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."

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 [youtube.com]
Citadel [youtube.com]
Labyrinth [youtube.com]

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 [wikipedia.org]

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.

Re:Good but Dull

[jimicus]

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.

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.

Re:Good but Dull

[DrXym]

With the exception of Elite, most BBC games were pretty crap too. It probably had something to do with the trade offs between resolution and colours. Most arcade games had to drop into mode 2 but the poor horizontal resolution made them look squashed like the sprites had been sat on. The Spectrum wasn't exactly great for graphics but it was good enough, and more importantly it was much cheaper than the BBC and had more games. Acorn's own efforts to produce a home computer weren't exactly great either. The Acorn Electron was to the BBC Model B what the Commodore 16 was to the C64 - a total disaster. Aside from its graphics the BBC micro was impressive in hindsight. I recall our school actually had a file server and a network for its BBC micros. This is something hard to even imagine for an 8-bit micro.

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.

A machine still worthy of study in my opinion

[hoggy]

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.

Re:Good but Dull

[Alioth]

That was just an issue with your teachers!

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).

Re:I learnt to program on this

[Tony Hoyle]

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).

Ah yes ... econet

[Richard W.M. Jones]

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.