From Bedrooms to Billions...A documentary made for us retro folk..

I was feeling sick and low so sat in my bedroom which doubles as my high tech super man cave (yeah right), in truth If you have ever seen the film Darkman where the good Doctor tries to recreate his destroyed lab in an abandoned warehouse with bits of computer here and there, that's my man cave

Well I sat there and watched this film and felt a bit better afterwards...

Any way, the wonderful documentary follows the British rise and fall and then rise again of the computer market from its total infancy to the billion dollar men in suits lead business that it became and then to how independants rose out of the ashes again to regain creative control from the men in suits who put profit before new idea's.

Here's a trailer



Its over two hours and features some of our most iconic coders such as the late Ben Dalglish, Archer McClean, David Perry and the like, it shows just how wonderful it was at first and how it made people a bucket load of money with sacks upon sacks of mail order orders for just about any software for these wondrous new machines. Its shows the ups and downs, the way it changed and what started to infest the system.

On the same link there's other snippets of projects the same team have made and lots of bits from the documentary, it can still be purchased and found on ooooh errr torrent sites, I've even seen it up on MEGA but I cannot express how fun a watch it is even if you just want to see the people that provided so much entertainment for you but the back story is woth it alone.

 

Great recommendation there, Paul.

A must if you like your retro computing history, fellas.

Remember also that Micro Men is still pretty easy to access too via You Tube and this is a fascinating look at the personalities and personal battles which erupted when Sinclair took on Acorn for the huge Beeb education contract in the early 80s:



Perhaps if you've already seen the above, there are also these "supplemental" videos from the Centre of Computing History looking at the film afterwards:



and

 

Andy, in your avatar are you doing an impersonation of Super Mario's unwanted brother?

You have the Super Mario Odyssey hat and all

 

Damn it, fella.

You've rumbled me.

There is a sewer entrance, just below that chair in the high street whence I'm sat, where I gan down and sort out those Ninja Jasper turtles by flippin em onto their lids etc...

By rights, I should have all the rights to the franchise.

...I'll ask me dad!