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Rugby Radio Station
At the end of March 2003 Rugby Radio station sent its last commercial message when the 16kHz GBR transmitter was taken out of service.

This was the original service that the station opened with in 1926 and for which the very tall masts were built. Its high power and low frequency enabled it to contact virtually anywhere in the world. It was used initially for sending telegrams in morse and later telex messages, but was never intended to send speech, unlike the other transmitters on the site. The original transmitter was replaced in 1966.

Telephone services started on other transmitters in 1927 and as short wave services developed the site east of the A5 was opened from 1953. Short wave transmissions stopped in 2000 when communications with ships moved over to satellite.

The Rugby Radio Clock transmitter remains in service under contract with the National Physical Laboratory.

you might like this then

BBC Basic for various OS

(see my other reply to the parent post you were also replying to)

Shame you are AC. I hope you see this :

The Brandy Basic V Interpreter

What is it?

Brandy is an interpreter for BBC Basic (or Basic V as it is refered to here) that runs under a variety of operating systems. Basic V is the version of Basic supplied with desktop computers running RISC OS. These were originally made by Acorn Computers but are now designed and manufactured by companies such as RiscStation, MicroDigital and Castle Technology.

What does it run on?

The interpreter runs under RISC OS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, reeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Amiga OS, DOS using the DJGPP DOS extender and Windows as a console application. The program is written in ANSI C and comes in source form so it should not be difficult to compile it to run under other operating systems.

Brandy is distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

The current version of the program is 1.16 (January 2004).

Sorry but VB really is on the same level as Logo to me, Really if you can't understand basic youre not going to be programming, mabie not visual basic, I always favored BBC Basic of which the Brandy Interpreter is a fine version, though the appearance is slightly dated and you'll never write a windows program in it the language itself is pretty rock solid :)

FOR i=0 TO 10
PRINT "Hello World"
NEXT

It teaches you the basics :)

2 years later, Aliens invade because we "attacked" their home planet with an asteroid.

Nah, I'm sure they have their own MADMEN system... Here is what the ensuing conflict will look like.

When I was young, we used BBC Micro computers at school. These booted in under a second into BBC BASIC, so you could simply type things like

PRINT "hello"

FOR N%=1 TO 10 : PRINT "hello again" + N% : NEXT

(I haven't used BBC BASIC for about eight years so I probably have some syntax wrong :-) )

It was very easy for even the most uninterested person to make something of their own, even if it was simply asked a person their name and then said "hello Edward" or the like. Programming a game is a much more complex thing: you must teach the basics first. You can download Brandy, which is an almost complete BBC BASIC interpreter for RISC OS (!), Linux, Mac, DOS and Windows. Graphics and sound support are limited, but for teaching the basics of procedures/functions, loops and logic an interpreted language like BASIC is ideal. When the basics have been grasped, it is a simple matter to move to a more advanced (and more complicated for simple programs) language such as C.

The co-operative multitasking wasn't really a design choice; it was just that the Arthur operating system was hacked together in a hurry and didn't have multitasking (in many ways it was like a port of the BBC Micro operating system to 32-bit hardware). Then RISC OS 2, based on Arthur, used co-operative multitasking with a polling loop *probably* because this was the easiest thing to do without starting from scratch and building a new OS. It did give good performance though - provided apps didn't hang. There was some memory protection so it wasn't a completely braindead system - but still, I believe later RISC OS versions (4.x?) added true multitasking.

A few random links: Riscose, kind of the equivalent of Wine, except it isn't nearly as finished (it does include an ARM CPU emulator though). Riscose ties in somehow with the 'RISC OS emulator' package somebody mentioned at the top of this article's comments. Although I very much doubt that such a system is ready for any real work, even as a testbed for embedded code. RISC OS included an interpreter for the BBC Basic language (again essentially a port from the BBC Micro with some improvements), and Brandy is a free interpreter for that language. Finally, Arcem is an emulator (a la Bochs) of the original Archimedes hardware. It will run RISC OS 2.0 and 3.x well enough, if you can get hold of the ROM images. On a 1GHz machine, arcem should be just about fast enough to emulate the original 8MHz Archimedes in real time.

Some of the more useful software available for RISCOS is online here, in a searchable directory. More information is also up on my friend Dr. Pearson's page.

This site has more information.

I'm a little confused about that...

You may or may not recall the Net Yaroze (the "black Playstation"). It was meant for hobbyist Playstation programmer and came with a stripped down set of libraries, special memory card and boot cd, and a serial cable to connect to a PC (and yes, you can use Linux). That's all you needed.

I had seen the blue (developer) Playstation at a friend's company and I was under the impression that it was just like the Yaroze except it had the full libs and could read gold (burned) cds, but apparently the card you speak of is also required. I'm unclear as to what it's for, considering that you can do crippled programming on the Yaroze with just a serial cable.

2) Controllers are readily available for the PS2. Unfortunately, that's a slightly less important device than the console itself. I've personally had no problems getting all the accessories I wanted.

3) Most consoles have minor problems, especially when first produced. Some PS1's had to be turned over to operate correctly, as well as having some overheating problems (I don't know about the PS2, I'm sure others know more about its minor quirks). The first batch of Dreamcast games had a few problems, but the problems were quickly solved.
--

And you thought you needed Java/Javascript/CGI/etc...


Locked

Personally, I prefer Opera for the PC, and Fresco and Oregano for the RISC PC. Okay, neither of them are Mozilla cores, but they do what I need a web browser to do (browse the web). I use a mail client for mail...

Richy C.
--

Back in 1988, two guys called Ian and Ricky thought up a project called Karma, a game intended to have everything that Terminus had, and more. They'd planned it to run on the super-computer of the day, the Archimedes with its blazingly fast 8MHz ARM2, and they got a lot of code done until one of them was killed in a motorcycle accident (this was back in 1993). Although Ian is still working on it (or rather nobody's heard anything to the contrary), it's been really slow progress, and I don't remember seeing anything from him on comp.sys.acorn.games for a while. Still, it's worth looking at the pitifully out-of-date Karma project page to compare the two.

Back in 1988, two guys called Ian and Ricky thought up a project called Karma, a game intended to have everything that Terminus had, and more. They'd planned it to run on the super-computer of the day, the Archimedes with its blazingly fast 8MHz ARM2, and they got a lot of code done until one of them was killed in a motorcycle accident (this was back in 1993). Although Ian is still working on it (or rather nobody's heard anything to the contrary), it's been really slow progress, and I don't remember seeing anything from him on comp.sys.acorn.games for a while. Still, it's worth looking at the pitifully out-of-date Karma project page to compare the two.

Bill Gates