gimpymoo
15 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2015–2026
1:24:13 · 461K views · Jul 28, 2013
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.
HN recommends it often as an entertaining and authentic dramatization of Sinclair versus Acorn, the story from which ARM grew.
20 comments from Hacker News
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.)
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
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
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
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]