BBC Horizon - Microworld (1984)

This story tells of the new steps that British scientists and engineers took into the microworld of electronics in the early 1980s.

A human hair is roughly a tenth of a millimeter across (100 microns).
Transistors on a chip are nowadays ten times smaller than that.

This program looks in detail how a new custom gate array consisting of 2400 gates and used in the Acorn Electron* was designed.
It shows how a computer made of integrated circuits helped to design a new integrated circuit i.e. a new microchip being created by its ancestors.

The program is another fine example of how much better information seemed to be portrayed in those days without the need of special effects and you can judge from the content how accurate (or not) their predictions for the future were.

*The Acorn Electron was a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd.

VHSRip

Format : AVI at 1 126 Kbps
Length : 391 MiB for 48mn 29s 520ms

Video : MPEG-4 Visual at 986 Kbps
Aspect : 720 x 536 (1.343) at 25.000 fps 4/3

Audio : MPEG Audio at 128 Kbps CBR
Infos : 2 channels, 44.1 KHz