{"id":5239,"date":"2010-02-15T10:00:14","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T15:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=5239"},"modified":"2021-07-09T21:52:32","modified_gmt":"2021-07-10T01:52:32","slug":"micro-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/15\/micro-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Micro Men"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Clive Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong) pays for drinks (from an uncredited Sophie<\/em> Wilson<\/em>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was a cheesy time, the early 80s, but I’m stuck with it as my youth. Home computers were probably the largest part of my life for rather longer than I should admit.<\/p>\n

My brother recommended Micro Men<\/em>, a BBC 4 (what? they have more than two?) comedy drama about the fight between Acorn and Sinclair for the BBC educational contract. I went to my usual source for quality television, and it was on my computer an hour after hearing about it.<\/p>\n

With a mix of vintage film and recreations, it caught the ’78-85 vibe perfectly. Whether all the anecdotes are historically correct, it doesn’t matter – the feeling of the frantic dash to develop new machines in ridiculously short times and then advertise them months before they were ready was there.<\/p>\n

There were a bunch of good cameos, too. Nice to see Sophie Wilson<\/a> (known to me as the author of Acorn’s BBC Basic, known to you as the designer of the ARM processor almost certainly used in your mobile phone) making an appearance.<\/p>\n

So, though I was never a BBC B or ZX Spectrum owner, a fun programme, and one you might like.<\/p>\n

I came late to the BBC Basic game, but used it on my Z88<\/a> to ace an Introduction to Numerical Methods<\/em> course (yay EVAL<\/code>!).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a cheesy time, the early 80s, but I’m stuck with it as my youth. Home computers were probably the largest part of my life for rather longer than I should admit. My brother recommended Micro Men, a BBC 4 (what? they have more than two?) comedy drama about the fight between Acorn and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[414,857,2099],"class_list":["post-5239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-80s","tag-bbc","tag-sinclair"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-1mv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5239"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16812,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5239\/revisions\/16812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}