I have just watched the excellent Micro Men on BBC4. It is a (highly) fictionalised account of the short lived Cambridge computer industry of the 1980s and early 1990s and the birth of the BBC Micro and the Sinclair ZX series of computers that culminated in the (in)famous ZX Spectrum.

This is of course very recent history but when I watched it, it brought back memories of my Ph.D. days, strange haircuts and clothes that reminded me of well hidden photo albums. What seemed very strange was seeing actors play people you know. Indeed playing people you were sitting next to at a recent committee meeting – that is wierd. Fortunately, I missed out on the computer boom so ther was no danger of me appearing even in a crowd scene – although it was worrying to discover that the code name for the ZX Spectrum project was Derby.

I never met Herman Hauser personally in Cambridge but he was a name that appeared in wider circles, and I never met Steve Furber until he moved to Manchester but I had friends who worked for Acorn, Torch, Torus and even (God forbid) Sinclair. These companies never had the business acumen that led to world dominance, although ARM – the Acorn Risc machine – was being developed when I left Cambridge and is now ubiquitous in every mobile device. Still it is interesting to consider that you were on the edge of a minor revolution, even if you never even remotely considered joining in and becoming part of it.