Tonight, BBC 4, 9pm. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92

I’ll say it now - BBC Micro FTW!!!

Oh, crap.I’m feeling all nostalgic:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fdecomite/3512659424/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peteredin/ ... otostream/

My dad's got it on 'remind'.

If they pull out a Spectrum with the solid key conversion I may cry.....

That was a brilliant programme

I especially liked the Austrian guy.

I enjoyed it - I’ve got a ZX81, but I’m firmly entrenched in the Acorn camp. I did think that Armstrong’s hair piece looked a bit odd, but it was a good telling of the story.

I don’t know if Sinclair’s obsession with the electric car was as obsessive as portrayed, but I really feel that if he had announced it this decade, he’d have been on to something.

I watched it and enjoyed it.

Blimey! I was there. I bought a ZX81, had the 16k RAM pack, and failed to learn anything with it. A colleague bought a QL, but I don't think he ever mastered it.

I lived through that time. I'm old. I remember the Sinclair QL jumping advert!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc3kGyYyqgQ

No sound!

What was interesting was how the British industry sort of lost the plot somewhere. We were at the forefront, but let it slip somehow. I'm still not sure, from the film, how it slipped, but I guess that's history. America won. Again.

And thankfully so did graphical user interfaces. Without those, I doubt the personal computer would be anything more than just a games machine. I wonder what business machines would be like if Xerox hadn't let folk in to see their ideas, and letting the whole mousey-pointy-clicky genie out of the bottle?

We still have manufacturing systems here running on old UNIX systems. The Windows PCs are just used to run VT100 terminal emulation onto the server...

In fact, we have a couple of old 8086 machines kicking around doing that as well.

Over in the lab, I uncovered a working IBM PC from 1982, with MDA display card (you can't call it a graphics card, as it can only generate text!)

Businesses did quite well with text based applications - they were certainly a lot easier to support as they did a limited number of tasks and did them well. The GUI allows the users to do more, but it is also confusing!

We have users who type lists of numbers into Excel, then use a real calculator, with paper roll, to calculate the total and type in the total!

Most of the users here moan about Windows XP (just wait until the new machine turn up with Windows 7!) and they want to go back to their beloved UNIX system, it is so much better than a graphical user interface!

Yes I remember an accountant who insisted his team did that

We used to do all our ordering of stuff by paper forms. Recently the department admin person said to everyone 'OK, that's archaic, we're not doing that any more'. Now there is an excel spreadsheet on the department network share that you type all the details into - address of suppliers, items, prices etc and send that to her and she migrates that to a DB of all the orders. At the bottom of the spreadsheet, there's a cell for 'total cost'. You have to fill that box in yourself.

We're an IT department for christ's sake.

Jon

Missed it

Oh well, there's always iPlayer

The programme missed an interesting. The New Brain - the BBC’s original choice for the BBC Micro - was originally a Sinclair Radionics project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundy_NewBrain
Knowing this makes Sinclair’s rage even more pointed as he had missed the chance to be in on the ground floor.

In 1983, Acorn announced the ABC - a business machine (Acorn User were all over it at the time) - a year before the launch of the QL. Sinclair made much of the QL’s 16bit processor, even though it was using 8-bit busses to shunt data around. Both companies were clearly targeting the business market, and at this time, both were on a road to failure. Sinclair seemed to be driven by the need to get to market first at all costs - the first QLs shipped were of poor quality (even by Sinclair’s standards), and had to have a dongle fitted to get the to work properly.

Heather - you will have noticed on the white board behind Chris Curry the letters ARM in big letters. This is your clue to the development of a GUI for the successor of the BBC Micro - the Archimedes. It shipped in June 1987, with the custom Acorn RISC Machine chip onboard (the ARM chip being developed by Acorn specifically for this computer) with a GUI - ARTHUR - on board. ARTHUR purportedly stands for “A Risc-based operating system by THURsday” it was not good (I didn’t use it), but the successor - RISC OS - was far, far better and very useable. It’s still in development, despite Acorn being long gone.

In 1988, Sir Clive’s Cambridge Computers released a portable - the Z88. It was an A4 sized black tablet with funny rubbery keys, a strip LCD display and was based (again) around a Z80 processor. It did PDA type things, but had a very interesting couple of features. First off, it had a version of Pipedream, which was an advanced for of View - Acornsoft’s word processor. It also had an implementation of BBC BASIC. It was probably the best machine Sinclair ever made - it could be linked to a regular computer via a serial cable, and there was software supplied to connect it to a BBC Micro. It was pretty straight forward to link it to an Archimedes and swap files between the two. I used mine for my University work. It was an ultra portable in a time when the Apple Portable looked like a suitcase.

We definitely missed something. Apple muscled in on the education market - forming a temporary alliance with Acorn (dubbed the Fruit and Nut alliance), but Acorn got shoved out by Apple and Research Machines. Microsoft pretty much won the desktop in the business and the home, and Acorn shut down days before the release of it’s RISC PC follow-up Phoebe. Acorn bought and became Element 14 and got swallowed up into Broadcom (remember - RISC OS and the ARM chip work on very few resources - you can do a lot with 2MB so both were perfect for set top boxes).

So, that’s it for the British computer industry. We did a lot, but others just did it bigger. I think the exchange between Sinclair and Curry at the end of the programme was right - if they had stuck together and Sinclair had let Curry develop his computers, they would have had a much bigger winner. There you go. HIndsight, eh?

And then this happend: http://www.acorncomputers.co.uk/

Repeated this Saturday 10th, at 10pm, on BBC 4 and also on Monday 12th, again at 10pm on BBC 4.