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The dramatised story of the relationship between Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry, the two great microcomputer entrepeneurs of the early 1980s was a real eye-opener for me. When I switched from working in the photographic trade in 1982, I started a small software development business, before eventually turning to journalism and writing about IT in general (and then on to digital imaging...)
I interviewed Sir Clive several times, and was a frequent visitor to Acorn Computers in Cambridge, and knew quite a few of the staff there. I even went to the Acorn Christmas party on a couple of occasions!
Roger Wilson (now Sophie), who wrote BBC Basic, and later worked with Steve Furber to design the ARM RISC processor (descendants of which are now the most prolific of microprocessors in history and are used in most mobile phones, PDAs, plus Nintendo GameBoys, etc.) used to be a poster here on the old DPNow forum, and was a Pentax DSLR user. If you are reading this Sophie - you're very welcome to join in here once again!
I sometimes used to sit with Steve Furber on the train into London from Saffron Walden and probably bore him to death chatting about microprocessors!
And there is an obscure link with photography - Chris Curry co-founded Redwood Publishing, which published the now defunct Acorn User magazine. Acorn User was briefly edited by Barry Monk, who also spent a couple of years editing Amateur Photographer magazine.
There you go!
Ian
I interviewed Sir Clive several times, and was a frequent visitor to Acorn Computers in Cambridge, and knew quite a few of the staff there. I even went to the Acorn Christmas party on a couple of occasions!
Roger Wilson (now Sophie), who wrote BBC Basic, and later worked with Steve Furber to design the ARM RISC processor (descendants of which are now the most prolific of microprocessors in history and are used in most mobile phones, PDAs, plus Nintendo GameBoys, etc.) used to be a poster here on the old DPNow forum, and was a Pentax DSLR user. If you are reading this Sophie - you're very welcome to join in here once again!
I sometimes used to sit with Steve Furber on the train into London from Saffron Walden and probably bore him to death chatting about microprocessors!
And there is an obscure link with photography - Chris Curry co-founded Redwood Publishing, which published the now defunct Acorn User magazine. Acorn User was briefly edited by Barry Monk, who also spent a couple of years editing Amateur Photographer magazine.
There you go!
Ian
However we never had any money to buy software that was worth having. The Acorn Archimedes was a great however and I used to virtually the sole user of the one in our dept. there was still a great scepticism then to computers and many staff didn't really want to now. When I left teaching I bought my own Archimedes, I loved that machine, but it soon became apparent that it was not industry standard and so it had to go in favour of a PC 
How things change, and I'm now solely using Macs.
My first keyboard . . .
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