BBC Micro Creators Reunite In London

mustrum_ridcully writes "This week some of the original creators from Acorn Computers who developed the BBC Micro home computer are coming together again at the Science Museum in London to discuss the legacy of the computer fondly known in the UK as 'the Beeb'. This news is being carried, of course, on the BBC. The BBC Micro sold some 1.5 million units and helped fund Acorn's development work on the Acorn RISC Machine processor — also known as the ARM processor used today in countless mobile and embedded devices."

Comments

Ahh, I remember it well...

[h4rm0ny]

10 PRINT "FIRST POST!"
20 GOTO 10

(stupid lameness filter objecting to my caps)

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[morgan_greywolf]

GOTO? If you had a BBC Micro, you didn't need GOTO or GOSUB. BBC BASIC had support for named procedures, pointers, structured IF/THEN/ELSE, and inline assembler. Quite advanced for its day, really.

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[h4rm0ny]

Hey - I was eight, okay? :) There was a way of disabling the Break key as well so that the teacher couldn't stop it without flipping the power switch, but I can't remember how you did that. Mainly we used it for playing "Kingdom" when we could smuggle the floppy disk in. And let me tell you back then, when we bought a floppy disk, it really was floppy!

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[jimicus]

BBC BASIC had support for named procedures

Only after version 2, IIRC. Mind you, I've never seen a BBC micro with version 1 fitted.

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[Ed Avis]

My BBC had BASIC 1.0 and it supports named procedures fine. It lacks EQUB and similar assembler directives, which makes it a pain to include literal byte values or strings in your assembly language programs. These were added in BASIC 2.0.

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[RupW]

GOTO? If you had a BBC Micro, you didn't need GOTO or GOSUB. OK then :-p

10 REPEAT
20 PRINT "NO GOTOS HERE!"
30 UNTIL FALSE

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[ajs318]

No, BASIC 1 had named PROCs. BASIC 2 introduced OSCLI -- a command for issuing MOS commands through BASIC without resorting to low-level hackery -- and OPENUP -- a new file mode (update). (Actually, it introduced OPENIN, an input-only file mode, but BASIC 1 already had an OPENIN which actually, in defiance of documentation, opened files for update: the token for OPENIN on BASIC 1 became OPENUP on BASIC 2, and OPENIN got a new token of its own.)

Anyway, a backward GOTO addressed to a destination line which would be visible on the same screen is perfectly acceptable. And deep down inside, every processor architecture supports unconditional jumps.

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[Rufty]

*fx247,76 (break key now causes a crash)
*fx101,1 ( disable all keys other than break)

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[LordSnooty]

The Break key also had a screw which you could tighten to prevent pressing... a low-tech solution which I've never seen anywhere else.

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[ZERO1ZERO]

That reminds me ... "Break-Shift-Break" was that not some kind of key press to auto-load from the floppy or something?

P

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[PReDiToR]

My Beeb (Master) had an 8086 daughterboard inside.
512MB RAM was enough to run DR-DOS.

Remember the days ... *configure tube
That was all it took to get DOS to load up from the big-ass 5.25" floppies that didn't really have a lot on them. Better than the C/PM that I was using on my Amstrad PCW8256, but not quite as snazzy as playing Firetrack on the Beeb itself.

For historical purposes, I think the youngsters amongst us should be aware that even in those days we had porn. One of the kids at college gave me (through his little brother) some disks that had PC format porn on them, grainy black and white animated GIFs that looked worse than the newspapers, but WTF, they moved!

Notably, I had this DOS machine way before my school got a DOS box (Schneider 8086, orange screen) for us to look at and admire, and I have this awful feeling that I took the wind right out of my teacher's sails when I showed him how to use the thing. I imagine that either he, or his son are going to reply to this and tell me how I wasted my life by not making the most of my abilities with computers ...

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[Goodl]

512MB? surely 512K?

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[clickclickdrone]

>big-ass 5.25" floppies
Pah! 8" floppies were big-ass. 5.25" were nice and neat, until the 3.5 ones came along and confused everybody ("Why is this a floppy disk? it doesn't bend?")

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[morgan_greywolf]

I'm sure he meant 512K. 512MB would have cost a small fortune back then and would have required a large freezer to both store and keep it cool. :)

'sides, the 8086 only had a 20-bit address bus. 1MB is the most it would address.

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[samjam]

I think you got OPENIN mixed with OPENOUT.

OPENOUT became OPENUP

Sam

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[Slashcrap]

10 PRINT "FIRST POST!"
20 GOTO 10 You obviously didn't go to a very good school. When I was a lad, we had to learn the Queen's BASIC. Here's some example code :

10 PLEASE PRINT "FIRST POST!"
20 GOTO 10
30 THANK YOU VERY MUCH

Apologies to whoever I stole that joke from.

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[youthoftoday]

... you mean you never say thank you? How rude!

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[h4rm0ny]

Ha ha ha ha! Nice!

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[LinuxGrrl]

GOTO? hah. This is BBC BASIC

REPEAT
PRINT "First Post!"
UNTIL FALSE

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[mollymoo]

512 KiB would have been a hell of lot back then; it's 4x the maximum a standard BBC Micro could handle. IIRC the ones at our school had 32 KiB.

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[Zemran]

The only thing that I can remember about the BBC B was losing years of my life playing Elite... GOSUB??? You mean there was more to it?

Re:Ahh, I remember it well...

[PReDiToR]

Yes, sorry, 512KB.

Taken away by honeyed memories.

Memories

[julesh]

While I was always a Spectrum guy at heart, I do have fond memories of my school's BBC "B"s. You always got the feeling that they were _real_ computers. I mean, they had operating systems and everything...

Re:Memories

[steevc]

We Beeb owners looked down on Spectrum owners. We were far superior with our proper keyboards and solid build quality. We did envy some of their games, even if the Speccy could only do two colours per character block.

I wrote loads of little programs on my Beeb, including a simple Mandelbrot. I liked playing with graphics. Unfortunately those programs are all lost now. I had them on cassettes that got dumped some time. I upgraded mine from a 16KB Model A to have 32KB. Never got a floppy drive, so had to load games like Elite from tape. Had fun with various other games too.

I sold my Beeb in the mid-90s for about 30 quid including the tape deck and my games. I wonder if it is still out there. I kind of miss it.

Re:Memories

[Stooshie]

Try this: http://www.mikebuk.dsl.pipex.com/beebem/

Not quite the same but you can experiment to your hearts content (and change the machine between A, B and Master.

Re:Memories

[LiquidCoooled]

I inputted a mandelbrot generator for spectrum (before i could code my own..)
I left it running for 24hours to produce a stunning black and white basic initial bug.

I was awestruck but the lag was a killer.

Re:Memories

[SST-206]

Hi Steve

I seem to be amassing rather a lot of Beebs - there are currently four on my living room floor, rescued from a company clear-out, and many others lurk in cupboards, all awaiting testing when I catch up with my 21st Century life. Trouble is, that never seems to happen... I do keep one machine set up in case I suddenly need to play Elite :-)

I was pleased to find that most of my old 5.25" floppy disks of programs I'd written do still load. And yes, loading from tape... that noise is burned onto my eardrums.

Good but Dull

[gsslay]

IMHO, the Beeb always seemed a bit dull. It was what you used at school, when you had to peck through dull basic programs under the watchful eye of teacher.

At home is where you had a ZX Spectrum, and where you had free reign and did the real inventive programming.

The Beeb was probably the better machine, but the speccy was where the real fun was.

Re:Good but Dull

[mccalli]

IMHO, the Beeb always seemed a bit dull. It was what you used at schoo...At home is where you had a ZX Spectrum, and where you had free reign and did the real inventive programming.

Extrapolation: the machine you had at home was the fun one. True whether Beeb, Spectrum, C64...whatever.

I had friends with Beebs and enjoyed messing around with them. I had a Spectrum 48k myself and enjoyed messing with that (wireframe vector graphics in Spectrum BASIC anyone? Anyone? No, didn't think so...). I also moved to the C64 and enjoyed messing with that.

It's whatever you got free reign on, not what the specific platform was.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Good but Dull

[TheRaven64]

When the BBC was launched (did anyone really call it a 'Beeb'? That's always meant the corporation, not the computer to me), they allocated a part of the teletext space late at night for transmitting programs. One of the optional things you could plug in let it read these and store them on disk or tape.

The real power of the BBC was the I/O capability. We used to plug all sorts of things into the 'user port,' and 8-bit I/O interface. You wrote an 8-bit value to a specific address and it would set the line voltages up or down for 8 wires, and you could get 8 one-bit inputs by reading from another address. My school had a 7-segment display connected to one, with each segment controlled by a different line. I remember spending a lunch break getting it to display 'nerry christnass' (you couldn't do an m with a 7-segment display). I also took one home to play with over one holiday and used it to control a scalextric set. The output was digital, so it would just toggle the power between 0 and full very fast, and it used light gates to know where the car was. It used a very simple algorithm where it would start the car going slowly and then try driving it faster in each track segment until it crashed.

Re:Good but Dull

[jimicus]

IMHO, the Beeb always seemed a bit dull. It was what you used at school, when you had to peck through dull basic programs under the watchful eye of teacher.

That was probably more the schools' fault than anything else. Back then your teacher was often a maths teacher who didn't really understand the computers so they did all they could - which generally amounted to "have the children type in this program line by line, they must get it all typed in right and must be punished for attempting to learn anything outside of what this program does" - and generally the program was something pretty simple like a 20-line guess the number game.

There was a thriving games industry back in the day, with much more than just the educational stuff available. Repton (similar programs existed on other platforms - Boulder Dash springs to mind) and Elite both started out on the BBC.

Re:Good but Dull

[mccalli]

When the BBC was launched (did anyone really call it a 'Beeb'? That's always meant the corporation, not the computer to me)

Yep, I did. And so did Beebug magazine.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Good but Dull

[DrXym]

With the exception of Elite, most BBC games were pretty crap too. It probably had something to do with the trade offs between resolution and colours. Most arcade games had to drop into mode 2 but the poor horizontal resolution made them look squashed like the sprites had been sat on. The Spectrum wasn't exactly great for graphics but it was good enough, and more importantly it was much cheaper than the BBC and had more games. Acorn's own efforts to produce a home computer weren't exactly great either. The Acorn Electron was to the BBC Model B what the Commodore 16 was to the C64 - a total disaster. Aside from its graphics the BBC micro was impressive in hindsight. I recall our school actually had a file server and a network for its BBC micros. This is something hard to even imagine for an 8-bit micro.

