Pure Energy Multimedia - 25th September 2008

Because of the fact that I featured in an episode of the Channel 5 documentary 'Brits Who Made the Modern World', I've just found myself on IMDB ... now that feels weird !

No!, I wasn't looking for myself (I have tried that for many years and failed!), but I was looking for the series and found that it had each episode listed on there too. When I clicked on the entry for 'Computer Games' there, at the bottom of the list, was I ...

What's the chances of that? The list is completely fair - it's alphabetical, my name begins with F, it's not exactly far down the list, yet every other bugger on the list has names Ian Bell, David Braben, Chris Curry and then me, Jason Fitzpatrick ...

Saying that, it's probably even more fair than simply being alphabetical. These guys have made huge contributions to the development of computing in the UK. Ian Bell & David Braben developed the game 'Elite' which was orginally released for the BBC Micro. They did, in my humble opinion, create a new genre of computer game, and do amazing things with a 6502 processor and 32K of memory!

As for Chris Curry, he along with Hermann Hauser founded the company Acorn Computers who then developed the hugely successful BBC Microcomputer mentioned above.

I am deeply grateful to them all - The BBC Micro or Beeb as it was known the first computer that as started to program 'seriously', developing disco lighting control hardware and software and later control interfaces for the educational market. Through Elite, Braben and Bell inspired me to push the Beeb to its limits by developing a 3D CAD package that could twist and rotate 3D images on the screen in real time. However, whey they succeeded - I failed! Hats of to you gentlemen ...

By the way you can watch the episode on the Demand Five website :
http://demand.five.tv/Episode.aspx?episodeBaseName=C5134750003