The Ghost of Ferranti - all about the pioneering UK chip maker

A 30 min TV program from 1983 or 84, I think. Featuring the Wilmslow Micro Centre, and several of the UK computers which used Ferranti ULAs - the Spectrum, the Electron, the Beeb:

(I don’t see an Amstrad in the program, although the C64 and Apple II appear in passing.)

Also seen, a DEC “mainframe” used for chip design.

It’s about chip making and chip design, in part.

via hackaday which links to two other Ferranti documentaries

I can’t quite place this machine - any ideas?
image

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This is a hard one. Could it be an aftermarket Sinclair case? I think, Indescomp made black cases with red keypads. (But this is really far from my comfort zone, so don’t take my word for it.)

P.S.: The keys look a bit odd, and I guess, there’s a reason for this.

Oh, good idea - here’s a dk’tronics keyboard which looks like it could be a match:

Yes, I think, you nailed it!

Here’s a rather brutally enhanced version of The Mystery of the Ghost of Ferranti (which is very much the title of an Ann Radcliffe novel – “Have you made it to the red keys yet? Horrid!”).
There’s some color irritation just where we would expect the ENTER key, which may be even red with a bit of imagination (which may be a requirement for the Gothic Computer genre, anyway.)

The-Ghost-of-Ferranti-mystery

Mind that color resolution is just half of the (original) video resolution, and then there’s digital compression, which does the same, as well. So this might be a red ENTER key, indeed.