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).

On new technology

... does technolgy lead the products, or the products lead the technology?

Maybe, as most things in life, the answer isn't simply one or the other, but a combination of both and other factors (yes, there are no simple answers).

How often is a product generated from the desire to see a new technology in action? Where do all the blogs come from - is this led by the ability to host/publish blogs in different ways - built into many technologies; or is the desire to blog pushing the appearance of such technologies?

Well, there's the initial blog appearance - based on non-appealing software, then the idea of a market opporunity seized by the entrepreneur, then the sheep stampede of bloggers which follow, and then the more-blog software avalanche.

It's a symbiosis, not a horse and cart, bud!

I am ill

And hating it :-(

Hopefully will soon recover.

First Posting

Testing out the blog site!