If you had visited David Braben’s room at Jesus College, Cambridge in 1983 you would have found an unusual scene. Sure, it was just as cramped, muddled and tinged with the fragrance of generations of undergraduates as that of any other student. But while Braben’s neighbours lined their walls with textbooks and Hollywood posters, the shelves in his room supported cascades of cabling and copper wire. And there in the centre of the desk, amid a shanty town of screws and pliers, an Acorn Atom computer hummed.
Braben knew its insides better than his own. Such was the extent of his frequent and intrusive tinkering that he left the machine’s casing permanently off, leaving the circuitry exposed, like that of a battle-wrecked android. One winter’s day that year, he and a friend, Ian Bell, stood in front of the Atom’s chunky monitor. Braben moved his hand towards the keyboard and, with a tap, executed a Big Bang.
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