Re:Good but Dull

[h4rm0ny]

Well there might be some truth to that... but the Spectrum had RUBBER KEYS!!!! Compete with *that* BBC Micro.

Re:Good but Dull

[Mike McTernan]

wireframe vector graphics in Spectrum BASIC anyone? Anyone? No, didn't think so...

Uh? Don't you remember the CIRCLE, PLOT and DRAW commands? Sure they were slow (I can remember watching as large circles were drawn clockwise to the screen), but they were there.

Examples are here: http://www.1000bit.net/support/manuali/zxspectrum/chapter_17.htm

Re:Good but Dull

[The Bender]

So there were two of you then. I messed around with the thing for years, and that's the first time I've heard it. As far as I'm concerned, the "Beeb" is the BBC (corporation, that is).

Re:Good but Dull

[Constantine XVI]

Extrapolation: the machine you had at home was the fun one. True whether Beeb, Spectrum, C64...whatever. I'd have to second that. When I was in (American) grade school, we had Macintoshes which would obviously kick the ass of our Packard-Bell IBM clone at home; yet I always remember the "fun" stuff (QBASIC, Wolf3D, Warcraft) happening on the 386 at home.

Ah, the days when GOTO made sense...

Re:Good but Dull

[Alioth]

That was just an issue with your teachers!

The BBC for us was an exciting machine. We had an Econet network of them, with the SJ Research fileserver.

We wrote a MUD. It became so popular that we were restricted to 3 days a week only! Things like the inline assembler, and the best BASIC for its day made it fun to write. Other great things that the BBC had was that all the system calls were vectored through RAM, so you could easily add your own extensions. Oh, the mischief I used to have with that feature. It was so funny to watch the kid next to me get random spelling mistakes because a little hook I wrote was occasionally adding an extra keystroke here or there :-)

We couldn't afford a Beeb at home, I too had a Spectrum, and learned Z80 asm on that machine. The Spectrum was also fun, but in different ways. I now own 6 Spectrums (two rubber 48K, a plus, a toast rack 128K, an Amstrad made +3, and a bare Issue 4S 48k motherboard awaiting repairs) and 2 BBC Micros (one tricked out with sideways RAM, an internal IDE hard disc, adfs formatted, and a double density disc controller, the other rather more standard with just the intel single density disc controller).

Re:Good but Dull

[montyzooooma]

I had the distinction of getting chucked out of the computer room at school by a prefect because I wanted to program one of the BBC B computers when there was a Defender tournament going on.

Re:Good but Dull

[Ginger Unicorn]

all the computer nerds i went to school with called it a beeb.

Re:Good but Dull

[Alioth]

Actually, most games on all plaforms were pretty crap if the truth be known - which is a constant that continues to this very day.

There were many excellent games for the BBC Micro. Many were also available for other platforms. My favorites are Thrust (multi platform, but runs by far the smoothest on the Beeb), of course Elite (again, smoothest on the BBC), Starship Command (BBC only), Chuckie Egg (pretty much identical on all platforms, very playable platformer), Zalaga (runs as fast and smooth as the arcade game it was taken from, Galaga), Castle Quest (BBC only), Revs (BBC only) - about the only decent race driving game on any 8 bit platform.

While the frame buffer did tend to eat up space, much of this could be recovered on game launch - since you were no longer using the BASIC ROM, you could reclaim some of the zero page, BASIC workspace, and if you weren't going to use the disc drive again, you could reclaim a lot of space in lower RAM.

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

At home is where you had a ZX Spectrum

Only if you couldn't afford a Beeb. :P

Re:Good but Dull

[LWATCDR]

Funny but when I first saw one on the Computer Chronicles I really wanted one. I had an early C64 and that was during the first few months when software was in short supply. The BBC micro seemed to have a great basic compared to the C64 and had that cool user port.
Of course today we have massive computers on our desks that can do so much more. The problem is they are so massive that I don't think anybody knows them at the level they could know a BBC, Spectrum, Atari 400/800, or Apple.

Re:Good but Dull

[clickclickdrone]

>I don't think anybody knows them at the level they could know a BBC, Spectrum, Atari 400/800, or Apple.
Yep. I was an Atari 400/800 user and had the OS source code listing, DOS source listing, hardware manuals, basic manuals and bought every mag going that over time had all sorts of neat tricks and ways to push the envelope. I really knew that machine inside out and then some. These days you can have a single language with an API of 5000 calls so the chances of ever being in that position on any sort of mainstream platform are about nil.
It gave a peculiar level of confidence in your coding that you knew *exactly* what ought to happen and when so you spent more time looking for your own bugs and never even considered the OS, language, hardware etc could be screwing with you.

Re:Good but Dull

[mccalli]

Uh? Don't you remember the CIRCLE, PLOT and DRAW commands? Sure they were slow (I can remember watching as large circles were drawn clockwise to the screen), but they were there.

I certainly do - I actually wrote a vector graphics game in BASIC on the Spectrum. Wrote it the day after being taught vectors and matrices at school - it was a reakky, really simple plane racing game where you raced around two towers.

And it was awful. Terrible. Appalling. Speed? I'd heard of it...

Not knocking the Spectrum, just sometimes people who don't know better, ie. the me of the time, start writing code where Code Should Not Be(tm).

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Good but Dull

[chthon]

I wrote a small CAD(rafting) program on my Spectrum (in 1986 or 1987). It used an array to hold a list of objects, and you had to position the pointer using the cursor keys, and there were commands to begin or stop lines, and you created polygons by issuing a key press which made the last point of the previous line the starting point of the next line.

I did never really use it, because I had no possibilities to print or plot my results, and frankly drawing on a 256x192 screen is very coarse. But it was a nice programming exercise.

Re:Good but Dull

[Tony Hoyle]

We had 'Frak!' on the BBC at school.

It was the closest we could get to swearing being teenagers in the pre-internet days :p

Re:Good but Dull

[Comboman]

I recall our school actually had a file server and a network for its BBC micros. This is something hard to even imagine for an 8-bit micro.

It was not that uncommon in a school or business environment (though home networks were certainly unheard of; it would be many years before any home had more than one computer). My school had a network of Commodore PETs and CBMs (precursors to VIC20 & C64) that allowed the 20 or so computers in the lab to share the printer and floppy drives (most early PETs had cassette drives).

Re:Good but Dull

[Mindwarp]

The best thing about the Beeb was the amazing number of expansion ports on it. The number of electronic circuits I built and hooked up to the User port... Now THAT'S entertainment!

Yes, I was that sad kid.

Cue *Kids nowadays don't know...* and *Get of my lawn* comments in 3.... 2.... 1....

Re:Good but Dull

[Zukix]

Quite right : Revs, Elite, Thrust were not just good but true classics.

I also loved Exile, The Last Ninja, Starport, Commandos, Football Director and many more. All polished and great fun games. Those written by Peter Scott tended to be of the quality of the emerging 16-bit world. I tended to play them from the Play it again Sam series of compilations that were affordable and cherry picked the best games.

Interview with Peter Scott : http://www.beebgames.com/psinterv.php/

I don't get half the fun out of Bioshock, Crysis etc. that I used to get out of those games but I realise its an age thing.

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC was much more amenable to hacking than the other systems of that era (i.e. the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81, and Spectrum or the Commodore VIC20 and C64). Mainly due to the inline assembler and the documented OS vectors (OSBYTE, OSWORD). Graphics programming was also a lot easier than the Spectrum.

Re:Good but Dull

[Alioth]

All of us called it the Beeb. I didn't know anyone who called it a 'BBC' in casual conversation. Typically, Beeb meant a model B. A BBC Master was just known as a 'Master'.

Re:Good but Dull

[lenski]

Yup. I started with a Digital Equipment PDP-8/L and it will always be my first.

Beginning with FOCAL, no less! It's where I learned the value of "interrupt service". Wonderful experience. The results are, literally, history. I am sure that machine and nearly all others like it are long gone now.

I don't really miss it much, surprisingly. Life moves on, and technical life moves on ever more quickly.

Re:Good but Dull

[hoggy]

The coolest thing about Elite was the trick of using a timer triggered off the vertical sync to re-program the video controller 3/4 of the way through the screen refresh so that the top part of the screen (the external view) was in a black and white mode and the bottom part (the ship's displays) were in a lower resolution 4-colour mode. (Original Elite, the later co-processor version used 4- and 8-colour modes respectively.)

Frickin' brilliant. I spent ages carefully re-implementing the idea in my own code.

Re:Good but Dull

[clickclickdrone]

Yup - that's exactly how I remember it - Beeb & Master.

Re:Good but Dull

[68K]

> wireframe vector graphics in Spectrum BASIC anyone?

Definitely: I had to complete some 2D/3D graphics routines as part of my University studies in 1996 and my Atari ST died on me. I completed the coursework on my Spectrum while my Atari was being fixed.

And yes, it was *slow*! :-)

Re:Good but Dull

[Bloke down the pub]

The Beeb was a better machine, but if memory serves it cost twice as much.

Re:Good but Dull

[ajs318]

I saw a modified version of that game ..... where, amongst other visual alterations, the caveman didn't quite fit entirely into his loincloth, and the "R" and "A" of the "FRAK!" speech balloon were replaced by other letters.

With only 32KB of RAM which had to be shared between system variables, code and the unfeasibly large frame buffer, absence of source code frankly was not a showstopper for anyone wanting to modify games. Patching binaries was common, and there were tools readily available especially for doing just that -- either in RAM, or right there on the disk. Graphics mods were rare; most were just extra lives, though I often changed the keys (some programmers liked using A and Z for up and down, with _£ and cursor down for left and right; I preferred the so-called "Snapper keys" of Z and X for left and right, and :* and /? for up and down.)

Re:Good but Dull

[clickclickdrone]

Should have bought an Atari then. They had display list interrupts that allowed you to reprogram the video to whatever mode/character set/palette you wanted scanline by scanline. The Amiga had something similar many years later.

Re:Good but Dull

[untitled.london]

yay!

Frak!

Thanks for reminding me of that.

Also: Chuckie Egg, Mr.EE, Sim, Repton(??).

Re:Good but Dull

[TheBracket]

Wow, Beebug brings back memories! Between Beebug, the old family Model B, and assisting at school with various computer problems - I don't think I'd have my current career if it weren't for the Beeb.

(Nostalgia ahead!)

