I finally watched the show last night; I'm fairly disappointed because it was neither one thing nor the other - it wasn't really very funny (Hauser seemed to get the best lines, while the Sinclair-based humour mainly seemed to be based around laughing at his borderline-autistic outlook on life) but it wasn't particularly accurate either.
They put in a few well-known anecdotal bits but played around with the timeline horribly - the QL and the C5 were out at around the same time, IIRC, their collective failure ultimately working together to bring Sinclair Research to its knees. They also seemed to conveniently forget that the Newbury Newbrain was actually developed by what was Sinclair Radionics, which suggests Sinclair's involvement in computer development had started well before 1980; they also missed out large chunks of the Sinclair development story in favour of some padding (including a fairly bizarre scene at the Mensa conference), so we're left with this idea that Acorn were working hard at development while Sinclair just plugged stuff together that already worked (we know that's not the case). They also messed horribly with the Acorn story - the Electron was out well before the timeline would suggest it but they couldn't produce enough for demand, then production finally got sorted and the demand had gone; finally although the majority of the shares were bought by Olivetti they still continued as a separate entity (unlike Sinclair Research who were to all intents and purposes absorbed into Amstrad) - indeed the Master was more of a success than the Model B, IIRC, I guess that didn't quite fit the overnight-success:failure story they wanted to portray. For me though the biggest shame was that they mentioned the major success story as an afterthought, as if it had happened later; AIUI the ARM chip was in development well beyond the whiteboard stage by the time 1984 clicked around. The hollywood-romantic in me would like to believe that Curry and Sinclair finally made it up though. Anyone know if that's true? G
