Micro Men

BBC3 and BBC4 often have some interesting programmes that are easily missed. I remembered to record Micro Men, a dramatisation of the work of Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry who produced the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro respectively. It was good fun, although Sinclair didn’t come across as a particularly likeable character, which I found disappointing since he was always something of a hero for me as a child. Acorn lives on with its ARM processor powering most of the world’s mobile phones and Sinclair continues to invent things, although with somewhat less success than the ZX Spectrum. Anyway, Micro Men is available to watch on BBC iPlayer for a while.

The ZX Spectrum is 25 years old

And how old does that make me feel?* Get an emulator and download some great games at World of Spectrum, read more about the mad genius Clive Sinclair at Wikipedia.

* Short answer - very

Hello World for ZX Spectrum lovers

When I was a young lad, there was nothing I liked more than going down to my local Dixons after school and typing my very own Hello World application into the nearest ZX Spectrum. But the Hello World apps I see today just don't match up to the beauty and elegance of that original version, so I've written one for C#

using System;

namespace HelloWorld
{
    class App
    {
        [STAThread]
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
             line10: Console.WriteLine("Doogal is cool!");
             line20: goto line10;
        }
    }
}

Who says goto is evil? I think I might adopt this style for all my applications...