Out or morbid curiosity, I've been watching "RetroManCave" Neil's "BBC Micro" mini-series on YouTube, and it's been just as creepy as I thought it'd be: old pictures of uniformed kids and their "educators" crowded around the little beige essentially State-manufactured and standardized boxes, like a bunch of school children from old Soviet Union photographs.

The funniest part is the reverence given to it by people like Neil, claiming categorically how big of a "success" it was. The evidence? Nostalgia and meaningless anecdotes. It's a classic case of Bastiat's "seen versus the unseen". Not to mention, this same class of people constantly harp on about "crony capitalism"-- can you find a better example than this?

And on that note, in virtually every other country-- meaning, where it wasn't 50% subsidized like it was in England-- where Acorn tried to sell this computer, it was a colossal failure, to the point where it basically drove Acorn into bankruptcy; they wound up getting acquired in the 90s. I've noticed that the fact the machine was not even remotely competitive in actual free markets does not give the proponents of this program pause.

Another interesting side note: one of Acorn's very early figures, Roger Wilson, suddenly woke up one day and decided he wanted to be called "Sophie". Ok, fair enough. But then he started getting named to "top NN most successful female computer scientist" lists! How is that fair to the actual women who got bumped off those lists in lieu of Roger? It's no different then men beating the snot out of women, in women's sports. Biologically, men have significantly more muscle mass than women, and way more of them have genius-level IQs-- so the comparison is apt.

And on that note, Neil ends the third part of his series by blathering on about the so-called "gender gap". Why is it I never hear about the crisis of 90% of interior decorators or nurses being women? "Oh my god, we need to close the gender gap in interior decorating by getting more men in!", said no one, ever. Or at my employer: 75% of marketing is women, and all management says is that they want to hire more women. That's how you know it has nothing to do with "equality", and everything to do with Cultural Marxism and sexism.

All of that said, I do think from a personal standpoint that I would have loved the BBC Micro as a child-- so I can at least understand why people like Neil have nostalgia for it, even as they lack the self-awareness to know that they are purely ex post-facto rationalizing their emotions with pretend reasoning. That colorful, low-resolution program with the house, which tied into the corny TV drama show, would have really captured my imagination as a seven or eight year-old.