Micro Men

Micro Men (2009)

In 1979 Clive Sinclair, British inventor of the pocket calculator, frustrated by the lack of home investment in his project,the electric car, also opposes former assistant Chris Curry's belief that he can successfully market a micro-chip for a home computer. A parting of the ways sees Curry, in partnership with the Austrian Hermann Hauser and using whizz kid Cambridge students, set up his own, rival firm to Sinclair Radionics, Acorn. Acorn beat Sinclair to a lucrative contract supplying the BBC with machines for a computer series. From here on it is a battle for supremacy to gain the upper hand in the domestic market.

Date of release
2009-10-08
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (30)
Runtime
1h 24m
Genres
Drama
Director
Saul Metzstein

Casting

Interesting facts

Micro Men 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 and the early fortunes of Sinclair and Acorn Computers. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair, who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry, the man behind the BBC Micro.

Production

The programme was created by independent production company Darlow Smithson and was written by Tony Saint, directed by Saul Metzstein and produced by Andrea Cornwell. It was produced as a BBC Drama, shot in the UK, with some scenes shot in and around the colleges of Cambridge on 15 July 2009. Computers were supplied by The Centre for Computing History, then in Haverhill.

The programme's titles use a green lettering font similar to that produced by the 1980s monitors to which BBC Microcomputers would have typically been connected.

The soundtrack uses a number of early 1980s electronica tracks: Though not all tracks are limited to that decade.

"Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

"Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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