Happy 40th Birthday to the Acorn BBC Micro!
- Thread starter Carvaged
- Start date
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
I was employed to support their supply to schools.
I wish I'd stolen the one at work that I ended up in the late 90s using to operate two cassette decks for language tape editing - sadly I don't even have photographic evidence
I wish I'd stolen the one at work that I ended up in the late 90s using to operate two cassette decks for language tape editing - sadly I don't even have photographic evidence
platinumsage
HaveMyPassword123
I binned mine aged 25 when moving house, didn’t seem worth advertising it in the local paper.
I binned mine aged 25 when moving house, didn’t seem worth advertising it in the local paper.
Considering they were almost unbreakable, if you could find the tip it was dumped in, you have a good chance it's still in working order
Shellee
Well-Known Member
We didn’t have a BBC Micro but we did have it’s little brother, an Acorn ElectronI took my two kids on the bus to Brent Cross to get it when they were reduced, all we could afford
It was my oldest son’s first computer and he’s a systems architect now, it must have worked!
It’s still up in the loft
8ball
AV REFUGEES WELCOME
View attachment 297933We didn’t have a BBC Micro but we did have it’s little brother, an Acorn Electron
I took my two kids on the bus to Brent Cross to get it when they were reduced, all we could afford
It was my oldest son’s first computer and he’s a systems architect now, it must have worked!
It’s still up in the loft
I had one and remember having a basic grasp of programming and being blown away by how the programmer of Elite had got all those galaxies into 16k* of free RAM.
* - may be off by a little - it’s been a long time..
View attachment 297933We didn’t have a BBC Micro but we did have it’s little brother, an Acorn Electron
I took my two kids on the bus to Brent Cross to get it when they were reduced, all we could afford
It was my oldest son’s first computer and he’s a systems architect now, it must have worked!
It’s still up in the loft
We got our first Electron Xmas '84. I had no interest in it at all as a kid, but my brother went from there to an Acorn Archimedes and later a job as a programmer, like so many others who started out on these cool little machines it would seem!
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
I found it very depressing how quickly "home computers" became about games rather than programming.
I suppose we've ended up with enough programmers anyway, but still ... the people I was working with at the time put Seymour Pappert and LOGO up on the same kind of pedestal as the one where others have placed Chomsky ...
I suppose we've ended up with enough programmers anyway, but still ... the people I was working with at the time put Seymour Pappert and LOGO up on the same kind of pedestal as the one where others have placed Chomsky ...
8ball
AV REFUGEES WELCOME
Gaming has accelerated the development of hardware and software well beyond where I think we would have been without it.
That’s as well as creating an entertainment industry that overtook Hollywood over a decade ago, that employs a massive number of highly creative people (some of whom might otherwise end up pointlessly helping hedge funds compete with one another).
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
... and now Bitcoin ... about which I don't have a clue ...
eatmorecheese
He's fallen out of the car again
Repton and Chuckie Egg in the computer room at school. Programming classes because 'We'll all need to be able to do it".
My late 80's was weird.
My late 80's was weird.
8ball
AV REFUGEES WELCOME
Well, so many other things than that. Computers have transformed our lives massively, but like any powerful thing it has been a double-edged sword.
One other thing I think we can thank gaming for is that due to processing power developing ahead of general long range network capacity, people wanted power in their own home. Meaning we are not using dumb terminals linked to a central network, but ordinary people, hackers, tinkerers etc. have some meaningful power in terms of computing.
8ball
AV REFUGEES WELCOME
They’re starting to say that about coding again. It’s still nonsense.
