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30 Years of the BBC Micro
Alioth writes "The BBC has an article on the BBC Microcomputer, designed and manufactured by Acorn Computers for the BBC's Computer Literacy project. It is now 30 years since the first BBC Micro came out — a machine with a 2 MHz 6502 — remarkably fast for its day; the Commodore machines at the time only ran at 1MHz. While most U.S. readers will never have heard of the BBC Micro, the BBC's Computer Literacy project has had a huge impact worldwide since the ARM (originally meaning 'Acorn Risc Machine') was designed for the follow-on version of the BBC Micro, the Archimedes, also sold under the BBC Microcomputer label by Acorn. The original ARM CPU was specified in just over 800 lines of BBC BASIC. The ARM CPU now outsells all other CPU architectures put together. The BBC Micro has arguably been the most influential 8 bit computer the world had thanks to its success creating the seed for the ARM, even if the 'Beeb' was not well known outside of the UK."
People used to get excited when a CPU clock was measured in MEGAHERTZ! Now we're jaded...
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Programming with 6502 assembly... all of us cool kids were doing that back in those days.
The most remarkable thing about the BBC is that they're still going running production code.
I had the good fortune of working with (or rather, near) one of these systems a few years ago. When I asked why they hadn't upgraded the machine in nearly 3 decades the head of the system simply responded; "It still works."
The first computer I ever used was a BBC Micro. It was around 1986 in a small private boarding school in the middle of the bush in Zambia. We were over an hour's drive from the nearest telephone. The school got one or two of these computers just before I left, and somehow they got me hooked on computers.
The only command I still remember was that you had to type "CHAIN" to run something. I've been curiours about that command ever since, but a quick Google search leads me to believe that it "chained" the LOAD and RUN commands together.
www.clarke.ca
Back in 1998 when I was in the 5th standard my school provided us some very old bbc micros to learn basic. It was small (no separate cpu cabinet ) and was efficient for all that it could do.
Still remember the day we 'replaced' (in software) the BBC BASIC with a Welsh language version on all the machines in the school lab... And the things we could do with Econet, which really wasn't the most secure networking scheme in the world.
I still have fond memories of spending my school days playing Granny's Garden on the BBC Micro; that game was bloody hard when you were 8.
2 MHz was not all that remarkably fast for its today - the competing ZX Spectrum ran at 3.5 MHz. Although to be fair the 6502 does more per cycle than the Z80.
Aged 7, my school had three BBC Model Bs and one BBC Master. The head teacher gave us one half-hour lesson each week on whatever he felt like teaching at the time. Sometimes it was classics, for a few weeks it was programming. He taught us BASIC and Logo on a BBC B connected to a big TV. In break times and after school, we could reserve one of the machines to use, if we were the first to request it. I spent a lot of time ages 7 to 11 writing little programs on them. At home I got an 8086 PC and learned PL/M86 and C.
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Changing the screen mode 3/4 of the way down each screen refresh. Programming while counting every clock cycle - fantastic. I still wonder where all the resources are wasted in current software. I still say FRAK! when the need arises. Nobody knows what I'm talking about :(
We used to have a room full of them at school and we soon discovered if you rubbed your feet on the carpet and then pushed your locker key in between the keys to the exposed circuit board... they stopped working.
The irony is I later in life wound up maintaining student labs for a university and had to put up with "dickheads" like I forgot I used to be...
My first computer was an Acorn Atom - the forerunner to the BBC Micro. I still have some books I purchased then on 6502 Assembly language. Reminds me how old I am.....
Er no, we use to hand write machine code. A9 loaded the accumulate immediately with the value... which is 169 in decimal, since some of us had to enter the machine code in decimal.
Funny isn't it?
I'm using a phone where I'm rendering a 3d world just to set the time zones, yet it was in my lifetime that these computers began.
Elite, developed for the BBC Micro and published by the same company that made the Micro, did get a lot of attention here in the U.S. (it was ported to all the major platforms). It was one of the first big universe sandbox games, and modern games like EvE Online are still influenced by it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Can anyone familiar with the BBC Micro give a comparison to the contemporary 6502 computers from the States?
Was the Beeb available before the Apple ][ ? Was it more or less expensive in the UK?
I get the feeling that the BBC Micro enjoyed a kind of tax protected status, the way American made pickup trucks do in the US.
So even though the CPU was underpowered by the mid 80s the programs written in Basic could still blitz a lot of other faster machines Basic programs. Also it had procedures which most (all?) other home computer basics lacked. Mind you, Amstrad Basic had high level interrupts which allowed a sort of early threading along the lines of
EVERY GOSUB
or something like that.
That was seriously cool.
My chemistry teacher had a BBC Micro sitting in the corner of the lab. I never saw it used, until near the end of the final term when I was 18 (2004). He ran a simulation of the electron cloud round a hydrogen atom, and admitted that he only used the machine once per year for this purpose.