My Dad worked at a 6th form college (17-18, pre-University for Americans), and brought home a Model B about the time they were released. It had a cassette drive, a black/white monitor, and the old Acorn 'Welcome' tape. He also purchased a subscription to Beebug magazine. At first (I was around 5), I just played games - Magic Mushrooms, Defender, and messed around in Logo. Noticing my interest, my father was kind enough to teach me some BASIC: the usual "What's your name? Hello TheBracket!" stuff, and then procedures/functions. I was producing my own text-adventure games by Middle School - as well as playing Elite, Chuckie Egg, a Donkey Kong clone, and a bunch of educational programs (I have fond memories of a program my father wrote to help me learn long division because I was struggling with it at school for no good reason). As I progressed through middle school, we picked up a mouse, I discovered the joys of Repton (Boulderdash type clone - seemed like the best game ever to me for years), and started typing in programs from the several volumes of Beebug archives we now had. I started tweaking games, learned a fair amount of 6502 assembler (as well as a lot of BASIC!). We picked up a floppy drive, a shadow RAM board (basically extra RAM chips that could be paged in/out; the Beeb had a great system whereby programs could be run from a ROM - or a shadow RAM chip loaded with a ROM image - leaving most of the 32k system memory available for data) - and I got my paws on a ROM image for the graphics extension system. Suddenly, sprites were easy! I came up with everything from simple platform games to soccer games; none of them were any good, but I had the programming bug - something that stayed with me for life. I also met some cool people when my father took me along to BBC Micro trade shows. It was a lot like the Linux community, in that everyone was helpful/encouraging (unless you didn't know what you were doing), and most people were willing to share their wisdom.

Later on, I learned Pascal and C, helped run a local political parties' accounts with a spreadsheet, and did all my school papers in Word Wise (with a LOUD dot-matrix printer). I even made some pocket money selling (locally) a floppy disk menu system that worked by directly querying disk catalogue information from RAM. We also picked up a 1200/75 or 300 baud modem - that was FUN. I remember being in a lot of trouble for the phone bill when I discovered Prestel (a BBS run by the telephone company) had MUDs!

When the Archimedes came along, I desperately wanted one - but my father was pretty sure it wasn't going to take off well (he'd seen some of the crashing Arthur demos given to schools - if Acorn had shipped the first Archy with a working OS, I think we might be running Risc OS today). Beebug became more and more Archy focused, but jealousy of the Archimedes inspired me to figure out various 3D landscape systems (although I never got a Zarch clone to work), and even a basic GUI.

The family's next purchase was a PC - an Amstrad 1640. It had GEM, Windows 2, and a fair number of (not very good) games. I still used to boot up the Beeb for most of my gaming needs (Exile, Codename: Droid, Stryker's Run - some of those were amazing. Exile with shadow RAM even had enemies with speech sounds - ok, it sounded terrible, but hearing "you shall die" coming out of the Beeb was exciting back then!). As soon as I found Turbo Pascal - I didn't really look back for anything else. A few years later, we picked up a 386 with a VGA card - and the poor old Beeb ended up in the attic.

(/nostalgia trip)

The funny thing is, when I fire up an emulator and look back - the Beeb holds up pretty well. It's a LONG way behind what we can do now, but I really don't think I'd be where I am today if I hadn't had all the low-level experience from back then. (I also really wish that RISC OS had taken off... I still find it more usable than Gnome or Windows in a lot of cases! ROXBOX is cool, but it's not enough for me...)

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

The output was digital, so it would just toggle the power between 0 and full very fast

Seems you missed an opportunity to learn about pulse-width-modulation for DC motor control :)

Re:Good but Dull

[jimicus]

I wondered how they did that.

Mad. I doubt there are many people left today who could abuse the systems they're given quite so creatively.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing I leave to the imagination.

Re:Good but Dull

[mikael]

Very true. At this time our schools computing facilities consisted of two Apple ]['s. One up at one end of the school with a printer for word processing, while the other was in the school library (of all places) with another printer. Only at the end of the year did they get a roomful of BBC model A's.

But all the BASIC programming tutorials were based on database processing, batch processing and basic arithmetic. Other schools taught Pascal or used BBC BASIC with procedures.

Out in the your local newsagents, there were whole loads of games and technical programming magazines:

Atari User, Personal Computing World, Byte, Atari ST User, Computer and Video Games,
Acorn User and many other
computer magazines

Many of the BBC micro games are available online:

http://www.bbcmicrogames.com/">BBC Games

Re:Good but Dull

[PReDiToR]

Having a Spectrum+ was the biggie. No rubber keys, but the same (to all intents and purposes) machine.

Every time I turned it on I used to 'POKE 23609, 190' to make the keypresses beep.

Long live Chuckie Egg 2!

Re:Good but Dull

[weierstrass]

definitely called it a beeb, as did my friend who actually owned one

Re:Good but Dull

[imdx80]

Our school had Yellow River Kingdom

they also had some weird flight sim where you had to answer questions to get across the atlantic, but the 'teacher' had a computer phobia who insisted that if people answered the questions ahead of the rest of the class everything would break

eventually we got to sit in the centre of the room and had to watch everybody else have 'fun' with that

Re:Good but Dull

[oliderid]

"Back then your teacher was often a maths teacher who didn't really understand the computers so they did all they could"

How true...I still remember that I lost points because i used something similar to (translate it into ZX spectrum basic):
Boolean test=false;
.
.
.
if(test)
{
}
else
{
}

instead of:

if(test)
{
}
if(!test)
{
}

I still remember that my way was totally fine. The math teacher knew nothing about computer.
I was 12 years or something, The first time that I had any interest for a class.

Re:Good but Dull

[Tim Browse]

I used to work at CC*, and pretty much all the coders there seemed to call it a Beeb.

(*If you need me to explain, my Appeal to False Authority has already failed)

Re:Good but Dull

[Tim Browse]

Back then your teacher was often a maths teacher who didn't really understand the computers so they did all they could - which generally amounted to "have the children type in this program line by line, they must get it all typed in right and must be punished for attempting to learn anything outside of what this program does"

I remember taking a 'test' at school in 'Computer Studies' - we used to have Commodore PETs and BBC Micros. One of the questons was:

"If you walk up to a computer and turn it on, and type 'PRINT A' followed by return, what will you see on (A) A BBC Micro, and (B) A Commodore PET."

To my mind, it was a really stupid question, but, being familiar with both computers, I answered (A) as 'No such variable' and (B) as '0'.

When it came time to pass your paper to you neighbour to have it marked, I was told this was wrong. Apparently the teacher thought the PET would also complain about 'No such variable'. I argued. The teacher insisted they were right, eventually saying in a smug 'teacher knows best' way, "Well, Tim, if you think you know best, why don't you try it now in front of the whole class?"

You can probably guess how that went :-).

What seemed stupid to me was that the question was so obviously phrased with the assumption that they would behave differently. I assumed the test must have been written by another teacher.

I was somewhat nervous, but it did feel good when the trusty PET choked up the answer '0'.

This was a maths teacher, btw.

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...

I can remember writing a disassembler/toolkit/emulator image. It looked like the famous ExmonII, but was a piece of software (no hardware ROM). It was capable to load on a second processor (65c02) in himem and operating using the tube. It could emulate the 65c02 processor to step (or run) trough a piece of program code, and it used shielded pieces of memory to keep the eventually stored data safe.

I also wrote a database/finance program for a faoundation to keep track of hired artwork and payments...

On the technical side I designed a fairly accurate voltmeter, using the analog/digital input and the parallel port. The parallel port was connected to a resistor network and was generating a reference voltage. A op-amp was used to measure the incoming voltage against the reference voltage until the outcome (+ and - input) equals zero. The digital value feeded into the parallel port was used to calculate the accurate voltage...

By the way - anyone remembering the AMX mouse? It came with a artwork program. There where addons, like 3d packages and even a primitive desktop publishing program (named AMX Pagemaker).

Good times - not boring at all!!!

Re:Good but Dull

[Tim Browse]

Zalaga (runs as fast and smooth as the arcade game it was taken from, Galaga)

Oh please. It certainly ran fast, but no way was it as smooth as the arcade game. The sprites would move about 2 inches per frame; that's how Orlando got the speed. Play Galaga on XBLA and then try Zalaga on a Beeb emulator.

Re:Good but Dull

[Shuntros]

We got a Master 128 at home in the late 80's and for some strange reason I took to it rapidly, first basic, then assembler, figuring out how to write something which would copy all those Superior Software games (Crazee Rider, Repton 3, Codename Droid, anyone?). When I got to High School we also had an Econet with an SJ Research server. I wrote to SJ under the guise of designing the multiuser network game (which I did, in the end) and they sent me photocopies of the entire network API set, enabling me to code utilities superior to the standard *VIEW, *REMOTE, to bypass *PROT commands, get into network directories listed as Private etc..

I built a ROM image from said utilities and after discovering my dad's friend had an eeprom blower persuaded him to blow me a few chips. One found it's way into the B+ in the music room at school where I used to hang out, and needless to say, carnage followed.

That was about the last time I used a computer at school. The IT teacher flipped his lid over the whole affair and got the headmaster to ban me from using any computer connected to the school network.

I kinda lost interest in computers after that (nothing to do with discovering cigarettes, alcohol and girls you understand), and it wasn't until the mid 90's I figured they were my best chance of actually earning some money in the real world. A pity schools back then saw computers as "a passing phase, won't catch on", otherwise I'd probably be earning twice what I do now.

Re:Good but Dull

[jimicus]

Actually, your way's slightly better because the CPU won't have to do two comparison/branch operations. Not that it matters that much these days, but back then every little CPU cycle you could squeeze out was worth it.

Though you'd probably have been even less popular with your teacher for pointing that one out.

Re:Good but Dull

[Zapnot]

Strange. At the time (and in retrospect, unfairly) the Spectrum always seemed like a toy machine to me.
The BBC Micro, on the other hand, seemed like a serious machine. All I can truly say is that I owe
a lot to my BBC micro and the people who made it. Although I learned elementary programming on
a Trash-80, the BBC was the machine on which I really started to do useful stuff. At college I used it to
analyze the results from my lab classes (and later fake them with a nice spread of errors), word
process my reports, visualize diffraction patterns, work out square well potentials. I even used it
for (small) neural net simulations written in ISO Pascal for my post grad project. Oh, and then there
was Elite and Revs and Adventure.... oh and I still miss my Music 500 synth box.

Re:Good but Dull

[Orddu]

You didn't go to the Gilberd School in Colchester did you? If not, interesting because we also had a MUD there (based shamelessly on Shades), written by the computer studies teacher and myself.

I still have my Beeb (yes, some people did call it a Beeb) which I've had since 1984 or 5. It was well beyond its time. Decent software-based speech synthesis from phonemes in 16K which for some reason we don't seem to be able to do any more.

