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BBC Micro Creators Reunite In London
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Mar 20, 2008 07:39 AM
from the getting-the-band-back-together dept.
from the getting-the-band-back-together dept.
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."
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Ahh, I remember it well... (Score:4, Funny)
10 PRINT "FIRST POST!"
20 GOTO 10
(stupid lameness filter objecting to my caps)
Re:Ahh, I remember it well... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Hey - I was eight, okay?
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*fx101,1 ( disable all keys other than break)
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Only after version 2, IIRC. Mind you, I've never seen a BBC micro with version 1 fitted.
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Anyway, a backward GOTO addressed to a destination line wh
Memories (Score:2)
Good but Dull (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Parent
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Well there might be some truth to that... but the Spectrum had RUBBER KEYS!!!! Compete with *that* BBC Micro.
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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 [1000bit.net]
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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,
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Ah, the days when GOTO made sense...
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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 ni
Re:Good but Dull (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
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Yep, I did. And so did Beebug magazine [freeserve.co.uk].
Cheers,
Ian
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Re:Good but Dull (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
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Er? Stryker's Run? Repton? (Score:2)
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 c
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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 arcad
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It was the closest we could get to swearing being teenagers in the pre-internet days
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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 cas
Re:Good but Dull (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Parent
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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.
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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
I loved the BBC Micro (Score:5, Interesting)
I got nostalgic a few months ago and made some longplay movies on YouTube
Codename: Droid [youtube.com]
Citadel [youtube.com]
Labyrinth [youtube.com]
I really should just remake some of these games...
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For the Record (Score:3, Informative)
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...
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10 print "Please input your name:"
20 input A$
30 print "A$ is a wanker!"
40 goto 30
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30 print A$ + " is a wanker!"
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No mention of Sophie Wilson! (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson [wikipedia.org]
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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!
If you go there to see this... (Score:2)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Ah yes ... econet (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
A machine still worthy of study in my opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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!
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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.
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And for extra geek points... (Score:2)
Hint: think tapes, the vertical blank interupt and the *load command.
Answer in rot13:
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I used the prototype (Score:2)
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
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