My dad was a school IT teacher in the 1990s and early 2000s, so there were always lots of Acorn machines for me to play on. BBC Micros were old by then, but I remember an Archimedes A310 (A320?) which was borrowed from school -- it was too expensive to buy. Later, my parents bought an A3000, then an A4000. Unusually, my dad came to IT from the design/art side, rather than business/science. That meant the stuff he borrowed from school over the holidays (to learn) was much more interesting. We digitised some home videos using an A5000, must have been about 1992-3.
I tried to learn as much as I could, but there really wasn't anyone who could teach me, and not even anyone who knew where to start. It's a shame we didn't get Internet access until about 1996 (by then on a PC).
I remember we had three of these on trollies in my primary school - two had colour monitors, and one had a black and white monitor. Somehow I managed to network/schmooze/brown nose my way into becoming a "computer mover" when I was in the 5th year with two of my friends. We were tasked with moving the computers first thing on a Monday morning into a new classroom, who would then have it for a week. We'd plug it in, turn it on and load up the correct disk that the teacher wanted to use. I think that's where my love of computers came from right there. They were really good computers for their time. I gather that they were expensive, which is why they didn't find their way into many homes. However, a generation of British children did indeed grow up using them.
My mate had one of those Archimedes - red function keys if I remember?
I still had an Acorn Electron - but I had the Plus-3 disk drive and Plus-1 cartridge interface. Rendering the initial Mandelbrot set took me 8.5 hours. His machine then managed it in 15 seconds. Man was I gutted.
What Braben and Bell did to get this running on the BBC makes for pretty interesting reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)#Technical_innovations
Summation 2
No, it's not at all related to the Ohio Scientific. The only thing they have in common is they are both 6502-based.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Fact is the man in the street didn't have a computer in his home (not a single one, regardless what type), perhaps not even heard about it or understanding what it is.
And suddenly there were these affordable machines that you could buy, discover how they work, program, play games on, plan your finances with, etc, etc. That novelty aspect was way bigger attraction than just MHz's or graphical / sound capabilities (if any!).
Remember this was a time the first single-chip microprocessor (Intel 4004) was hardly a decade old, and the internet was just a military/academic network that no-one in the street had ever heard of.
Of course once the homecomputer market was created, it became a matter of "mine is bigger than yours" & picking one system over the other because it had nicer/more games.
Aside from Elite, one of the classic games for the BBC was Citadel. I'm still amazed how it managed to fit about 100 screens worth of platform adventure game into 12k of memory without touching the disk after it had loaded. IIRC it ran in mode 2 - which took 20k out of the available 32k memory. I think they only used part of the screen and used the rest for storage with some weird trick to make it invisible. The Electron version (see link) couldn't do the hiding trick somehow.
The BBC version also spoke to you when the menu program loaded up, and to this day I think of it as "Seeta-toddle", which gives you some idea of the audio quality.
For those who are curious, there is a wikipedia entry here: Citadel (video game).
In the late 1980s Apple Computer and VLSI Technology started working with Acorn on the second generation of the ARM core. So once again Apple is there. It's getting like the black obelisk on 2001. Pick anything and apple may not have invented it but they did shape what it became.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The BBC was expensive. It cost £400, back in the early '80s. It was an amazingly powerful machine in comparison to most home computers, but also much more expensive, so even the man on the street who did have a computer didn't usually have a BBC. The government gave schools extra funding to buy machines that had a certain feature list, and the BBC was about the only machine that qualified when this was launched, which accounted for a lot of the sales.
The BBC came with (for the time) high resolution vector graphics, a teletext display mode, easy to use analogue input and digital I/O, a BASIC dialect with full support for structured programming, a built-in assembler, and even things like a coprocessor port. In comparison with other 8-bit systems, it really was impressive.
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http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/30/bbc_micro_model_b_30th_anniversary/
In about 92, a couple of friends at school wrote a BASIC program to fake the login screens on the BBCs to grab the login details. I had a copy because I was curious how it all worked. Still got busted. A year later everything went Mac.
By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.
Wonderful and amazing stuff... but what would be even more wonderful & amazing: visually show how the effect of signal changes propagates through the chips' logic, as a function of time.
That is: not do 1 step, see colors update to reflect new state, repeat quickly to simulate running cpu. But rather: flip input signals, watch how some transistors respond first, then some internal bus(ses?) follow, then how registers are updated, and some outputs change as result of changed internal state. I'd expect that would create organic-like patterns flashing across the chip's surface, showing where 'early responders' are located, etc.
I grew up programming advanced Java routines on a difference engine. Your BBC Micro and your ZX81 have nout on me.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Ones the eye candy novelty factor has worn off which takes, ooh , 3 minutes , no one cares one way or the other. All it does is waste energy by forcing the GPU to do pointless calculations. You couldn't have picked a worse example to explain why computers are better today.
What a trip down memory lane... I still remember that I wanted an Archimedes back then, but couldn't afford it. For its time, it was an incredible machine... *sigh*
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The "It just works" meme, huh?
While sometimes that's the proof of a well designed system, it can also be the sign of a super cheap company that doesn't take technology seriously.