Re:Good but Dull

[Roger W Moore]

The coolest thing about Elite was the trick of using a timer triggered off the vertical sync to re-program the video controller 3/4

The other cool thing was using the random number generator to create the 8 galaxies. If I remember right that was one of the reasons that it took so long to port the game to other platforms: they had to reproduce the Beeb random number algorithm precisely to get the same galaxies.

Re:Good but Dull

[Alioth]

No, I didn't go there.

Funnily enough, our game was shamelessly based on Shades, too. Not the location data, that was all our own work, but the general hack-and-slash character of the game, and the levels (I copied the levels and scores pretty much verbatim from Shades). There were some other parts rather shamelessly borrowed from Shades - while we didn't have a castle or Mad King's Room or anything like that, we did have the Shifting Sands with a rusty longsword hidden within, and items that were answers to puzzles.

I've actually since got back in touch with the head of computing (who is still the head of computing). He still has the floppies our MUD is saved on, in SJ Research format DD discs. At some point I need to go there with my hard disc equipped BBC Micro and a DD disc drive, and do a bitwise copy of those discs.

Re:Good but Dull

[turgid]

The BBC micro was also about 3 times as expensive as the ZX Spectrum. A 32k BBC B cost £399. At today's prices, that's about £1000 ($2000). So if you lived in Surrey or Berkshire, you had a BBC B. Everyone else had a Spectrum.

Yes, the BBC was more sophisticated in many ways (expansion busses, clever OS, many channel sound etc) the Spectrum had a far better processor (Z80) and more memory (48k).

This is a case of the BBC blowing their own trumpet, as it were.

Yes, it was a good machine. It would have been worth the money if they'd put a Z80 in instead of a 6510.

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

There were plenty of good games for the BBC. Imogen is one of the best puzzle/adventure games ever IMHO - worth getting an emulator just for this one great game alone.

Re:Good but Dull

[LinuxGrrl]

Friend of mine got banned from the computer room for "hacking" after hitting F12, then typing "modules" on an Archimedes, a few years later.

Now she works for Google.

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

The CIRCLE algorithm in the original spectrum ROM is actually very clever and efficient.
It is the same as the ARC command mirrored about a central point, but new coordinates are generated relative to the last ones plotted, rather than relative to the central point. If that makes any sense.

Have a look at the ROM dissasembly here:
http://www.wearmouth.demon.co.uk/zx82.htm

Re:Good but Dull

[jimicus]

Heh.

She'd have caused more trouble had she typed "unplug adfs". (Though not, I hasten to add, anything insurmountable).

Re:Good but Dull

[mollymoo]

The original 16 KiB and 48 KiB Spectrums had rubber keys, but the + and beyond had real keyboards. Still, I loved my 16 KiB speccy. The fact that so many games required 48 KiB probably helped push me towards programming.

Re:Good but Dull

[natd]

The real power of the BBC was the I/O capability. We used to plug all sorts of things into the 'user port,' and 8-bit I/O interface. You wrote an 8-bit value to a specific address and it would set the line voltages up or down for 8 wires, and you could get 8 one-bit inputs by reading from another address.

My 'technology' teacher in school was in love with the BBC right through to the early 90's and used to rave about the IO. I was into my Amigas those days so for a school project I wrote an IO toolbox called "Amitrol" (using AMOS, remember that?) which gave you a fairly nice GUI to control and monitor the 8 digital IO ports and 2 * 8-bit analogue ports on the Amiga. As well as plotting real time graphs for the analogue ports, it included a primitive macro language which with conditional loops etc to enable 'intelligent' devices reacting to their surroundings. I built hardware for it to, but PCB design using a pencil, dining room table and photocopier to scale it down made a mess of that part...although the software did then get bundled by an English company who happened to have made a reasonable box but had no software.

Anyway, point really was (which i was determined to make to that teacher) that those 8 digital IO ports were just a regular parallel interface, and the 2 analogue were just additional pins on the mouse ports...the BBC didn't have anything special over the Amiga in these areas. Since then, I've decided I do like the BBC anyway so have a Modem B, Master 128 and a Compact in my collection :)

If anyone happens to have a copy of Amitrol, I'd love to see it but have long lost both the source and builds....and the school refused to give me back my hard copy ;)

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

The amiga had a whole separate (though simple) processor synchronised to the display, so you didn't need display list interrupts (though they existed too) for most tricks - you just wrote a program (called a display list, funny enough) for the display-synchronised co-processor, the "copper", the cpu could be off doing other stuff.

The c64 also had display list interrupt functionality, though it wasn't as good as the atari's.

Re:Good but Dull

[turgid]

Lucky you. I was still using a 16k ZX81 in 1986. My puritanical father thought anything better was decadent, and colour, sound and high-resolution graphics would turn me into a thug, waster and junke.

I obsessively collect computers nowadays.

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC Repton was not an original, but just another clone of the basic concept. I think Boulder Dash started it all.

Re:Good but Dull

[TheRaven64]

Comparing the BBC to the Amiga is a bit unfair. The BBC was released in 1982 and retailed for £375, while the first Amiga came out in 1985 and cost $1,296 (around £660 at the exchange rate of the time). If a machine three years more modern and costing twice as much wasn't better then the designers would have some explaining to do.

Mind you, I've only touched on some of the I/O capabilities of the BBC. I don't remember the Amiga having a port into which you could plug an external CPU, allowing you to turn it into a symmetric or asymmetric multiprocessing system...

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

wireframe vector graphics in Spectrum BASIC anyone? Anyone? No, didn't think so...

Why not? OK, so maybe you couldn't write Elite or Starglider in Basic, but you could do some basic wireframe stuff. Remember, Nightflite, one of the first flight sims on the Spectrum was written entirely in Basic.

Re:Good but Dull

[natd]

). If a machine three years more modern and costing twice as much wasn't better then the designers would have some explaining to do.

Absolutely, no argument there, the BBC crammed a lot in, especially given it was in many ways a rush job too. My post was purely on the subject of the BBC having the 8 digital IOs and 2 Analogue which schools seemed to think was a unique features... apparently right into the 90's. IN 1981 I was given a Vic-20 and thereafter was extremely jealous of those that got BBC's...to the point that I even used to POKE the VICs screen and border black, text white, type an underscore and cursor back over it to make it blink ;) in fact, I think I went as far as ruining the fantasy by typing "CHAIN "KILLER" (or whatever it was) and getting a syntax error ;)

Now, I'm not sure if it's a direct equivalent, but the Zorro slot on the Amigas did allow for the addition of both regular CPUs and/or an FPU. On my A500 I had a card with an 8086 in the trapdoor to enable 'native' DOS compatibility. Anyway...as you say, different vintage.

Re:Good but Dull

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a fool would write in BASIC and expect speed...

Get out your assembler, man!

Re:Good but Dull

[samjam]

BBC Micro also did that.

I played a game that was mode two for half the screen and then some other text-ish mode mode 6 or something further down the screen.

One really daring game I read of was switching to mode 7 halfway down the screen for text.

Sam

Re:Good but Dull

[samjam]

In 6th form college I finally got hold of the advanced programmers guide where I could even intercept CTRL-BRK to re-install my vectors.

I wrote a 3 way "talk" program based on a VAX talk program I saw.

We'd control a speech synthesiser from across the room and use the cmoputer to chat up girls who somehow knew the crowd of geeky boys in the corner were behind it all, and went along with it any way.

My last attempt before I left was to turn Acornsoft Maze into a networked multiplayer game, but my skills were too poor then. Skilz! Gah!

I also reverse engineered the econet password file, grassed up some students with naughty admin privileges and got granted them myself.

My high school, though, had the cheaper e-net. I went back to visit once and needed to login as the teacher. To find his password I wrote a BASIC program to dump the disk DMA buffer and then tried to login and watched as his entry was read from the password file and then read his password. It never occured to me that in a decent system this would NOT work as the password would be hashed. But it wasn't hashed and I got in. A wiser man would never have tried.

Sam

I loved the BBC Micro

[Rik Sweeney]

mainly for the games. Codename: Droid, Citadel, Labyrinth...

I got nostalgic a few months ago and made some longplay movies on YouTube

Codename: Droid
Citadel
Labyrinth

I really should just remake some of these games...

Re:I loved the BBC Micro

[Winders]

Don't forget Elite. Probably one of the best games ever made, and still well-loved. The Acorn port was damn good too...

Re:I loved the BBC Micro

[Anonymous Coward]

Likewise. I treasure my still-working BBC Micro and the great games that came with it.

If you fancy a blast from the past, there's a flash version of Repton here.

Re:I loved the BBC Micro

[IceFreak2000]

The best game of all on the BBC Micro was Repton - a great Boulderdash clone that was a damn sight harder to play. Mind you, I'm biased

Re:I loved the BBC Micro

[IceFreak2000]

The BBC Micro version was the original - it was ported to virtually every other platform under the sun afterwards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%29

Re:I loved the BBC Micro

[15Bit]

Still the best game i ever played. I remember thinking when i was a kid that it would be amazing if you could connect up loads of computers and play it as a real universe. Took them 20 years, but Eve is that game.

Re:I loved the BBC Micro

[uuxququex]

There is a vastly superior version nowadays: Oolite. Free to play and it has exactly the right "feel".

Video: Lave to Zaonce

Re:I loved the BBC Micro

[Tim Browse]

I played Labyrinth too - but watching your video it only just struck me - is this the first documented appearance of the Companion Cube? :-)

As a person who...

[MrKane]

..has a growing Archimedes collection........I should probably not tell people this.

I was going to say "think this is great news", but then realised ;?)

Re:As a person who...

[oberondarksoul]

Don't be ashamed! I grew up with an A3000 as my main computer and still love RISC OS. My RiscPC may be much faster (StrongARM!) but that Acorn badge on the front still makes me smile.

I remember it

[Anonymous Coward]

as my first toy.

Not too funny, but I used to call it BBC MY CROW.

Computers in school?

[kernowyon]

Didn't have such things when I was at school - it was paper and pencils,ink in ink wells on your desk and learning your times tables by rote. You youngsters don't know how lucky you were..blah blah Now get off my lawn!

For the Record

[Toreo asesino]

"Beeb" is a name for the whole BBC, not just the machines....

And yes, i had one too, bought for me by my father....said it was "chipped", whatever that meant; it was probablly supposed to convince me it had superpowers or something, but anyway, this machine was my foundation of everyone's first program....

10 print "hello world bum bum willy willy weeeeeeeee!"
20 goto 10

Ok ok, so I was 8-9 - give me some credit...

Re:For the Record

[j.a.mcguire]

I never heard anyone ever call them Beebs, they were just called BBCs.

