Micro Men

... or the history of the home micro-computer in the UK.

A fascinating programme on BBC4 about the birth of the home computer, focussing on the battles between Clive Sinclair and ex-employee Chris Curry, who co-founded Acorn Computers.

Very much a walk down memory lane ... the Tandy TRS-80; Commodore Pet; Sharp MZ-80K were all around before the idea of true personal home computers arrived. Heralded by Sinclair's ZX80 (with shrinking screen as you used up the memory), but succeeded ultimately by Acorn's Atom, and then the BBC Micro. Back in the days when a 2.3Hz 6502 with 8k of RAM was seen as ground-breaking. I remember living through this, and the plethora of competing home computers.

Of course, both Sinclair and Acorn eventually fell to the mighty mass-market production of IBM-PCs, and their clones, but out of Acorn came it's ARM chip (a RISC CPU originally called the 'Acorn RISC Machine', then 'Advanced RISC Machine' once separated from its parent) and that low-energy user is now the most used CPU in the world, powering almost all mobile devices.

A warm look at the days of invention and innovation, when England led the way in new technology.

Database Design

...is something often done poorly, but let's not get onto that right now.

Consider throwing out your DBMS and just employ a lot of people to read through card decks. How about that as a solution? Well, after a while I guess each person would learn to deal with the requirements they face - they would probably start ordering their decks in a "most frequently accessed" order. In fact, the order itself would then yield useful information.

Back in our automated world, when you consider what order (primary key?) to assign to a table, rather than 'alphabetical' or 'geographical', why not consider 'access frequency' as part of your key. Something the database knows about, and something that helps you put the most used cards "at the front" (whatever that might mean).