Take a look at Fry's electronics. They have more technology than you can shake a stick at inside the store. But all of their systems telnet into some mainframe or another and run an ancient text based interface. Which, if it works is okay. But it really doesn't. Forget a field in a form? Too bad, you'll have to figure out which one you missed and re-enter all of the information, while the customer and everyone else in line waits. That's efficiency!
The current ARM has little to do with the BBC micro. Apple purchased a stake in Acorn with the goal of getting them to FAB a low powered CPU to power the Newton. While the Newton was never a success as a device, the technology and patents that resulted from the project set ARM on it's current trajectory. In a round-about way the Newton did save Apple. At it's darkest hour the sale of Apple's holding in Arm netted $800m in hard cold cash when Apple needed it most. Without the Newton Apple wouldn't be what it is today and neither would Arm Holdings.
At least I think they were BBCs. I remember they had this special hard plastic yellow thing that went in the floppy drive (a 3.5" IIRC) to keep it from being damaged when the machine was moved or something.
I was 9 years old ( 1989) when my school (INDIA) introduced computers . I learned the LOGO and BASIC in couple of years. I spent numerous hours after school and on weekends so that I could have the computer to myself as opposed to being shared between three students during regular class hours. I asked my dad to buy one and I kinda remember him saying that costs something like a few months of his salary.
I loved Micro Men. The Beeb show absolutely no interest in releasing it on DVD, but it's on YouTube. I'm getting really fucking tired of waiting for banner ads to load on YouTube, but if you want to see it, start here.
Some of the original people have cameos, like Sophie Wilson as the exasperated barmaid toward the end.
...laura
My chemistry teacher had a BBC Micro sitting in the corner of the lab. I never saw it used, until near the end of the final term when I was 18 (2004). He ran a simulation of the electron cloud round a hydrogen atom, and admitted that he only used the machine once per year for this purpose.
What is it with chemistry teachers not being able to find elegant demonstrations of ideas outside of the BBC Micro? My own chemistry teacher did something similar, as did a chemistry teacher in a school I worked at for a year.
Unfortunately there were very few programs that could use that, as it was a different CPU than the C64. (It had two CPUs for backwards compatibility with the C64, I used mine mostly in C64 mode.)
Great memories with this computer. And it was so far ahead of all competitors : even the predecessor of the Acorn BBC B (the Electron) already had 2Mhz and 32KB RAM and was networkable using a thing called Econet.
The BBC B+ could be expanded up to 128KByte and had a second processor (we're talking 1986 !!!!), teletext-reader, lightpen that allowed you to draw by using a pen on your screen (think tablet !) and so on.
And then Archimedes with its 32-bit RISC CPU came in 1987 (!), doing 4 MIPS and offering a Windowed operating system that booted from EEPROM instantly (switch it on and it's there).
Any mobile device with an ARM chip (think Android, tablets, Blackberry, etc.) is based on the architecture that was spawned in the 80s by Acorn (ARM = Acorn Risc Machine).
I'm glad and privileged to have worked with those great devices !
I think BBC Basic was the third for me too.
I recall it was quite a bit different than the BASIC used by other computers at the time.
All sorts of weird peeks and pokes for doing things with the graphics that you had to "magic-number" in.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
well at £400 plus say £200 for a monitor - was dirt cheap when a color text terminal was £2000 - where i worked another guy and i lobbied to get a BBC micro as a cheap color terminal - they eventually did this and used to to font end a pdp11 based system that measured temps on a huge hydraulic model of hongkong harbor (the largest ever in the world which used 1/3 of our total lab space)
/Milton Keynes for BBC micros to take back in the diplomatic bag.
When some people from the PRC came to look at the model - they where excited and apparently spent the next day scouring the shops round Bedford
Anyone remember Sex Invaders for the BBC? I think it was in the public domain, not something you'd find in a shop.
It was like Space Invaders, but the aliens were actually women's legs opening and closing, and the player controlled a penis shooting up at them!
It was fast for a home computer at the time.
The 8088 was a 16-bit processor too (albeit talking to the outside world via an 8-bit data bus, much like the 386SX being 32-bit internally but with a 16-bit data bus and 24 bit address bus) where 6502 and similar CPUs used in the beebs (and some other like Commodore's home machines at the time) was 8-bit, so it could do a lot more with each of those clock cycles.
But that IBM PC would have set you back a heck of a lot more money. It wasn't a personal computer in the sense of being one anyone expected you to have at home, IBM were using "personal computer" here in the sense of having your own computer at your desk at work.
Fast used the z80, and very few programs used it, there were 2 cpu's in the 128, a 1mhz 6502 and a Z80 for cpm support (though why I dont know by the time the 128 came out cpm was a old skeleton covered in cobwebs, maybe to make the commie into something people would see as a more serious computer and less of a video game console with disk and keyboard, which was a very common perception in dem days)
And here I always thought ARM processors where built to fight the CORE.
FOR ONCE, could you fanboys just appreciate some technology without finding some way to draw attention to your religion?
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
The 6502 was very American.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972