Re:For the Record

[REBloomfield]

me neither...

Re:For the Record

[cordsie]

This always leads to the inevitable Version 2.0:

10 print "Please input your name:"
20 input A$
30 print "A$ is a wanker!"
40 goto 30

Re:For the Record

[TheMoog]

typo! :)

30 print A$," is a wanker!"

Re:For the Record

[Linker3000]

Didn't a comma give you a one tab spacing, if so it should be:

30 print A$ + " is a wanker!"

Re:For the Record

[cheekymunky]

On BBC BASIC (I think, definitely on Atari BASIC) the syntax should be 30 PRINT A$; "is a wanker!"

Re:For the Record

[rbanffy]

Turn in your geek card when you leave.

What did you mean in line 30? Shell-style variable substitution? You can't do that in BASIC!

At least not in any BASIC I know of.

Re:For the Record

[SST-206]

On BBC BASIC (I think, definitely on Atari BASIC) the syntax should be 30 PRINT A$; "is a wanker!"

LOL. How many geeks does it take to fix a bug? ;-)

Actually you can omit the semi-colon at the expense of readability, and many times we were compelled to in order to save the scarce memory. Ah... the joys of removing every extra space and shortening variable and procedure names down to one letter! Also recall using integer variables (FOR C%=X% TO Y%) just to give the BASIC interpreter a slight speed boost.

Re:For the Record

[leenks]

You are right, but "beeb" was also the name we used to refer to the computer itself. There were loads of "Beeb micro user groups" over the country, and even "Beeb user" magazine iirc.

Re:For the Record

[operagost]

Version 2.3:

30 print a$;" is a wanker!"

Re:For the Record

[badman99]

Wow you wrote the first Gay BBC program

Greed prevented world domination

[Anonymous Coward]

If the idiots in charge had brought the price of the Archimedes down to that of the Atari ST, it would have dominated the market when the Amiga, Atari ST and Archimedes were in vogue, and we might now all be using RISC OS based PCs, instead of Microshaft.

But the idiots in charge of the Archimedes' price refused to bring the price down - they would rather sell a few at a large profit per unit, and then lose the market, than sell the most at a smaller profit per unit...

Re:Greed prevented world domination

[SirMeliot]

They were more than happy to sell into education at huge discounts. The technical collage I was at was quite pleased with the IIRC £250 it paid for each of the A310s in the lab. RRP was about a grand.

I agree they showed no interest at all in selling to Joe Public though.

Re:Greed prevented world domination

[Anonymous Coward]

In a sense it was justified. The early RISC OS 2 Arcs (A3xx and A4xx series) were considerably more powerful than any other home computer on the market at the time.

I don't think we'd all be using RISC OS though, even if the prices were lower. The Arcs would only have filled the niche in the market that the Amigas and Ataris occupied - and look where they are now.

Re:Greed prevented world domination

[plingboot]

Towards the end they brought out the A3000 which was very much an Amiga/ST styled machine, with floppy drive in the right hand side. There were even bundled games deals in highstreet shops such as dixons. It was too little too late though, the ST/Amiga had already taken over.

Re:Greed prevented world domination

[westlake]

would have dominated the market when the Amiga, Atari ST and Archimedes were in vogue, and we might now all be using RISC OS based PCs, instead of Microshaft.

"Microshaft." How clever of you.

In 1982 magazines like Creative Computing were stuffed with adds targeting the market for the emergent IBM PC. Most of interest to small business, of course - and that would prove decisive.

But the new 16 bit micro was already drawing attention from gamers. This would be the year of Flight Simulator for the IBM PC.

Re:Greed prevented world domination

[weierstrass]

IMHO home computing really took off when a lot of people who weren't part of the (ATARI/AMIGA/BBC etc.) home computing scene, and wouldn't have bought a home computer brought their old IBM PC home from the office for the kids to play on / for word processing and realised that it was worth having. So it didn't really matter much who was dominating the home computer market before the PC, the fact that people had already learnt to use it at work, there was a certain amount of shareware and stuff available, and that lots of PCs were obsoleted meant that whatever people had at work was going to take over in the long run.
All the other computers had a lot more programmer/hobbyist appeal, but this might have been a factor in putting a lot of untechnical people off, who didn't know they could operate a computer until they had to learn to do so at work.

No mention of Sophie Wilson!

[Hal_Porter]

Co designer of the what is probably the most popular Instruction Set Architecture in the world the ARM. She also designed the Acorn Atom microcomputer, forerunner of the BBC Micro and wrote the improved version of Basic which caused the BBC to sign the contract

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

Re:No mention of Sophie Wilson!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should point out to the OP how silly it would be to suggest that (eg) the 8088 runs the majority of personal computers today. Thankfully, you have at least identified that there is a difference between an instruction set and a chip. All hail the ARM ISA.

Re:No mention of Sophie Wilson!

[mustafap]

Sophie first designed the Acorn System 1, which was my first computer. And a damn fine thing it was too. I still have mine.

I exchanged emails with Sophie last year; she is very modest about the work, but I still have fond memories of programming the system 1 in assembler, and trying to get the 'correct' volume control on the cassette interface. Ah, those were the days!

Re:No mention of Sophie Wilson!

[Anonymous Coward]

She is a he she

Re:No mention of Sophie Wilson!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't call us "he shes". Many of us find such terms really quite offensive (and there are almost certainly far more of us reading /. than most people think).

Re:No mention of Sophie Wilson!

[Excession]

Rather a lot of us in fact.

Re:No mention of Sophie Wilson!

[Goth Biker Babe]

An awful lot to be honest!

Re:No mention of Sophie Wilson!

[Hal_Porter]

In terms of cores shipped Arm is a clear winner over x86. A typical phone has 1 or 2 ARM cores and a billion phones are shipped a year. A typical PC has the same number but they only sell ~239 million.

http://www.news.com/Intel-has-ARM-in-its-crosshairs/2100-1006_3-6210033.html

PC sales growth is slowing in the U.S. and Western Europe (PC vendors shipped 239 million units during 2006, according to Gartner, up 9.5 percent from 2005), and while PCs are still hot in emerging markets, it's only a matter of time before growth there settles in at a respectable 10 percent clip.

Smart phones, on the other hand, are taking off. Mobile phones as a whole already sell more than a billion units a year, and Gartner thinks smart-phone shipments (defined as phones that can run sophisticated operating systems and access the Internet) are set to grow 52 percent from 2007 to 2008, from 102 million units in 2007 to 156 million by the end of next year.

If you go there to see this...

[tgd]

Go check out the Listening Post, also at the Science Museum. Sit through its whole cycle (~30 minutes)

Hands down the coolest, most impactful, art installation I've ever seen.

(And yes, this is sort of on topic because it has to do with the Science Museum)

Multi user

[Alioth]

I have two BBC Micros (one with an internal IDE hard disc and double density floppy controller, sideways RAM banks, and another fairly standard one with the Intel single density disc controller).

Back 'in the day', a friend and I wrote a MUD (multi user dungeon) for the BBC Micro, on Econet, since our school had quite a few of them connected together via econet.

It was an ungodly mish-mash of 6502 asm and BBC BASIC. It's a wonder that it worked at all, let alone reasonably well. Since we couldn't get the game into one machine, we made it client/server before either of us had actually heard the term client/server! The server was an almost unused Torch BBC compatible machine, donated to the school - no one wanted to use it because it had a rather odd keyboard layout and a few other non-standard things, but otherwise, worked like a BBC Micro and had a Z80 second processor (unused by our server). Clients displayed things like location descriptions, item descriptions etc. while the server kept track of game state.

Some things were also peer-to-peer, if a player 'shouted' a message, it went peer-to-peer. But if a player used 'tell' to privately tell someone else something, it was routed via the server which only sent it to the right econet station. The server kept track of what was allowed, so people couldn't cheat by loading a different exits file into the client.

We could only run it three days a week because it was pretty popular. We were only allowed to run it at all because the head of computing obviously saw that we were learning from the experience of writing and maintaining the monstrosity we had created. It taught me many valuable lessons about software that communicates.

I only had a Spectrum at home (couldn't afford a Beeb!), but it's another 8 bitter I really like. I have six of those now, and I'm designing an ethernet card for the Speccy. Once the Spectrum one's done, I'll do the same for the Beeb (which should be electronically far simpler, because the BBC has much better support for adding new ROMs, and a proper formal way of telling the MOS that you've done it).

Good times.

Re:Multi user

[Scott Kevill]

Hmm. That sounds a bit like a text MUD I remember playing on the BBC in highschool in 1990 and 1991. My memory is kind of hazy and I haven't been able to find anything on Google about it. I think it was simply called Cave.

Points I remember..
- you could "summon" monsters or other players to teleport them to the room you were in. This had varying degrees of success, and your ability improved with experience, and moreso if you had a certain gem

- one of your attacks was to "zap" a player or monster. Toughest monster was the dragon, I think

- there was a sort of co-op puzzle in one place that required two players to get an object, one had to pull a rope to raise a portcullis while the other grabbed the object behind it

- with enough experience you became a wizard, which increased your skills quite a bit

- the admin was a form of super-wizard, but still mortal. I remember when he (a teacher) logged in to shut down the game at the end of a lunchbreak (it would say, "blah has collapsed the cave"), I summoned him and zapped him repeatedly so that he died without being able to shut it down. Good times.

Does anyone else remember this game?

Re:Multi user

[Alioth]

The one we wrote was on similar lines, except the admin (me!) was immortal and had infinite mana. Zap was only available to wizards, everyone else had to make do with KILL and hope for the best.

You could summon other players if you had enough mana. The higher your level the more likely the spell was to succeed. However, there was a non zero chance of the summon backfiring in some way. Indeed, most spells could backfire, but the more powerful spells tended to backfire in nastier ways.

One of the monsters (mobiles) could summon, and would occasionally attempt to summon and slay a player. It didn't do it very often.

Re:Multi user

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds rather like LpMUD. Any connection?

A machine still worthy of study in my opinion

[hoggy]

I had a BBC B and then later a BBC Master 128 (which I upgraded to a BBC Master Turbo). I learned BASIC, Forth, Lisp, Pascal, C and 8502 assembler on the BBC Micro before I even got to University. I learned most of the 1st year CS algorithms and data structures course from Beebug (the BBC Users Group) magazine.

The BBC had what, at the time, was a "proper" operating system on a home computer and you could patch all of the system calls so that you could inspect and modify the behaviour. With the excellent Exmon machine monitor and the BBC Advanced User Guide, the machine was a treasure trove for an aspiring programmer.

