Micro Men

My word …

I was mildly impressed, last night … !

No, I was.

I’ve got to admit, in between watching the occasional bout of this year’s Grand Prix snooker tournament, I caught “Micro Men”.

And I ended up impressed with a docu-drama that seemed to capture the excitement of the times.

“Micro Men” charts the early years of the British computer boom, and follows the clash between Clive Sinclair — played by Alexander Armstrong — and his former employee, Chris Curry; played sympathetically by former “The Office” star, Martin Freeman.

It’s a very affectionate look at the period the funky looking ZX Spectrum was battling it out with the sturdier — and dull looking — BBC Micro.

Both of which I used.

The Beeb was a sturdy — and fairly high spec — piece of kit. But always had something of a reputation, back then, for being a bit … well … swotty.

It was used at school, remember? (OK, granted a lot of musicians used to record one or two hits on it, but … )

The Spectrum, on the other hand was the nicely designed fun one!

Literally, fun!

The number of games for it was phenomenal.

And rather eye-catching; that’s probably left its mark, on me, at least. The basic equation, for me, is Fun + Computer = Mac.

You couldn’t see that coming, could you?

But back to the story …

As I write, it’s currently still available on the BBC iPlayer, so I’d urge you to go watch it, yourself, while you still can.

But watching “Micro Men”, last night, did leave me very convinced of a thing or two.

Firstly that, whilst Clive Sinclair left us a big legacy — the idea that all of us could have a computer in our front rooms — he seems to have come off rather badly. After all, after the collapse of his company, with the farce of the C5, he ended up having to sell Sinclair Research — and the ZX Spectrum — to Sir Alan Sugar.

And whatever you may think of Sir Alan, time has shown us he’s one hell of a businessman.

And that — however much of a shark Sir Clive may have been — other bigger sharks have managed to build on the foundations he and Chris Curry* laid, and succeed a lot better than he could have dreamt.

That seems a shame; the early 1980s seemed to be one of the few times in my memory when Britain was innovating and seen to be doing so.

* Chris later went on to become a director of the company that developed the ARM chip, and the concepts behind RISC computing. You’ve probably got an ARM chip. It’ll be the one powering your mobile phone. Now that’s a coup!