BBC Micro; 30 years old today

[Mark]

30 years old today Acorn and the BBC launched the BBC Micro - which over many years went on to be one of the most sucessful home computers of its time.

I was about 6 when I came home one day to find that my Dad had bought one - at considerable expense £600 with the machine and a floppy disk drive which on it's own cost £200, in 1984 this was a lot of money - it still is now!

The fact that today I'm a computer systems administrator all goes back to my Dad's decision go to out and buy a BBC B.

There followed lots of programming, playing games from Superior Software like Elite, Exile, Repton 3 and the likes. Christmas and birthdays for the next 5 years were sorted - just buy me a new game

I used that machine for a long time, over 5 years, in the meantime there were new machines on the market, Archimedes, Atari ST etc which I'd tried to get hold of but my Dad finally relented for Christmas 1989 when he agreed to buy me a PC, a 12Mhz 286 costing another whopping £1,200, but that's another chapter.

[Andrewmcm]

A similar story for me. I was 4 when I was introduced to a BBC Micro. 27 years later and I do computational modelling of fluid dynamics for a living. No doubt this is all due to the fact that I've spent most of my life around a computer and have a very natural affinity with them.

I used the BBC Micro until I was 11, when we finally got a 386SX 33MHz PC, with 4MB RAM and a whopping 120MB hard drive. Those were the days!

My favourite BBC games were Chuckie Egg, Felix Meets The Evil Weevils and too many others to mention.

[Mark]

Back in those days the computer was on a dedicated computer trolley (best MDF!) in the living room, you didn't get a monitor with it so it had to be hooked up to a TV, and we only had one TV, so I was allowed to use the computer for a little while after I got in from school, and after that the TV was in use for TV programmes, so no more computer! A couple of years later I got a small TV for my own room which meant I use the computer there; which was amazing!

[Andrewmcm]

We had a monitor for ours, which was basically a TV set that couldn't receive TV signals. When we got a PC my dad couldn't understand why we weren't able to use a 7 year-old BBC monitor on a VGA-capable PC.....

Did you ever attempt to write those BASIC programs that they put in BBC Micro magazines? None of them ever worked!

[Mark]

Did you ever attempt to write those BASIC programs that they put in BBC Micro magazines? None of them ever worked!

Yeah, of course! I was always typing them in! A lot of them worked too. I remember sitting on our front step in the summer where my Dad had a printout of the code that I'd typed in and he'd read it out, almost letter by letter and I'd compare it to what was written in the magazine!

Ok, the longer stuff never really worked but there were a few cool ones which were only a few dozen lines which worked quite well.

Obviously this was way before the days of the internet - the web was some 10 years off and the existing net was only available to large government organsiations. But not only that it was before the days of putting cover disks on magazines, as to do so would have put the price up by a couple of quid (yes, really), plus it's quite likely the disks would have failed due to being damaged on the way.

Later we took out a subscription to Micro User which included a disk of all the software for that month, which was a revelation!

[Andrewmcm]

Yeah I remember Micro User. There are probably still copies of it in our loft somewhere.

Interestingly on the subject of floppy disks, one of the greatest PC game producers called Origin had to sell the publishing rights of their games to EA, as Origin couldn't afford the 7-9 floppy disks that their games shipped on in the early 1990s. Shipping games on that many floppy disks in those days was a very considerable expense Selling out to EA began a slippery slope that led to the demise of the company behind Ultima, Wing Commander etc..

It's ironic (and not in the funny sense either) that EA's electronic distribution system for games is now called Origin - a system that sells games without any physical media.....

[Dave B]

10 MODE 7
20 PRINT CHR$129;"Happy Birthday ";CHR$131;"BBC Micro! ";
30 GOTO 20
 
RUN

[race aficionado]

. . .

I was about 6 when I came home one day to find that my Dad had bought one - at considerable expense £600 with the machine and a floppy disk drive which on it's own cost £200, in 1984 this was a lot of money - it still is now!

The fact that today I'm a computer systems administrator all goes back to my Dad's decision go to out and buy a BBC B.

. . . . . but my Dad finally relented for Christmas 1989 when he agreed to buy me a PC, a 12Mhz 286 costing another whopping £1,200, but that's another chapter.

Cool thread

and a great story Mark.

And a great homage to your dad.

[martinbalmer]

Yeah, of course! I was always typing them in! A lot of them worked too. I remember sitting on our front step in the summer where my Dad had a printout of the code that I'd typed in and he'd read it out, almost letter by letter and I'd compare it to what was written in the magazine!

It's amazing how many people have started some sort of coding career as a result of hours and hours of painstakingly typing out programs from magazines and books, then going on from there. I think some of the motivation that brought me to writing my own stuff from scratch was because I didn't really have the patience to retype someone else's [long] program... ...although they proved good reference material :

[Mark]

And for those of you outside the UK who may not have heard of the BBC Micro or Acorn. Remember that it was Acorn - party using the BBC Micro that developed the ARM processor. The CPU which powers almost all smartphones to this day. It's not an exaggeration to say that the lineage of my iPhone can be traced back to the BBC Micro.