Extremis Podcast Extra: Mel Croucher's Christmas Cracker

A true pioneer of British microcomputing has once again taken to the airwaves. Mel Croucher, the visionary creator of Deus Ex Machina and one of the most distinctive voices of the 1980s home computer scene, has revived his irreverent end-of-the-year “address to the nation” as Mel Croucher’s Christmas Cracker. In the glory days of Crash and other stalwart computer magazines, Mel’s seasonal missives arrived as crackling cover-mounted cassette tapes, equal parts satire, philosophy and digital mischief. Now, in a pleasingly circular twist of technological fate, the message returns via podcast: still as provocative, still as witty, and still reminding us that computing was once as much about imagination and rebellion as it was about machine code.