama, it really feels like it captures the time very well. As my first computer was a BBC Micro, it really struck a chord. It’s great seeing the specs for the (yet to be built) ARM chip on the board in the Acorn office, and it’s also awesome that Sophie Wilson playing the barmaid too! For those that haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth a watch [1] [1] [this video]
Captures the era well, with ARM chip specs on the office board.
Micro Men is available on youtube [1] and is definitely worth a watch. The scene were one of the characters is eating noodles using multimeter probes as chopsticks made me smile. [1] [this video]
"26 years" is oddly precise, but the sinclair C5 was 1985, 34 years ago, so it's probably just how long he's served or something. [link] BONUS "Micro Men" documentary/drama about Sir Clive Sinclair vs Acorn (from which grew Acorn RISC Machine -> ARM) [this video] (1h 24m) "A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?"
Drama of Sinclair versus Acorn, from which ARM grew.
[this video] The full BBC movie without commentary. An authentic drama about the heyday of British home computing featuring Clive Sinclair plus Curry, Furber, and Hauser from Acorn computers. Also appearing are the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, and the ARM processor on a whiteboard.
Full authentic drama on British home computing heyday.
Acorn was not obscure. It was a household name, with TV ads and such. There's this nice TV show about Sinclair and Acorn from BBC 4. [this video] (Micro Men)
[link] Favorites about real and fictional creators: Micro Men [this video] Pirates of Silicon Valley Halt and Catch Fire ... and some documentaries like "Mother of all Demos", the history of Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, and the creators of the spreadsheet
It's easy to quibble about some aspects of the Speccy - the rubber keyboard or the limited BASIC for example - but the key thing is that it offered an awful lot for the price - starting at £125 in the UK when the cheapest BBC Micro was £300. This made computing with colour and enough memory to write programs that were substantial and interesting available to a much wider group than before. Sir Clive Sinclair had a unique genius for designing and then marketing products that caught the public imagination. Sadly, he seemed to lose interest in building on his success and quickly moved on to the next project. Famously the C5 electric "car" but also wafer scale memory! [1] If anyone hasn't seen Micro Men, on the Sinclair vs Acorn rivalry, its definitely worth a watch: [this video] And seeing some of the participants watch it and recall their own versions of the story is good too: [link] [1] [link]
one of the reasons it was cheap was they got faulty 64k ram chips at a knock down price - hence the 48k. this film about sinclair is well worth a watch. [this video]
To people asking why a broadcasting corporation needed a programming language you might watch 'Micro Men'. It's available on YouTube. [link] [this video]
Explains why the BBC needed a programming language.
The BBC made a drama, "Micro Men" (2009), about some of the behind-the-scenes drama behind the BBC Micro. As I recall, it doesn't explain the whole Fred, Jim and Sheila thing though. Martin "Bilbo Baggins" Freeman is in it. [this video]
Drama about behind-the-scenes BBC Micro story, starring Martin Freeman.
The closing scene is priceless. Clive Sinclair defiantly drives into the future on his C5, without helmet or neck support, overtaken by lorries/juggernauts: [this video]
Stutters quite badly on my laptop (Thinkpad P53 / Ubuntu / Firefox) So here[0]'s the original as used at the end of Micro Men, featuring Acorn / ARM's Sophie Wilson as the barmaid. [0] [this video]
Original Oxygene 4 as used at the end, with Sophie Wilson cameo.
Fixing the 16K RAM pack makes an apperance in the Micro Men film: [this video] RAM was so tight on those 8-bit machines that many games used tricks like hiding things inside the viewable area of the screen to eck out just a little bit more.
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