4 ms·

18 year old BBC Micros used in retro programming class

20 points by bensummers 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago
I disagree with that most of these oldies are 'cast aside', they actually fetch good money (if you can find them, they're collectors items) and are still some of the easiest machines to learn with and to teach with. We should really revive that somehow and make a teaching course around a simulated 8 bit computer that you run as a VM on top of your regular OS. I'd contribute to an effort like that, both financially and with work.
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  >I disagree with that most of these oldies are 'cast aside', they actually fetch good money (if you can find them, they're collectors items) They're collectors items that fetch good money because most of them were cast aside. :)
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    That's possible but quite unlikely, especially in the case of the machine we're talking about here. The ones that I know about that were bought almost 3 decades ago are either still around or have died in terrible ways, but none were 'cast aside'. MSX and such, yes, I'd agree with you there.
- robgough 16y ago
  About 9 years ago my secondary school (in the UK) had finally got fed up of having these lying around, and told the students that if anyone wanted them they could take them home w/ them. They still had a few left, and so they went in the bin.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    that hurts.
    - robgough 16y ago
      I would imagine it's a tale that was repeated up and down the country.
camperman 16y ago
28 year old I think you'll find.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Yes, that was a funny mistake there. 18 years ago we were almost a decade in to 'ARM' (Acorn Risc Machine) territory already. Anybody here remember 'lander'? edit: maybe they meant the 18 years relative to the date the computer was officially discontinued? But it had already been out of the regular trade for many years at that point.
- bensummers 16y ago
  Oops. Unfortunately, Mathematics degrees don't teach arithmetic. Too late to fix it now. :-(
wallfly 16y ago
Does anyone know of an "online shell" and tutorial combo that would give a similar kind of learning experience for understanding how computers work at the lower levels, as mentioned at the end of the article: "The day of study had begun with what must be the ultimate hands-on technology experience: Mr Abrams got the students to be a computer. They each took on the role of a different part of the machine - CPU, accumulator, RAM and program counter - and simulated the passage of instructions through the hardware. The five shuffled data around, wrote it to memory, carried out computations and inserted them into the right places in the store." Through self-study of CS texts and good code that others have written I've been gaining a lot more depth to my OOP programming skills. I'd love though to get a more ground up, "live action" education on what's happening at the machine level, albeit it would probably need to be based on the simulation of a tiny computer by modern standards, maybe something like Knuth's MixMaster.
- indy 16y ago
  I recommend The Element of Computing Systems (http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/). It's has no "online shell" but the book is accompanied with hardware simulators
  - wallfly 16y ago
    Perfect! Thanks a bunch.
    - wallfly 16y ago
      Ordered on Amazon! Really, I feel very excited, just wanted to say thank you again. I had not stumbled across this resource when googling around for such an intro/guide, or maybe it just didn't catch my eye.
- Tichy 16y ago
  Not an online shell, but perhaps playing with Arduino would be a good way to experience basic computing.
forinti 16y ago
At university I had to code an emulator in assembly and I thought how much more fun it would have been to use some old 8-bit micros. I've got a BBC B+128KB and the coolest thing about them is that you can mix BASIC and assembly.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Ah, the '[' trick, I remember when I first found out about that and thought it the neatest trick ever, no need to have a separate assembler. That said, it was mostly useful to speed up basic programs, if you wanted to write a program completely in assembler there were better options (the 'ade' rom for instance). I still have a 'mostly functional' bbc emulator that I wrote for the ST laying around, there are much better ones available now so there is no point releasing the thing, but it was lots of fun to code that up, the 6502 part is about 1600 loc, the rest of the project another 1600 lines or so. I never did implement mode 7 (teletext) or sound, but most of the other stuff worked. Can you still read your old media?
  - forinti 16y ago
    All of my cassettes and most of my 5,25" floppies don't work. My drives are also starting to fail, so I recently got some new 3,5" drives installed and wrote about it here (portuguese only, I'm afraid): http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/upgrade-historico.html http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/upgrade-historico.htm... The only floppies that still work are those that came in those nice black folders from Acornsoft.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      With cassettes the problem is usually copy-through, with one layer influencing the next on the wound up spools so you get pre and post echos of the signal. You can possibly fix that using a bunch of processing. The disks is a harder problem, surprising though, that they've already degraded that much, I would have expected the 5 1/4" to be readable a bit longer than this.
      - 16y ago
iuguy 16y ago
I'm amazed they're using BBC Micros for game programming, an awful choice. They should be using ZX Spectrums or C64s.
- gaius 16y ago
  BBC Basic was easily the best on the 8-bit micros. You can go straight to procedures and functions without ever using GOSUB or GOTO. Plus the OS provided an interface to its internals (e.g. *FX, the OS... routines like OSWRCH, the in-line 2-pass assembler) and vector tables, no need to peek and poke.
- arethuza 16y ago
  Having used a BBC Micro and ZX Spectrums I much preferred the Beeb - everything from the nice keyboard through to the (relatively) pleasant Basic where it was pretty simple to drop down to lower level stuff.
- RichardRussell 16y ago
  If you want to see what you can achieve using BBC BASIC for games programming these days (on a PC) look here: http://www.bb4wgames.com/ http://www.bb4wgames.com/
EamonLeonard 16y ago
I remember a brand of washing detergent running a "Computers for Schools" marketing campaign, here in Ireland around about 1986. Myself and my classmates had to cut out tokens from the packaging and bring them into school. After a year, all the tokens were counted up, and we finally had enough to get one "free" BBC Micro. All we were missing was a teacher who knew what to do with it. /doh
Tichy 16y ago
I for one would be intrigued to program a punch card computer. They were before my time and sound like fun.
- balding_n_tired 16y ago
  If you are excellent typist, perhaps. Otherwise, they were a pain.
gaius 16y ago
Some interesting points there about education in the UK 1) using Visual Basic by default (which is obsolete in industry and was never even intended to be a pedagogical language anyway) 2) The reference to "ICT" which is a term that doesn't exist outside of schools.
- peterstjohn 16y ago
  Depends what A-Level subject they're taking and school; at my school, they're taught Pascal and C (possibly moving into Objective-C this term if I finish installing the Macs into my department before the end of next week!)
  - gaius 16y ago
    At secondary school we had BBC Basic running in an emulator on the RM Nimbus, which had the mysterious 80186 processor. You could run Turbo Pascal if you first ran the 8086 emulator. If I were designing the curriculum kids would be taught Forth or ML.
- RichardRussell 16y ago
  "using Visual Basic by default" I don't believe that is the case. I know some schools teach BBC BASIC (for Windows), which of course was specifically designed for the purpose: http://www.bb4w.com/ http://www.bb4w.com/

