Micro Men

[Michael Clease]

The BBC has been showing a Docu-Drama about Clive Sinclair and the Acorn computers race to be number one in the UK market and then their downfall when the market was saturated.

Its quite funny and sad.

Sorry but Only people in the Uk can probably watch it on Iplayer but check you tube for clips.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer)

[matthew]

I saw this a few Weeks ago, it seemed to be well researched & was quite amusing.

The ending was a bit depressing albeit realistic though when it described that the current computer scene is dominated by big American PC firms with no room for small manufacturers anymore.

[Petr Schreiber]

Thanks,

I will try to find it on the net. I have ZX at home and it still works, which is funny when observing notebooks today usually do not survive few years of existence.

[Michael Hartlef]

The only thing I could find on youtube was a preview with a link to a payed service to watch it.

Petr, you have a ZX? Way cool :)

[Charles Pegge]

As with all Sinclair products, the build quality was shall we say, minimalist - the very cheapest they could get away with. So it's all the more amazing that Petr has a ZX81 that still works! If it does die eventually, you will have to conduct a post-mortem and inspect the soldering. Perhaps being in central Europe, - being far away from the salty atmosphere of coastal regions would help to minimise corrosion. Another factor is the absence of IC sockets. Cheap IC sockets are almost certainly the limiting factor in a computer's lifespan.

Although Acorn did not survive, it produced some really great technology, - its GUI/OS implementation was closely studied by microsoft and of course the ARM processor, first used in the Archimedes (successor to the BBC micro), demonstrated the power and efficiency of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set) processors - and continue to be deployed in many mobile devices, including the iPhone.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197003973

[Petr Schreiber]

Yes,

still alive. I do not have the classic ZX 81, but ZX Spectrum (with some crazy memory expansion module). I think the 81 was little bigger.

I liked on this machine that I can redefine font "bitmaps" to create fast pseudographics.
I attach the photo took quite recently, ZX Spectrum lying on dirty balcony floor.

I do not use it that often now(maybe that is why it is still working :)), it gets quite hot after hour of use.
But I like its primitive look - even the electronic parts inside are quite huge.

Interesting is that while the keyboard does not look very solid, all keys still react properly.

[Michael Hartlef]

I love that machine, but I never had one. Besides the usual C64 and other machines, I had a Schneider (Amstrad) CPC 464 with an external Disk drive later.

http://www.zock.com/8-Bit/D_CPC464.HTML

I remember having a long night playing HANSE with 5 other guys.

We were sitting on soft chairs around one table. After quite some hours around 4 am in the morning everyone got tired. We were playing there for allready 6-8 hours. So one guy decided to instead moving his body towards the keyboard, he just pulled the whole computer towards him. Badly, the CPC has that tight spiral cord connection from the monitor, that also serves as the power connection. So this cable was unconnected and the whole game was gone. You can imagine how the others reacted on him. The game wasn't saved and all was for nothing. We still have a blast over it sometimes these days.

[Michael Clease]

After watching the show I looked up some of the history and on wikipedia I found some very interesting info.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers#New_RISC_architecture (http://)

I've always liked BBC basic and after reading that they made a simulation using BBC basic leaves me even more inpressed.

http://www.comedy.org.uk/guide/tv/micro_men/videos/

or each video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyBu4gi6ddA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMFSzJCtRMw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGiGrf2YyZE

[Michael Hartlef]

Crap, I can't even watch these youtube videos because I'm not in england. Silly! :roll:

[kryton9]

Just reading the discussions about this makes me feel old :)

It will be fun watching these gems this week, thanks for the links guys!