Sir Clive Sinclair versus Chris Curry to be broadcast on UK TV
The story of how the home computer gained prominence throughout the eighties is being retold - in a new BBC comedy drama.
The new show, called Syntax Era, is currently in production and will air on UK TV later in the year. It will focus on the growing rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair and his former colleague Chris Curry; masterminds behind rival systems the Spectrum ZX and the BBC Micro.
“Those of us who lived through the 1980s will remember the sense of excitement when gadget and technology started to appear in our homes, but not many of us will know the fascinating stories behind their arrival,” said Richard Klein, controller of station BBC4.
Sinclair and Curry will be played by Alexander Armstrong and Martin Freeman. Klein said the two are “excellent choices to portray Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry at a time when battling to have the UK's most-loved home computer was their number one priority."
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Comments
Fanboy war ACTIVATE!
I can't see why they're doing this. Everyone knows that the Commodore 64 was better.
*runs*
Heh
Heh, the Amstrads started turning up around 1988-89, I'm surprised Alan Sugar hasn't complained ;)
That said, the Spectrum was a great computer for playing games on, but those rubber keys and keywords made it almost impossible to learn to code on, that's where the BBC Micro came through, it just 'felt' like less of a toy whereas the Spectrum felt like a console with a keyboard.
Oh, and I owned an Oric 1... So not exactly in with the in-crowd ;)
Get yer facts right..
"rival systems Sinclair C5 and the BBC Micro. "
Read that again, and then correct your error...
Updated
Of course. Story is patched now, thanks.
ZX
It was called the ZX Spectrum, not the Spectrum ZX.
No such thing
There never was a war between Spectrum and BBC Micro, because NO ONE HAD A BBC MICRO!!
The war was between ZX Spectrum and CBM 64
I had a Micro
But then, I was a deprived child. All of my mates (okay, my mates' older brothers) has Spectrums and C64s. However, this is a programme made by, and aired on, the BBC. You can draw your own conclusions there...
No Micro for Me
No we couldn't afford a BBC Micro, I had a humble Acorn Electron.
I remember at primary school having a "computer" day and we would turn up with our various systems, BBC Micro's, Acorns, Spectrum 48's, C64's etc etc
Anonraks R Us
Yeah - I was working at ITT when the apple II was ported to the UK - it was built in a TV plant, with a TV power supply, so when the NASCOM came out we grabbed some scrap ITT 2020 cases, and shoehorned in the cpu card and the "free" 16KB RAM card they had to ship because the 1Kx8 rams were in short supply. I designed and built a 64x32 character display card just so I could port SARGON the chess program on to it.
And of course there was the National Semiconductor SC/MP (Scamp)
And the Trash/80
Of course, these days I dont know anything about computers, and I have to endure lectures from 18 year olds...:-)
retro
BACK TO WAR... C64 was SHIT..... great games but a shitty computer... BBC and Speccy was the KINGS
When nerds were true nerds
A lot of comments in this thread are in the wrong timeframe
this is the early 80s when you could buy your comp as a bag of bits, put it together yourself and then spend hours programming and debugging a program.
Ps it was the zx80 and the acorn atom spectrums,electrons,bbc,amstrads,orics etc all came later
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