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 ... See full summary »

Director:

Saul Metzstein

Writer:

Tony Saint

Stars:

Alexander Armstrong, Martin Freeman, Edward Baker-Duly

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Alexander Armstrong	...	Clive Sinclair
Martin Freeman	...	Chris Curry
Edward Baker-Duly	...	Hermann Hauser
Sam Phillips	...	Steve Furber
Stefan Butler	...	Roger Wilson
Colin Michael Carmichael	...	Jim Westwood
Derek Riddell	...	Nigel Searle
Rhona Croker	...	Valerie
Amy Beth Hayes	...	Cynthia
Nicola Harrison	...	Ann Sinclair
Anthony Smee	...	Norman Hewett
Michael Keating	...	Derek Holley
Peter Davison	...	Bank Manager
Jon Glover	...	John Radcliffe
Theo Barklem-Biggs	...	Sinclair Journalist

Storyline

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.

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Plot Keywords:

computer | bbc | electric car | television news | pub | 

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Genres:

Biography | Drama

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Details

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Release Date:

8 October 2009 (UK)

Also Known As:

Syntax Era

Company Credits

Production Co:

Darlow Smithson Productions

Technical Specs

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Trivia

Sophie Wilson has a cameo role as the landlady of the pub.

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Goofs

In the sequence when Chris Curry is driving to London to meet with the BBC, he is seen nervously chain-smoking at the wheel of his car. The roof-line of the vehicle used for the interior shots is clearly not a Ford Fiesta.

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Quotes

Clive Sinclair: Games! Games! Everywhere I go, games! This is what my lifetime of achievement has been reduced to! Clive Sinclair, the man who brought you Jet Set fucking Willy! Apparently there's even a game now about me trying to get a knighthood, for Christ's sake!

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Connections

Featured in Grierson 2010: The British Documentary Awards (2010)

User Reviews

Entertaining Brit-Centric Fantasy

Micro Men is an interesting look at this early British microcomputer industry, but the viewer must always keep in mind that these events occurred in Britain's isolated, self-important microcosm, and had virtually no relevance to the real microcomputer industry as a whole. As with all British-produced programs dealing with computer history, Micro Men is hilariously Brit-centric, to the point of being fantasy. This self-delusion can even be seen in the IMDb summary for Micro Men, which refers to "Clive Sinclair, British inventor of the pocket calculator". Not only did Sinclair not invent the pocket calculator, but he didn't even invent his *own* pocket calculator, which used an American-made Texas Instruments single-chip calculator, similar to the chips used in many early TI hand-held and desktop calculators. Sinclair literally only invented the box that held the TI chip. This of course will set the tone for Britain's entire microcomputer industry -- inferior repackaging of technology from the United States and claiming it as their own, and then further exacerbating the delusion by making false claims of being 'first', 'best', 'most important', etc. Britain has an extensive history of grotesquely overstating their relevance in the computer industry, which stretches all the way back to World War II, and Micro Men is no exception to this behavior.

After watching Micro Men, you're left with the utterly erroneous impression that Sinclair and Acorn were on the verge of dominating the home computer industry, yet somehow let it slip through their fingers. Of course, the movie never really tells you *what* they did wrong, as that would require a direct confrontation of the fact that they were five years late to the party, and showed up with hardware which was vastly inferior to what was being produced in the United States and other countries. As England slowly escaped the early 1980s economic recession, Sinclair's $99 doorstops became progressively less appealing. Meanwhile, the computer and video game crash in the United States dragged American offerings down into the price range of Acorn's products, stripping Acorn of their only significant advantage.

When Sinclair and Acorn attempted to escape the economically protective confines of Great Britain, they were met with much-deserved scorn and ridicule. Quite simply, neither company ever had a chance of survival in an environment of global competition.