HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

And if you're interested in that watch the movie :-)

https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM

Micro men, story of the zx spectrum vs the bbc

one of the reasons it was cheap was they got faulty 64k ram chips at a knock down price - hence the 48k. this film about sinclair is well worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

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] https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM

⬐ bencollier49

It's wonderful. I've pretty much watched it to death, but still occasionally have another go.

⬐ unfocussed_mike

An absolutely brilliant bit of creative work, indeed.

Nothing else has ever really conveyed that Clive Sinclair wasn't a sort of little professorial boffin the way the British press portrayed him; he was very business-focussed and evidently had quite a presence.

(Common to the almost concurrent misportrayal of John Major as a small, retiring, grey man)

⬐ bencollier49

I've heard that he was quite the party animal as well, something which doesn't quite seem to have been covered by the show (albeit some aspects hinted at tangentially).

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

And seeing some of the participants watch it and recall their own versions of the story is good too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaonVYOTSsk

[1] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3043/Anamartic-Wafer-...

⬐ vmilner

> If anyone hasn't seen Micro Men, on the Sinclair vs Acorn rivalry, its definitely worth a watch:

That is one of the funniest things I've ever seen - you can tell the main cast are having an absolute blast. BBC Four at its best.

⬐ klelatti

It’s great. The Acorn team seemed to like it too. Not sure if Sir Clive ever commented.

Did you spot Sophie Wilson in the Baron of Beef pub :)

⬐ rahimnathwani

"the cheapest BBC Micro was £300"

This is a great point. The Acorn Electron (a £129 cut down version of the BBC Micro) wasn't available until a couple of years later.

The excellent Micro Men docudrama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men) has somehow been on Youtube since 2013:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (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.)

⬐ alexfoo

I had the best of both worlds in my upbringing.

My father knew Clive Sinclair thanks to the Cambridge tech/hifi scene at the time, and we also used to live near him in Madingley. Somewhere in my dad's shed there's a ZX81 with a single digit serial number (amongst a lot of other similar machines: Jupiter Ace, ZX80, various Spectrums with weird and wacky keyboards, Dragon 32, Commodore 16 Plus/4, etc).

A bit later we also lived next door to Franni and Geoff Vincent who were part of the Acorn team that designed and built the BBC Micro. They used to let me come round (aged 8 or so) and use their Model B whenever I wanted.

Sir Clive Sinclair had a HUGE influence on my life. RIP.

⬐ hyperpallium2

  Your reach should exceed your grasp, or what's a heaven for?

A key quote from the documentary.

"Reach" is what you can just touch with your fingertips outstretched; "grasp" is what you can firmly close your hand on and grip.

⬐ pitspotter2

Thanks! I've heard that quote a few times but till now never grasped the full meaning.

A link to the quote in the film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=5m9s

⬐ empressplay

"Games! Games! Everywhere I go games! This is what my lifetime of achievement has been reduced to! Clive Sinclair the man who brought you Jet Set f**ing Willy!" -- Clive Sinclair (fictional), Micro Men

⬐ easton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3l_NV9oQ1c

⬐ simonw

Micro Men is so good. I met the director once at an event and asked him if it would ever be released on DVD or equivalent and it sounded like that was unlikely, so it's great to see it available on YouTube.

⬐ jecel

It is interesting to watch the video of the actual interview that they recreate in the movie. The movie Sinclair seems a bit upset while the real life one was smiling a lot and being very friendly.

⬐ timthorn

The Centre for Computing History videoed Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser watching Micro Men and chatting for the tenth anniversary of its broadcast:

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/55810/Micro-Men-10th...

Thanks for the reference googling I found https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_computers

Favorites about real and fictional creators:

Micro Men https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Pirates of Silicon Valley

Halt and Catch Fire

... and some documentaries like "Mother of all Demos", the history of Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, and the creators of the spreadsheet

⬐ aglavine

Blackhat was pretty good

It's not a documentary but the BBC drama 'Micro Men' is very good and AFAIK mostly historically accurate.

It's about the battle between Clive Sinclair (of Sinclair Spectrum fame) and Chris Curry (founder of Acorn Computers, the progenitor of ARM) for dominance in the 80's UK home computer market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92

Acorn was not obscure. It was a household name, with TV ads and such.

There's this nice TV show about Sinclair and Acorn from BBC 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (Micro Men)

⬐ mattbee

As a Brit I agree, I muttered my way through the parochial tone. Now imagine the parallel universe where it had been the Dragon 32 whose CPU had taken over the world :)

⬐ UncleSlacky

Ah, you mean the copy of the Tandy Color Computer...

⬐ jacquesm

Improved copy. But still, a copy.

That said, the degree to which the CoCo used software where other computers used hardware was very impressive and allowed for some pretty neat modifications without even touching a soldering iron. Oh, and the Dragon 32 actually had 64K of RAM which you could unlock entirely from software (it took a buddy of mine a couple of months to figure out how to keep the computer running when enabling that upper 32K after I figured out that it had the extra memory).

⬐ klelatti

With Sophie Wilson as the barmaid in the Baron of Beef Pub in Cambridge at the end!

⬐ 29athrowaway

Indeed, a cool cameo. She was one of the designers for the "Acorn RISC Machine" (today known as the ARM architecture).

⬐ sys_64738

I'd doubt a lot of people who knew about the BBC Micro would know who made it. Acorn was obscure as the company wasn't front and center of the BBC initiative.

⬐ timrichard

That drama is even more enjoyable the second time around with commentary from three of the Acorn team portrayed :

https://youtu.be/yaonVYOTSsk

⬐ klelatti

Herman Hauser: "Did that happen"

Chris Curry: "NO!"

ah yes you are right, the in-line ELSE

Obligatory shout out for 'Micro Men', about the making of the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

⬐ ksangeelee

For more geeky insights into the time, I can recommend the book The ZX Spectrum ULA http://www.zxdesign.info/book/ The business side of things is incidental to the rich details of the hardware design and production.

