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Showing posts from February, 2011

"What was it like in olden times Daddy?"

You know you're old when they make a programme about your childhood. I watched Micro Men on BBC4 last night, about the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they developed their home computers. Our school got a ZX80 and then a ZX81 and we got a Spectrum at home (Sinclair's machines). We also got a BBC computer (made by Curry's Acorn company) at our school. So these machines were part of my childhood. I heard names I hadn't heard for a long time like Sinclair QL, Dragon, Oric and BBC Master. Towards the end they sit in a pub and speculate what it would have been like if they'd worked together, however I think the home computer market may still have dried up. Someone's probably done the analysis, but I guess consoles took over from these computers for games, and PCs for "serious" stuff. One of my sons got a T-shirt yesterday that said "retro gamer" with a picture of a cassette tape on it. The tape also said 2kB. One of them a...

Twitter and TV idea

Because Russel Davies doesn't have comments on his blog I'm encouraged (I'm not saying forced) to write a blog entry rather than post a comment. Here's an idea that's relevant to his post on a second screen , that I would have put on backstage.bbc.co.uk (RIP): When watching recorded TV you can't watch the twitter stream unless someone came up with a website that would "record" tweets related to a particular programme, and then replay them when you were watching it, so you can feel part of the virtual audience.