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."

Re:jaded

[joshuac]

But there were far more megahertz than we'll get in gigahertz! You'll never get a 150GHz machine...

I'm with you totally...that's like well more than an order of magnitude faster than what we commonly have now, it would take huge advancements in technology to get there...heck, that would make the totally advanced and awesomely powerful computers we have these days feel like pocket calculators. Never'll happen ;)

First computer I ever trashed.

[Gumbercules!!]

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...

Re:jaded

[JockTroll]

Ha! Loserboy nerd, try to program on the MITS Altair 8800! No fancy keyboard or VDUs, real jocks enter their programs by throwing switches and read the output on blinking lights!