⬐ wtt604

This is a great dramatisation of the 80s, it is well worth a watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

The full BBC movie without commentary. An authentic drama about the heyday of British home computing featuring Clive Sinclair plus Curry, Furber, and Hauser from Acorn computers. Also appearing are the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, and the ARM processor on a whiteboard.

The BBC made a drama, "Micro Men" (2009), about some of the behind-the-scenes drama behind the BBC Micro. As I recall, it doesn't explain the whole Fred, Jim and Sheila thing though.

Martin "Bilbo Baggins" Freeman is in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

⬐ as1mov

Just watched it last night, it's pretty good. Though does anyone have any context for the scene with Sinclair and the 3 women in the convention? It seemed a bit out of place in the whole doc.

BTW, Silicon Cowboys is another film I'd recommend. It's about the history of Compaq.

⬐ LeoPanthera

It's a reference to the fact that Sinclair was a notorious womanizer, and his exploits often ended up in the press of the time. He was also chairman of MENSA from 1980 to 1997.

⬐ contrapunter

The closing scene is priceless. Clive Sinclair defiantly drives into the future on his C5, without helmet or neck support, overtaken by lorries/juggernauts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=1h21m38s

⬐ timthorn

A film with the best working title: "Syntax Era"

You can compare this philosophy to "Publish or Perish" in academia. Universities tell scholars if you don't "ship" (publish frequently, get citations), we fire you.

In that system, quantity is more important than quality. It's about pointless journals, conferences and citation rings, rather than actual research. "Publish or Perish" is about institutions trying to inflate their ranking, rather than fulfilling their original purpose: advance the frontiers of human knowledge.

Another example: When IBM projects paid engineers based on "kilos", or thousands of lines of code added, what was the result? millions of lines of pointless, redundant code. Bloated software that doesn't work and is impossible to maintain.

Another example: Stacked ranking/Vitality curve. The idea is simple: you evaluate each employee, producing a score. Then you rank all employees within a team. The lowest scoring 10% gets fired. Repeat every year... result? teams hire the worst employees they can, because that improves their chance of surviving the next stacked ranking iteration. Repeat for many years and you obtain an incompetent organization incapable of doing anything, full of toxic people.

If you use sprint velocity as your most important metric, the result will be a lot of redundant actions followed by corrective actions to undo those actions. It looks like a lot is getting done, but that's the same as saying that a truck driver driving in circles is productive based purely on fuel utilization, when in reality the guy is not going anywhere.

A perverse incentive, that's what it is. Want to have 0% crime rate? Have a population of zero, problem solved. Want to end elephant poaching? Kill all elephants, problem solved.

What is important is not only when you ship, but what you ship, and how you ship it. Don't upset your customers in the process of releasing changes. And keep the vital aspects of your product working...

https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM?t=4072

⬐ rusticpenn

Most of these problems can be curbed by pproper oversight and exception handling, however i also find that techniques based on empathy and trust tend to help longterm.

⬐ 29athrowaway

If you have a some buggy, unstable code and your boss is telling you to "ship" or else, be "released" (terminology from this article)... you will ship broken code. It's irrational.

⬐ 29athrowaway

So there are aspects of development that rank higher than shipping, right?

That invalidates the "shipping is #1" credo. Sustained and sustainable growth is #1.

Accountability is important, but being forced to ship a broken release is irrational.

For those who're interested in the 1980s "micro wars", BBC's Micro Men TV movie (2009) is a nice dramatized glimpse of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Though it does paint Clive Sinclair (the Steve Jobs of the UK) in a somewhat unflattering light.

"26 years" is oddly precise, but the sinclair C5 was 1985, 34 years ago, so it's probably just how long he's served or something. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5

BONUS "Micro Men" documentary/drama about Sir Clive Sinclair vs Acorn (from which grew Acorn RISC Machine -> ARM) https://youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (1h 24m) "A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?"

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

The end credits/epilogue of MicroMen is a lovely bit of visual poetry https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM?t=4900

⬐ C1sc0cat

And so sad :-(

Really ought to have a HN meet up in the pub where the famous fight between Sinclair and Curry Happened.

⬐ timthorn

A few years ago, the Centre for Computing History (as per the article) hosted the pair. No fisticuffs... :)

I highly recommend watching "Micro Men" which focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair, who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry of Acorn.

The original script was called "Syntax Era" which is still a much funnier name :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

⬐ timthorn

In which the proprietor of The Centre for Computing History (hosting this thread's target webpage) had a cameo.

⬐ louthy

As did Sophie Wilson (barmaid at the end)

This scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=1h28s (at 1:00:28) shows why people would think that.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Micro Men is available on youtube [1] and is definitely worth a watch. The scene were one of the characters is eating noodles using multimeter probes as chopsticks made me smile.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

⬐ 72deluxe

You may struggle to find Sophie in that film because at that time she was a man, and was Roger with the long hair (if I recall correctly). Very informative programme, some funny scenes with Sinclair driving past in his C5.

I still love my Beeb, great machines. Very well written manuals too!

⬐ rjsw

The cameo appearance by Sophie is as a barmaid in a pub.

As seen in Micro Men - BBC Dramatisation of the business end of (some of) the 80s home computer scene in the 80s in the UK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

⬐ hoggle

Cool, I didn't know about that documentary! Perfect Saturday evening cinema, thanks!

⬐ louthy

Slightly interesting fact: The barmaid at the end is Sophie (was Roger) Wilson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson