Did anyone see it - tells the story of Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry starting up their respective computer companies in the late 70's onwards. Fascinating and really funny in places.

You've got to watch this, if you have any interest in retro computing!

linkage
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...b92/Micro_Men/

 

+1 FANTASTIC show.

Didn't realise that Sir Clive was such a d1ck. No doubt, a genius though.

Been using this as a computer resource at college Showed all the 18yr olds the C5......
They were divided between it being good and rubbish.... until they realised that this was 25 years ago!!

They then called it visionary - electric cars?? who would have thought of it eh? small city transport??? Never

The man was 25 years ahead of his time. W@nker, but ahead of his time.

I also used a website to convert the price of the computers from 1980-odd to today's money.....

A Mac for £6000!!!! Prices have only come down slightly then

DAn

 

Forgot to add, one student floored me.....

asked WHY you would connect a cassette recorder (or that's what he thought it was) to a computer!!!!

I'm taking in my Speccy next week

 

Cassette tapes where used to store data befoe floppies came along

 

Young bucks - no idea

I remember my time as a games programmer on the good old commodore 64.
Now there's a challenge for you - write this game.
You've got a whole 64K to work with - multi load games were to be avoided like the plague

 

The sad thing was knowing whether you game was going to load or not by the sequence of the coloured lines down the side of the display and/or the noise emanating from the speaker. Oh this doesn't look like it's going to work, rewind, change the volume a bit, power cycle the computer, type LOAD "" and start again.

It would drive you bonkers these days if you had to do that every time you stuck a game in the Wii

 

I can rememeber Elite on tape taking the best part of 15 minutes to load.

 

The programme certainly showed Sir Clive in a different light to the 'god' I thought he was. His ambivalence towards Chris Curry's personal computer kit, was a real eye opener. It's almost as if the Spectrum wouldn't have happened if it hadn't have been for Curry pushing the whole computer thing forward.

Obviously I loved my spectrum 48k - bought for £175 in the back of the Sunday Express colour supplement in 1982 by my dad when I was a young kid. If I was capable of comparing system specs I would've gone for an Atari 800 with its dedicated game hardware, sprites, etc... Now I understand why Archer Maclean evangelised the things! Mind they cost a fortune in comparison.

And the BBC B was a marvellous machine, that was an absolute pleasure to program. I wonder how different it would've been without the rigid specs the BBC insisted on for all bidders to it's TV contract.

To anyone who hasn't seen it, go watch Micro Men, currently repeating on BBC Four and on the link I posted above on iplayer.

 

10 Print "Hello"
20 Goto 10

they were the days

 

We had a couple of IIƒx computers when I started typesetting and I recall them being something stupid like four grand each, before putting in a decent graphics card to drive our, I think, 20 inch monitor's, which themselves were not cheap.

I recall a friends Dad purchased a C5, think I saw him use it once, then it went back in it's box and as far as I know it's still there.

Just getting a torrent of it as I can't do iPlayer here. Seen a screenshot and the actor playing Clive does look quite a bit like him.

I do fondly remember my 48k days, and the associated noise from loading the tapes. I think the speccy emulators you get today may still allow the sound of tape loading to be output.

Didn't one of the GTA games emulate a C64 starting up as part of it's load sequence?

 

A few years back I went to a new professors party at Imperial,one of the people he invited was Clive Sinclair, he just stood in a corner with glass of wine and did'nt seem interested in talking to anyone, a bit sad I thought. Though to put in context a lot of the very clever ones do have a people interaction problem, so business cannot not always work with them.

 

ahhh memories.... I too can remember the whole "dammit, the sound has changed - the game ain't gonna load"

Anybody remember Microprose's Gunship - on 4 or 6 cassettes IIRC

this is going to prove how sad I am - currently got 2 speccys in the loft (48k +, and a 128K +2).... shed loads of games (including my Competition Pro 5000 and Quickshot 2 turbo)

I've put all my games onto Minidisc!!! for "quick" access

Also got a Waferdrive & Microdrive and a Multiface ( )

i can also remember the whole "thing" about getting the volume from the cassette deck right (and marking the levels with tippex)

Even harder to do with a C64..... especially when trying to high-speed dub


And the FUNNIEST thing (a big case of "awwwwww" really) - my parents bought a Dragon 32 - with cassette deck etc.

Turned it on with my C64-owning mate in the room. Couldn't work out why the machine wasn't loading........

until dad realised that my friend had plugged in the cassette deck - the c64 didn't need a power lead - sadly the Matsui cassette deck did

LOL

Dan

 

Just finished watching Micro Men, rather good. As it says, some things made up for humor. Love the "I wish somebody would answer the fukcing phone" line, followed by the phone flying through the office window

 

As I remember it, even the kids with an Oric would laugh at the Dragon owners

 

I have watched it twice now. The actors did a great job to bring something that could be so dull to life. Sir Clive Sinclair' swearing was great, 'bloody ******* hell' followed by the flying telephone was great. There is something special about a well spoken voice cursing in such a course way that just makes you smile.

 

Oh forgot to add, I started with a Commodore VIC20 and then ended up with a Spectrum 128k +3
Yea, mine had a disk drive!!!

 

did you recognise Alexander Armstrong, playing Sir Clive Sinclair ?



You've probably seen him in Armstrong & Miller, the TV comedy show






and the Science of Cambridge mk14 personal computer kit:


lastly, the famous Quantum Leap TV advert:

and a little treat:

 

Yeh, they weren't exactly brilliant!! Learnt a lot about simple programming though.
IIRC, my parents' justification was because the Dragon had a proper keyboard. nothing else - cr@p psu connector and rubbish joysticks too!

Still, we've all got to start somewhere

 

I expect a Dragon would have been a nice machine to learn programming with. In contrast the Spectrum was a nightmare. BASIC was so frustrating due to the rubbish keyboard / symbol shift , etc... Learning Z80 was probably less frustrating with a nice editor/assembler!

I was immediately converted to the BBC Model B when I used one at school That's when I started to enjoy programming. Plus it had a built in assembler! I remember playing Rocket Raid and thinking WOW! the sound is amazing! (compared to my Spectrum's beeps and farts)

 

There's loads of good stuff on BBC4 at the minute.

I thought this was brilliant, Freeman and Armstrong are really good actors so they made it what it was, excellent.

Also watched the programme about Bob Noyce the guy theat invented the silicon chip and went on to open Intel.

 

There was a good programme on ages ago about Bill Gates
Its was all about how he "stole" the idea the idea of windows from Rank xerox and IBM

 

"Pirates of Silicon Valley" is the Bill Gates and Apple story... just as interesting and eventful as the Sinclair / Acorn one. You can often find it on YouTube and it's well worth watching if you enjoyed Micro Men...

Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) (TV)

 

Just downloaded 'Micro Men' on BBC Iplayer. I'll watch it later. Cheers for the heads up