Micro Men was a drama-documentary on BBC Four about the competition in the home computer market between Sinclair and Acorn during the early 1980s.
Slightly dodgy false beards aside, I thought it was excellent. Despite a prefixed disclaimer that some scenes had been invented for dramatic purposes, the vast majority of what I saw held true to the actual events of the time. It was especially nice (and somewhat amusing) to see the attention paid to Clive’s terrible temper, something usually ignored by the media.
My only gripes were technical ones, for example, the “launch” BBC Micro had a DFS ROM in it – surely not.
(I noticed the beeb on “Electric Dreams” had a DFS ROM in it as well – probably the same beeb. This contributed to the difficulty they had in getting games to run on it – they needed to type *TAPE first.)
It would have been nice to go slightly further into Acorn’s future to show the successful launch of the ARM and Archimedes computers – whereas Sinclair just got eaten by Amstrad and then destroyed. I was also slightly disappointed that the launch of the BBC Master (my personal favourite!) didn’t get covered – just a note in a whiteboard.
But overall, really very good. If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend it. And if you’re interested in getting your old BBC Micro working again, I can help you there too! Just drop me a message.