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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."
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.
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"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...
throw new NoSignatureException();
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.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
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
-- Mike