I don't think there's anything comparable that a 12 year old kid can really get a chance to understand anymore.

Re:A machine still worthy of study in my opinion

[hoggy]

Or 6502 assembler even... *looks sheepish*

Another thing to add about how cool the Beeb was though is asymmetric multi-processing thanks to the Tube co-processor interface. How cool was that in an 8-bit machine!

Re:A machine still worthy of study in my opinion

[clickclickdrone]

>you could patch all of the system calls
You could do that with the Atari 400/800 and those hailed from the late 70's. Most OS calls were made by vectoring thru pointers in RAM to the ROM. You could add your own code then continue on or write complete replacements.

Re:A machine still worthy of study in my opinion

[clickclickdrone]

Plus the Teletext adaptor - that was cool too. You could have BBC Basic progs use it to get your stock/shares prices daily for you or to check the TV listings for your favourite progs - not bad for 1983/4 or whenever.

Re:A machine still worthy of study in my opinion

[Alioth]

Plenty of working BBC Micros exist. They are still fun to play with, I have two. If you're into hobby electronics, a BBC is a much better machine to have around than a PC, because the user port and 1MHz bus is so much trivially easier to hook a breadboard up to for some experiments than a PCI slot or USB port.

I learnt to program on this

[SmitherIsGod]

...when I was 7 or 8. I'm still recovering.

Re:I learnt to program on this

[Tony Hoyle]

My first job was coding for it. I wrote a fruit machine program that was supposed to be educational (you added up the values of the reels to win or something like that). As it was too ambitious for the platform (as a noob I didn't at that time know how to 'manage' managements's expectations) it ended up in raw 6502 and loaded up different bits of itself as it was running, just to fit in the memory. Was quite proud of it actually.. I still wonder what happened to it. (For historys sake that was GSN Software that became 3T productions that then got bought out by Research Machines and presumably vanished after that).

Er? Stryker's Run? Repton?

[Animaether]

Any of those games were perfectly good fun - and Stryker's Run even had a very decent musical score coming out of the 4 channel (3 melodic, 1 percussion) synth on a BBC Master 512k.

Not to mention that you could get BBC Micro magazine and write new games by copying them from the pages and experiment with them. open source games as far back as then. I remember when they added a CRC routine and CRC codes in front of each line so you could easily spot where you made a typo. Or if something didn't work, you could mail it to them and you'd get your own 'patch' code published and distributed that way.

Ahhh... fond memories of, among other, Clogger.

Don't get me wrong, they weren't the flashiest games, but they were more than decent and fun.

And for extra geek points...

[Rich]

Who can remember what was at memory address 0x3CA?

Hint: think tapes, the vertical blank interupt and the *load command.

Answer in rot13:
Vg pbagnvarq gur syntf jura ybnqvat n svyr naq yrg lbh *ybnq tnzrf gung jrer 'cebgrpgrq' gb bayl nyybj *eha vs lbh znfxrq bhg gur zbfg fvtavsvpnag ovg. Guvf jnf hfrq ol cerggl zhpu rirel purng jevggra sbe OOP tnzrf.

Re:And for extra geek points...

[dangitman]

Who can remember what was at memory address 0x3CA?

Your Mom?

I used the prototype

[Linker3000]

I can recall my school being given a prototype to test - this must have been around 1979-80 and I was about 14.

Up to then we had been using a couple of green-screen Commodore PETs, then one day this large colour TV appeared in the corner of the 'computer room'; it had a large, grey 'keyboard-in-a box' hard-wired to it via a cable about as thick as a vacuum cleaner hose! Test programs were supplied on micro cassettes and we could also download software over-the-air from CEEFAX.

I used to open up the computer room each morning (I somehow managed to acquire a key!) and sit in front of this anonymous, 'not-yet-a-beeb' computer, programming away or using it to read the news on CEEFAX.

Re:I used the prototype

[clickclickdrone]

That would have been something like an Acorn Atom bck then. The BBC went from 'not invented' to 'in the shops' in a few months as Acorn bascally did a few mods to a design they were already well advanced with.

Re:I used the prototype

[Tony Hoyle]

OMG the Acorn Atom. That's something I'd completely forgotten about. Didn't see many of those in circulation, though.

Re:I used the prototype

[Linker3000]

This machine was certainly not an Atom in terms of the case it was in and (ISTR) it did start up 'BBC Basic'

Re:I used the prototype

[clickclickdrone]

Could it have been an Acorn System 2 http://lowendmac.com/orchard/07/0228.html

Re:I used the prototype

[Linker3000]

Nope - it was definitely hand-built.

The keyboard & logic was in a plain grey plastic 'project' case of the type you'd buy from Maplin/RS/CPC.

Holes for the fan, microdrive etc. were hand cut.

No logos etc.

Re:I used the prototype

[clickclickdrone]

Maybe it was a bit later than 79/80? No matter, a cool thing to have played with :-)

Re:I used the prototype

[Linker3000]

Possibly, although I left that school in 1981 so it would have been late 1980 max.

Total nostalgia blow-out this week

[ratbag]

1. Sir Arthur dies;
2. The reason for my chosen career and hobby gets a story on Slashdot. I owned a Model 'B', then a couple of 128s. I helped (as a pupil) to run the Econet-based system at Oundle School in 1986-87, which I believe got some of its kit early due to links with Cambridge. By the time I left, we'd got a 20MB drive on the network. Quite an upgrade, since we'd previously depended on a couple of double-sided floppy drives as storage for the classroom.

Notable projects included an abortive attempt to write a robot control language running from EEPROM (*UP, *LEFT, *GRIP). That and an endless struggle to beat the tape protection on games.

How I wish I'd kept the machines. I moved onto an Archimedes or two, then moved away from coding into gaming with an Amiga.

There haven't been many computers with such easily accessible programming power (I owned several Sinclair Research machines and found the idiotic keyboard "auto-type" got in the way of thinking more than it speeded things up).

Incidentally, we never called the computer 'Beeb' - that's the name for the old Corporation (often as "Auntie Beeb").

Happy days.

Re:Total nostalgia blow-out this week

[ratbag]

Order all wrong, my Amiga was before my BBCs. PC followed Archimedes. You're not interested anyway. Oh well.

oblig Dilbert

[Loconut1389]

PHB: The smell of fresh ficus-- It transports me back to my youth. Summers in the Catskill Mountains. Ah...we'd all go to Turtle Pond to swim and laugh and play games amongst the wild ficus. One day, tragedy struck. A turtle made off with my trunks. I stayed in the water as long as I could but the water was cold.

Soon...
A crowd formed.

They gave me a nickname on the spot--

One that still haunts me.

Acorn.

My awful, non-French parents even named their dry cleaning store Acorn. But that's all in the past. What do you have for me?

Dilbert: We just need your approval on our next product name. Salmonella.

Join the club

[Kupfernigk]

• Ada Countess of Lovelace (programming the Difference Engine) - died tragically
• Jocelyn Bell (Pulsar researcher)- still with us fortunately
• Rosalind Franklin (DNA structure)- died tragically
• Sophie Wilson (Microcomputer pioneer) - AFAIK still with us

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (Early computer designer and COBOL originator) had the good sense to be a North American and so didn't have to watch the men steal all the credit.

Scientific American always carefully credits Jocelyn Bell for pulsars, although Hewish got the Nobel. Let's hope someone at the BBC can read /. and fixes the credits.

Re:Join the club

[sane?]

You do realise that the person who's recognised for all the BBC and ARM work was Roger Wilson? Which probably explains why he/she was not at the event - not wanting to call attention to the sex change...

Re:Join the club

[aembleton]

Sohpie Wilson was originally a man called Roger Wilson.

Re:Join the club

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but your four were born girls .....

Re:Join the club

[Goth Biker Babe]

I was going to say that given her past Sophie keeps her head down now-a-days.

Re:Join the club

[Kupfernigk]

It obviously wasn't a very good joke, unfortunately. Is it a troll if you just try to find out how many politically correct people weren't around at the time?

Re:Join the club

[LinuxGrrl]

and the fact that you *had* to bring it up is probably symptomatic of why she wasn't there.

Tell me, exactly, why was your information relevant?

Re:Join the club

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, thanks for that, angry feminist. On the computer scientists:

1. 
    
2. While Ada Lovelace was fucking brilliant, and her papers go into a delightful amount of detail on something even resembling design of a modern CAS, why we give so much credit to mid-C20 creators of today's architectures has a simple answer: those working in early- to mid-C20 didn't seem to pay much attention to C19 and earlier work as a whole. It wasn't Ada being ignored for being a woman, it was everyone from Schickard through Leibniz to Babbage involved in automated calculation being glossed over by C20 "pioneers". Shame, really, as Leibniz's dreams for automated reasoning were much more interesting than the machines we've actually ended up with.
    
3. I heartily recommend against using the inventor of COBOL if you want to puff up the accomplishments of your gender(*).
    
4. When she did most of her early work, Wilson had not yet made the decision to identify herself publicly as female. While it's perfectly respectful to refer to her as female now, it would be contentious to suggest that she was female then: by the most liberal definition of gender, it would at least require a statement from her that she has always considered herself a woman. I think most in the Acorn world know perfectly well what a great contribution she made, and this should be examined without a need to make this into some sort of campaign about gender - especially if you're going to make some fairly critical assumptions about how she felt about her gender identity.
   

(*) Actually, I strongly urge you to ignore gender entirely at this time, and focus on, you know, "content of character" and all that waffly Martin Luther King stuff. There is no chauvinist conspiracy.

Thank heaven for emulators!

[Bazman]

So anyone can now get a BBC Micror unning on their PC thanks to emulators. Anyone recommend a particular BBC Micro emulator? There's a whole bunch here:

http://bbc.nvg.org/emulators.php3

heck, there are BBC Micro emulators for the PSP now!

Re:Thank heaven for emulators!

[evolve75]

BeebEm is pretty good, cross-platform and comes with the source code as well. it also emulates multiple versions of the bee (Model B, B+ and master 128).

It Can be found at http://www.mikebuk.dsl.pipex.com/beebem/

The comp.sys.acorn.misc Usenet group is a good place to discuss Beebem

Some good game images can be found at http://www.bbcmicrogames.com/

Input

[Stooshie]

I remember Input magazine had a competition to write a program for the BBC in 1 line of code (255 characters). The winner wrote a rotating ball program.