Steel Icarus
we move
That Welcome tape though. Yellow River, Roger McGough, etc
I LIVED on my BBC Micro between about 84-88. Could program pretty well, and it got me into gaming. My fave game was Elite but I also loved Frak!, Snapper, Repton, Micro Olympics
I LIVED on my BBC Micro between about 84-88. Could program pretty well, and it got me into gaming. My fave game was Elite but I also loved Frak!, Snapper, Repton, Micro Olympics
Steel Icarus
we move
Yeah, I loved spending Sundays typing in games printed in Micro User magazine, and got good enough to be able to troubleshoot typos preventing games from working. Genuinely liked both things equally
8ball
AV REFUGEES WELCOME
Yeah, those games would almost never work unless you understood what you were typing. There were 2 kinds of people, those with games that didn’t work but would have looked great if they did, and those whose games worked fine but the artwork was all mutated because fuck it, who gives a shit about DATA statements.
WouldBe
Dislicksick
We had space invaders on a commodore PET at school written in machine code. Me and a mate played around with some of the variables. One alteration gave the UFOs 3 lives before they would die, another went "Run...Game over" as the UFOs shot down the screen at 60mph
Never did find a variable to work in our favour.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I had a ZX Spectrum but my parents were teachers and my Dad used to do their computer stuff because most of the other teachers at his school lacked confidence with computers back then. He used to get to take one home some weekends and during school holidays, so I spent plenty of time with the BBC.
I I dont know if it was Repton 2 or 3 that I played, I know it had a level editor but I used to mess around with such things without actually taking the time to make good levels myself.
I know I was impressed with the momentum of the weapons trails in Starship Command, and that there was something quite satisfying about blowing ships up in that game, probably because it took more than one shot to kill them.
I think there maybe another thread where I already went on about this and my first experience with modems and email being on the BBC, and how I look back with amusement at quite how exciting the teletext adaptor seemed at the time. I think Grannies Garden and Podd got a mention on that thread too, if it even exists.
Quite a bit later in the history of schools and the BBC, my Mum started to get into using the Concept Keyboard to try to help fairly young children who were starting to get left behind educationally, I've chatted to her about that more recently when she got her first modern tablet device.
These days I am really impressed with the Apple Macs that use ARM processors, and I get quite a bit of pleasure thinking about the Acorn origins of ARM. Not that I was wildly in love with the Acorn Archimedes when that arrived, not enough software, so its relative power seemed impressive but went largely to waste. Im really quite happy I dont have to use x86 CPUs and windows these days, never really loved the long era of the IBM-compatible PC despite all that it offered and still offers.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Those RM Nimbus computers were bad but they were my first intro to an early version of Windows, and both school and college tended to have them networked. And they tended to have a BBC emulator app on them for running some awful old departmental educational software on them. Someone used the BBC emulator and BBC Basic to exploit a bad security flaw on the Nimbus network, which enabled anyone to access the entire server hard drive with full permissions. We had a field day with that at college. RM never patched the flaw while I was there, and the college resorted to desperate measures such as a program that could scan the network drive for any copies of the malicious BBC file. But we had printed out the code and coud just type it back in again, and the college didnt want to remove the BBC emulator because then the awful educational apps a few departments still used wouldnt run. Fair to say we ran rings round the authorities and indulged in activities such as subverting the default cv word processing document that the college used to show off on open days, and introducing blasphemous alterations to the text of a religious studies BBC emulator app. Eventually they had to rely on non-technical methods such as punishing us by banning us from the computers for a time. Others were banned entirely from entering the 'computer suite' but they couldnt give me that bit of the punishment since it was also my form room. The computer technician was also not impressed when we drew a beard on whatever woman it was that featured in his personal choice of desktop wallpaper for his account.
The only time the RM machines really impressed me was when used with laserdiscs and the BBC Domesday discs, but that was a setup where the actual computer wasnt providing much of the power, the impressive stuff was just video and images from the laserdisc being overlayed and so there was also a BBC Micro version of that setup available (but I never got to try that version as thats not what my Dads school were supplied with). Actually thinking about it that RM Domesday disc machine was my first experience with PCs and DOS (The RM Nimbus wasnt fully 100% IBM-PC compatible but it was somewhat close), and I remember not initially knowing what the command was for listing disk/directory contents, I was used to typing cat on the BBC and was flummoxed for some time before discovering the 'joys' of dir.
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