Embarrassed by its roots, the Cambridge IT sector has airbrushed the 80s generation of engineers out of its collective memory, forgotten as quickly as the blacksmiths who helped Birmingham’s aristocrats build the first motor cars. The depiction of Sir Clive Sinclair at the end of The Micro Men was a case in point. Without Sinclair, there would have been no Stephen Cronk or Stephen Childerly to build that first MicroEye. Without the ZX81, a generation would have left school technically illiterate. And no Chris Curry, meaning no Acorn Atom when Hermann Hauser needed a computer for his biology project. Unfortunately, the person who ruined his Porsche by washing it with bleach and dug up a Texas Instrument Company engineer’s drive to retrieve obsolete microchips for his ZX81 doesn’t fit well within the narrative of the Cambridge Phenomenon …
… (An extract from The Ghost in the Labyrinth by Peter Kruger)