255 CHARACTERS!!! That was the Beeb alright. Best machine for learning coding. Also allowed you to try out assembly.

Re:Input

[Tim Browse]

Behold Tetris:

0MODE9:OFF:GCOL-9:CLG:REPEATs=s+VPOS:PRINTCHR$30s:REPEATSYS6,135TOi,p,d:PRINTTAB (p=0)CHR$9;:IFPOS=22VDU3100;VPOS,21;6667;:UNTIL0ELSEUNTILVPOS=25:v=ABSRNDMOD7:VD U31:COLOUR3:REPEATm=9-INKEY(INKEYTRUEOR6)MOD3:FORr=TRUETO1:t=rANDSGNt:IFt=rCOLOU Rv-15:VDUrEORm:i+=m=7AND9-6*r:IF0ELSEFORn=0TO11:d=nDIV3OR2EORd:VDUd:IF1

Ah yes ... econet

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Econet ... a good example of why you shouldn't design a network with zero security for use by schoolchildren.

Amongst its many flaws: You could spoof any machine on the network just by POKE-ing a single address (the machine's address was a single byte, I guess they never expected more than 256 machines on a single shared segment). I think the command was ?3362 = <node>

You could send text messages to anyone on the network. But get this: the messages were injected into the remote system via the keyboard driver. That's right: You could TYPE REMOTELY ON ANYONE'S KEYBOARD over the network! What finally got me thrown out of the computing labs at school at age 14 was writing a program which typed on all the keyboards in the lab at the same time, controlling the whole lab from a single machine.

Another good one was the quota system used by the file server. It didn't store total/available, as any sensible system would. Instead each user had a single quota value (free space). The only problem was you could also write to anyone else's file, eg. appending data to a file owned by another user. When you did the append, your own quota would be diminished. But when the other user deleted the file, *their* quota would be increased. I wrote several trojan games which other people ran that surreptitiously appended to a file owned by me. Then by deleting this file, I could steal other people's quota and sell it back to them later.

Ah, misspent youth ...

Rich.

Re:Ah yes ... econet

[Alioth]

I guess no one told you about *PROT

*PROT would stop anyone else causing mischief to your econet station (including poking stuff into your keyboard, reading the screen, remote rebooting the computer etc.) Most of us had *PROT as the first line of our login scripts, as well as *FX 201,1 which made sure memory was cleared out when you pressed break.

The SJ Research fileservers had a better way of managing quota (other users couldn't steal your quota in the way you say). Still had a few drawbacks and you could still have some mischief with it, though.

Re:Ah yes ... econet

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I guess no one told you about *PROT

(Happy memories flood back ...) I knew about *PROT, it was the other people who didn't :-)

In those pre-internet days there was so little sharing of information that each school probably learned the hacking and the protection techniques separately, or the latter by carefully reading manuals.

Rich.

Re:Ah yes ... econet

[Anonymous Coward]

There was next to *no* security on networks around that time. At University (a few years after the Beeb's launch [yes, we called it the "Beeb"]) we discovered that you could write to other user's terminals on a Unix network by catting "Please log off now, your RS232 is faulty" to their /bkp/dev/tty, and we also found that you could read/write/delete other people's email in VMS by a similar method.

The latter was especially useful in continuing a (rather evil, now I look back) prank where by a bunch of us managed to convince one of our group that a girl (yes, there were girls/young women doing Computer Science in the the 80s) was interested in meeting him. He was getting suspicious, so we asked someone on another course to send him a mail from "her" account whilst we were all in a lecture together.

Alas, the idiot forwarded the whole email, including the instruction "Please send this when we are at the Abstract Algebra lecture".

One of us (whose name shall remain private, but will be known to a number of you) discovered that you could point your own VMS mail client to someone else's data, and was able to delete said mail seconds before our victim tried to read it.

Innocent days, innocent days...

Re:Ah yes ... econet

[Richard W.M. Jones]

The scary thing is if we were kids doing it nowadays, they'd probably call the police, take our DNA and put us in prison.

Rich.

Re:Ah yes ... econet

[dangitman]

Econet ... a good example of why you shouldn't design a network with zero security for use by schoolchildren.

HERESY! That's what made the BBC so awesome in schools. Think of all the fun and creativity that would have been lost if it were secure and locked down. The hackability is what made Econet great.

Although, perhaps this explains why so many humorless, anal-retentive people are in "IT security" or "corporate IT" - they just couldn't stand the other kids having fun and outsmarting them.

Re:Ah yes ... econet

[mgblst]

We had a great program called WOW, that got me banned from the computer room a couple of times.

I also almost got suspended for writing a program that would loop through every possible password trying to log into the teachers accounts. I tried to explain the headmaster that it would take appropximatly 60 years to loop through, but he wasn't interested.

Remember Exile!

[jregel]

While I agree that Elite was (is) a fantastic game, I'm amazed no-one else has mentioned Exile yet.

A huge world to explore, artificial intelligence, realistic physics; a truly great game.

Re:Remember Exile!

[alyosha1]

And absolutely impossible to finish, even with cheats, if I recall correctly. Granted, it wasn't obvious what the goal of the game even was. But yes, I remember spending many hours throwing Coronium boulders around...

Re:Remember Exile!

[RupW]

And absolutely impossible to finish, even with cheats, if I recall correctly. Granted, it wasn't obvious what the goal of the game even was. No, I think it was (though I never completed it properly).

The goal of the game was to get your ship navigation unit back, the one that Triax teleported in and stole at the very start of the game. I remember having a cheat that let you spawn arbitrary items so I made one of those, plugged it in and my ship flew away with a victory chime. I think that was it for an ending.

Aah the joyful sound of history being improved-

[vorlich]

I have never heard this computer described as "a beeb". It was always described as "one of those expensive BBC Acorns that only the children of the wealthy and schools have." This sounds like something invented by a Public Relations person from "The Beeb". I can quite easily imagine that all those 18 year-old ipod-wearing-skateboarding-dudes employed as executives by "Auntie BBC" or plain old "Auntie" would come up with something like this.

I do remember a colleague of ours at Glasgow University Dept of Computing Science, bought the last ever high end model (the Archimedes A400) of with all of his inheritance windfall because it would run Linux or possibly even Unix ( it was 1993 and Linus Torvalds had only just finished primary school probably with a post graduate doctorate on the abacus and the slackware distro was available as a download of 25 floppy disks...). He had arranged delivery to the faculty, probably because he had a student flat somewhere in Hillhead (!) and didn't want to risk it being stolen. Almost every member of the two research teams came out to stare in wonder and incredulity at the idea of spending over a grand on something that was so close to extinction you could almost hear it sighing.
"is that all there is?" asked my friend Charles, his voice rising a full octave, quite flabbergasted that all you got for your gbp1300 was a monitor, cpu, mouse and keyboard. (I might be wrong about the mouse)

Just imagine if it had been stolen - the police would have been looking for a thief with very little knowledege of computer hardware...
SCENE IN GLASGOW PUB NOT A MILLION MILES FROM GOVAN
Chick "How's it goan Shug? Whit's thet yu'v goat there, been on the rob huv yae?"
Shug "Sum idjit had yin of them computurrs sent tae his student flat in Hillhead, right next doar tae ma wee bruvver. So we baith nicked it. Naw bad, huh?"
Chick "Shug, yoo are a bawheidet clown. Huv you naw goan an stolen an effin Archimedes A400."
Shug "Haw, wait a minit, thet's a pure crackin computurr"
Chick "A crackin computurr wee man? Iz thet right. It disnae even run Windows 3.1 so its nae use tae onyone."......
Sounds of heavy object landing in skip behind a pub not a million miles from Govan.

Re:Aah the joyful sound of history being improved-

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm, the last high end one was the Risc PC, not the A400 (there was at least one more model between those too.)
but yeah, they were niche and very expensive. OS was better than anything MS put out for quite a while tho.

Re:Aah the joyful sound of history being improved-

[Haeleth]

I have never heard this computer described as "a beeb".

Presumably you never had one. I did, and I certainly called it a Beeb, as did everyone else I knew who had one.

It was always described as "one of those expensive BBC Acorns that only the children of the wealthy and schools have."

Bad luck. Choose better parents in your next life. :)

Re:Aah the joyful sound of history being improved-

[mrslacker]

I do remember a colleague of ours at Glasgow University Dept of Computing Science, bought the last ever high end model (the Archimedes A400) of with all of his inheritance windfall because it would run Linux or possibly even Unix

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISCiX

Later machines indeed ran ARM Linux with the Acorn A5000 serving as the basis for its development. ARM Linux is now found on an insane number of embedded devices. It's possible to run full blown Debian on the more powerful machines, although you probably don't want to (the 'powerful' is purely relative compared to x86).

Chick "Shug, yoo are a bawheidet clown. Huv you naw goan an stolen an effin Archimedes A400."

I seem to have misplaced my copy of "The Patter", although you're doing a good impression of Ian Banks' writing style.

Re:Aah the joyful sound of history being improved-

[MadMidnightBomber]

If it's high end, you mean the A440 - which had a shocking 4Mb of RAM if I recall. My dad purchased an A310, not wanting to get an A305 because we'd need more than half a meg of memory. I remember not believing him at the time :)

Re:Aah the joyful sound of history being improved-

[nevali]

Y'wit? You think they'd lug it all the way from Hillhead to Govan?

There's the underground, I suppose, but even then you'd have to cart the bastard thing up and down escalators and that.

Acorn Archimedes

[abigsmurf]

Oh god they had to bring up the Acorns. Horrible horrible machines that were forced on kids nationwide. May be interesting from a tech POV for having a RISC OS but these things were incredibly slow to use (the way you loaded programs into the memory was a pain). At least that's my memory of them as a kid.

Re:Acorn Archimedes

[Goth Biker Babe]

What are you comparing to? RISC PCs when they first came out blew away PCs of the day. Similarly the earlier machines beat the competition performance wise at the time they were released. Loading a program in to memory makes it run *faster* than continually having to access the disk. PCs did the latter because their apps were far larger for the same functionality and wouldn't fit in memory.

Re:Acorn Archimedes

[plingboot]

Sounds like you've kept a personal grudge on these computers since childhood, what happened? Never got to play snapper?

Re:Acorn Archimedes

[abigsmurf]

They were pretty powerful but they were incredibly slow to use. You had to put in the disk for the Word processor, load it into memory, change the disk for the printer software and load that into memory before you could work. The time it took to load some programs was pretty long. It'd usually be between 5-10 minutes before you were able to start doing stuff.

Re:Acorn Archimedes

[weierstrass]

the archimedes was a beautiful machine. The PC succeeded for a lot of reasons, but what it didn't have was elegance. There's no way you can break down what that means, but when you sat down in front of an Archimedes (or a Beeb) it just made sense in a way that the PC didn't.

