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Comment by nr2x | Hacker News Reader

Really one of my favorite examples of why public sector investment is a Good Thing.

I still love that movie with the hobbit guy about the BBC acorn. That was great.

Micro Men! Great little TV movie, and really interesting story of the rivalry between UK golden-age home computing giants Sinclair and Acorn (Acorn being the company behind the BBC micro, and also originally the "A" in "ARM").

Oh thank you, I never heard those name before so I had a hard time following this part of the thread.

( do some more search, adding “micro” )

Ok, so it IS a British Broadcasting Corporation spawn.

Ha. Excellent. I had no idea.

Thanks for spelling it out, I was about to reject the idea as funny but unlikely.

Me neither! Here's a link to the movie: https://archive.org/details/MicroMen720p2009

Wait wait wait… Gloating for no good reason about public investment is one of my favorite activities.

I have a hard time following the connection with M1 processors?

bbc contracted acorn to produce an educational computer to go hand-in-hand with a tv program. it was a smashing success and made them so much more money than anything else they'd been doing. they birthed arm.

Ah thanks yeah I was researching that. I had absolutely no idea. And I’ve been using those nifty fuckers since a while now. Ha.

It made them the only money they ever made, but in the end they had to default on payback of 3mil pounds of royalties to BBC thanks to typical 80s mismanagement (oh hi Commodore).

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