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

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.

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

[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.

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...

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

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.