Re:Acorn Archimedes

[Anonymous Coward]

You had to put in the disk for the Word processor

Bollocks.

*view anyone ? Methinks you talk crap

The subject? Off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

Their purpose? To discuss the legacy of the computer

I see this grammatical construct used quite often lately, and it starts to get annoying. What's wrong with simply saying "Their purpose is to discuss the legacy of the computer"?

Is this the new "And I was like, and then she was like"?

just

[weierstrass]

SHIFT+BREAK

The Beeb got me my degree...

[Goth Biker Babe]

In the 80s I was studying for my Physics degree. I wasted a lot of one year playing Elite but my Beeb redeemed itself when it came to my final year project. I computerised a first year lab practical experiment. I designed sensors, hardware to connect the sensors to my Beeb. I designed hardware to connect my Beeb to drive the equipment. I wrote the software in a mash of BASIC and assembler using interrupts and events. It even had a real time read out and scope (custom pixel plotting routines FTW). I got a first for the project after convincing the examiners during my viva that I hadn't faked the results and they were genuine. It saved my degree.

I used to code in my spare time too. I've had stuff published in Acorn User. Towards the end of the 80s I graduated in more ways than one. I got my degree and moved on to Acorn's ARM machines and learnt ARM assembler. Again getting stuff written and published. I used Acorn machines right the way through to the mid 90s. I wrote my thesis on one. Finally I moved on to PCs when Linux became a bit more mature but I didn't leave Acorns completely behind as I start playing with Linux on ARM and was asked to talk about Linux on Acorn machines. Now-a-days I'm a software consultant specialising in embedded devices and linux on embedded devices. I deal with MIPS and SH platforms but also an awful lot of ARM platforms. All thanks to my Beeb.

For once I RTFA

[SST-206]

"It became socially acceptable to have a computer in the home; it wasn't seen as a force of evil."

What,... you mean I can come out of this basement now?

"It was more than just a piece of hardware; there were social implications"

Syntax Error
>_

Natural learning

[jago25_98]

Fond memories of rd90,fwd100... directing a `turtle`(?) round teachers legs. Struggling to her feet it appears her legs have been tied to the chair.

And then, behold! The Doomsday Project! Out comes teacher with a shiny disc bigger than Rolf Harris's wobble board. This thing holds the greatest collection of knowledge known to man - and it's scratched. ...getting to a higher level of Stig of the Dumb because I was the only one who could spell Clime correctly.

Seriously, this was the highlight of my whole education. If only the rest of it could have been play like that back then. In fact, I still wish I could play with this surveying equipment at work even today.

No better way to learn.

32K memories

[Midnight Thunder]

I had a BBC Micro, model B, with 32KiB of memory. I started off with a tape drive and the fiddling of the volume on the tape player, before discovering the joys of the floppy disk. Certain applications were installed by adding a new ROM and hoping you didn't break any legs while doing it. My favourite games at that point were Elite, Frak and Repton.

Move forward to the next century and my 1GiB of memory is still not enough :)

640x256, eh?

[serviscope_minor]

That's only partly true. I'm going from memory here, but it booted in to Teletext mode (mode 7) which had 40x25 chars. Pixels weren't addressable, though there were characters which woked like 3x2 pixel blocks. The characters were quite a lot higher resolution than in the other modes, but weren't programmable. It was stored as one byte per cell, so formatting characters made a blank space. The teletext mode was the same as the one used on TV, and specially equipped BBCs could pick up broadcast teletext.

Then there were the graphics (ish) modes. Pixels were addressable in a 1280x1024 grid, though there were rather fewer than that. The pixels in memory were stored in a funny way: the first 8 bits was 8 consecutive horizontal pixels. The next 8 bits were under the first 8 pixels and so on until it made up an 8x8 pixel square. Then, it moved on to the next 8x8 square in the row. Wierd.

Anyway, mode 0 was 640x256 with two colours chosen out of a palette of 16 (8 solid colours, and 8 flashing ones). Mode 1 was 320x256 and had 4 paletted colours, and Mode 2 was 160x256 with 16 colours. This meant that the text was very fat in mode 2.

Then there were the "text" modes. They were like the graphics modes, but had gaps between the 8 pixel deep lines to save memory. Mode 3, 4, 5 mirrored modes 0, 1, 2 but had Nx200 pixels. Mode 6 mirrored mode 4 but had only two colours.

Quite a choice there. I shall just end it with:

10 PRINT CHR$(141),"Long live the BBC!"
20 PRINT CHR$(141),"Long live the BBC!"
RUN

Re:640x256, eh?

[Tim Browse]

The pixels in memory were stored in a funny way: the first 8 bits was 8 consecutive horizontal pixels. The next 8 bits were under the first 8 pixels and so on until it made up an 8x8 pixel square. Then, it moved on to the next 8x8 square in the row. Wierd.

Not when you know why.

"The 6845 is intended for character based displays."

Re:640x256, eh?

[Alioth]

Not weird in the slightest. If the rows of pixels were stacked atop each other in 8x8 cells, it made it much faster to render text in graphics mode, and only made a trivial impact on graphics speed. If it was a simple raster, you would have to compute, when building up each character, how many bytes wide each scan row was, then add that many to the memory address pointer. If you stack the rows of 8 on top of each other, you only have to increment the memory address pointer by 1 to write the next line of bits making up the character.

The Sinclair Spectrum at first blush had a far stranger frame buffer layout. Bytes were arranged along the scanline - but when you came to the end of the scanline, the next address would actually be 8 rows lower. However, if you examine the Spectrum scheme more closely with knowledge of how 16 bit pointers are formed on the Z80 CPU, it makes sense: you can move one row left or right by incrementing/decrementing the low half of the register pair making up the screen pointer, and move up/down by incrementing or decrementing the high half of the register pair.

Re:640x256, eh?

[chiller2]

Double height text lives in 2008! :)

Starting up in MODE 7 made sense as it only needed 1k of memory. Perfect for those text adventures, or Football Manager by Addictive. Ah those were the days.

So what?

[Viol8]

Econet was never intended as some sort of secure system that would connect to the world at large. It was designed to connect a few isolated computers in a room. So what if it had security flaws? Wow , you could hack into a machine 6 foot away, BFD. Its not like the BBC had a 3DES login system to get past, it was an 8 bit micro with for the most part cassette based and ROM storage. Not exactly ideal an l337 hacker enviroment to embed viruses and mess up data.

What heppens next!!??

[serviscope_minor]

My favorites are Thrust

OK, so I beat the Spacelord score only once (230,000 FTW!), and I got to the end of the reverse gravity, invisible landscape level. But, I hit the tunnel on the way out, and that was it. What happened next? What was the next level?

Classic Beeb Games

[SST-206]

What he said about games, plus Labyrinth, Repton, Citadel and Sentinel. I learned to drive on Revs. See my pages about classic games on the Beeb

(hmmm, am I asking /.'ers to RTFA?)

Kids with "Beebs"

[malf-uk]

Seemed like the kids at my school who had "Beebs" tended to come from families that would be considered to be "middle class", whereas the rest of us scruffy lot had ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s and a few with various ones like Acorn Electrons, Oric Atmoses and Dragon 32/64s.

I think it was Iain Lee who said, in the Channel 4 documentary "Thumb Candy", that parents gave their children BBC Micros if they wanted them to grow up to be accountants.

Re:Kids with "Beebs"

[Alioth]

It was definitely the rich kids who had the Beebs at home. But I got to use this superb machine back in the day at least at school, and we had econet!

At home, I had a Speccy.

I now have 6 Spectrums and 2 BBC Micros. They are both awesome in their own ways - the Spectrum did an awful lot with very little, and the BBC was very well engineered.

see thread above

[weierstrass]

where some posts the exact same comment, and a bunch of people reply to say that they did call them Beebs. HTH

The brotherhood o the simmit

[vorlich]

Shuggie's wee bruvver was posh. He had made his fortune grinding up Glasgow Council bucket lids (pre-wheelie bin era) and selling them to students in half quarter deals of Black. He lived in Hillhead (not far from the specialist bike shop in Gibson Street) and he of course owned a Mark III Cortina (the 1.6 ).The back seat was full of all the Shoppers he hadn't bother to deliver that week, so they dumped half of them outside The Ubiquitous Chip and crammed the Archimedes boxes in. But with no Road Tax, MOT, Insurance or driving license, I suspect he would have avoided the M8 (too many video cameras even in 1993) and gone past Glasgow Uni before sneaking through Partick, which was the Wild West then, and crossed the river at Victoria Park.

At least that's what my younger brother did...

The BBC Model 'B' was my favourite machne!

[Nivag064]

Back then, at work I programmed mainframes in COBOL & Assembly Language; while at home I had fun programming in Acorn Basic on a BBC model 'B'.

Later I had a Master, and then an Archimedes.

At one time I had at least one BBC model 'B', two Master's, and an Archimedes. To be fair, I used the Archimedes, and my 4 children used the other machines. The Archimedes ran Risc-OS (a lovely user & developer friendly O/S, in ROM) and it had an 8MHz 32 bit Risc chip that outperformed a 24 MHz 386 running MS/DOS.

I taught myself 'C' on the Archimedes, and also wrote a few simple ARM2 assembler programmes. ARM assembly was the most beautiful assembly language I have seen, it beat 6502, 486, and ICL4/72 mainframe machine code languages.

I now use Java on Linux (dual core AMD64 with 4 Gig of RAM) - but I still have the fondest memories of my first BBC model 'B' micro, it had 32K Bytes, and a 2MHz 6502 8 bit processor.

-Nivag

Econet - could you do better in 10 days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Econet was designed and implemented by five people in ten days. That was from nothing to having a demonstration on the Acorn stand at an exhibition. Could you have done better in that time and at a price that made sense for the target machine? The BBC Micro did not exist at the time, so there might have been time to improve the design or make it more robust for the BBC Micro implementation but given the cost constraints and limited resources available in the machine it is not clear how much could have been done.

The remote keyboard control and ability to grab screen images were explicit design choices based on the expected use of the network. If the desigers were foolish it was perhaps in assuming that work on the necessary precautions or elimination of the feature would be done after the exhibition deadline had passed.

Perhaps because it was Roger

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who know will understand when I say it was Roger who was involved with the BBC Micro and earlier machines. Sophie may prefer not to remember Roger but I do not think it is a good thing to try to rewrite history.

Re:Perhaps because it was Roger

[mustafap]

What an obnoxious little twerp you are.
"Those who know". It'd no big secret, unless you think that wikipedia is some kind of secret club.

Sophie can call herself what ever she wants. It doesn't change history.

You pathetic little twit.