Micro Men, broadcast on BBC4 last year, is a great window on what went on during the early 80s computer boom. It tells the story of Clive Sinclair and his growing rivalry with Chris Curry, his one-time employee who left him to establish Acorn and then whip the BBC Computer contract from under his nose.
The BBC's aim was to put a computer in every school, and, with Acorn, it did - but Sinclair arguably did better out of the deal by producing a smaller, cheaper machine that became the computer in every bedroom.
There's a great scene in the film where Curry (played by Martin Freeman) goes into a shop and sees row upon row of Spectrum games, then has to ask if there are any for the BBC. The shop assistant has to have a good hard think about it before pointing him at a small selection of tapes hidden in a far corner.
. I remember this experience well, being the proud owner of a BBC model B, but at no stage did I wish we had got a Spectrum instead. The BBC was easier to programme, easier to load things into (programmes loaded from the tape block by block and the computer would tell you immediately if it failed to read a block properly - you could rewind the tape only a second or so and it would pick up where it left off). The games were also a lot better too, in terms of graphics and sound - quality over quantity, I say. With the odd exception of Manic Miner, which for some odd reason was ported to the Beeb by someone who thought it would be a great idea to make it look and sound identical to the Spectrum version. Bizarre.
The ultimate tragedy for Sinclair was that he always saw home computers as a side show and pursued the market only insofar as it made him the money he needed to invest in things he thought people really wanted, like the C5.