20 points by bensummers 16y ago

I disagree with that most of these oldies are 'cast aside', they actually fetch good money (if you can find them, they're collectors items) and are still some of the easiest machines to learn with and to teach with. We should really revive that somehow and make a teaching course around a simulated 8 bit computer that you run as a VM on top of your regular OS. I'd contribute to an effort like that, both financially and with work.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago
>I disagree with that most of these oldies are 'cast aside', they actually fetch good money (if you can find them, they're collectors items) They're collectors items that fetch good money because most of them were cast aside. :)
- jacquesm 16y ago
  That's possible but quite unlikely, especially in the case of the machine we're talking about here. The ones that I know about that were bought almost 3 decades ago are either still around or have died in terrible ways, but none were 'cast aside'. MSX and such, yes, I'd agree with you there.
robgough 16y ago
About 9 years ago my secondary school (in the UK) had finally got fed up of having these lying around, and told the students that if anyone wanted them they could take them home w/ them. They still had a few left, and so they went in the bin.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  that hurts.
  - robgough 16y ago
    I would imagine it's a tale that was repeated up and down the country.

camperman 16y ago

28 year old I think you'll find.

jacquesm 16y ago
Yes, that was a funny mistake there. 18 years ago we were almost a decade in to 'ARM' (Acorn Risc Machine) territory already. Anybody here remember 'lander'? edit: maybe they meant the 18 years relative to the date the computer was officially discontinued? But it had already been out of the regular trade for many years at that point.
bensummers 16y ago
Oops. Unfortunately, Mathematics degrees don't teach arithmetic. Too late to fix it now. :-(

wallfly 16y ago

Does anyone know of an "online shell" and tutorial combo that would give a similar kind of learning experience for understanding how computers work at the lower levels, as mentioned at the end of the article: "The day of study had begun with what must be the ultimate hands-on technology experience: Mr Abrams got the students to be a computer. They each took on the role of a different part of the machine - CPU, accumulator, RAM and program counter - and simulated the passage of instructions through the hardware. The five shuffled data around, wrote it to memory, carried out computations and inserted them into the right places in the store." Through self-study of CS texts and good code that others have written I've been gaining a lot more depth to my OOP programming skills. I'd love though to get a more ground up, "live action" education on what's happening at the machine level, albeit it would probably need to be based on the simulation of a tiny computer by modern standards, maybe something like Knuth's MixMaster.

indy 16y ago
I recommend The Element of Computing Systems (http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/). It's has no "online shell" but the book is accompanied with hardware simulators
- wallfly 16y ago
  Perfect! Thanks a bunch.
  - wallfly 16y ago
    Ordered on Amazon! Really, I feel very excited, just wanted to say thank you again. I had not stumbled across this resource when googling around for such an intro/guide, or maybe it just didn't catch my eye.
Tichy 16y ago
Not an online shell, but perhaps playing with Arduino would be a good way to experience basic computing.

forinti 16y ago

At university I had to code an emulator in assembly and I thought how much more fun it would have been to use some old 8-bit micros. I've got a BBC B+128KB and the coolest thing about them is that you can mix BASIC and assembly.

jacquesm 16y ago
Ah, the '[' trick, I remember when I first found out about that and thought it the neatest trick ever, no need to have a separate assembler. That said, it was mostly useful to speed up basic programs, if you wanted to write a program completely in assembler there were better options (the 'ade' rom for instance). I still have a 'mostly functional' bbc emulator that I wrote for the ST laying around, there are much better ones available now so there is no point releasing the thing, but it was lots of fun to code that up, the 6502 part is about 1600 loc, the rest of the project another 1600 lines or so. I never did implement mode 7 (teletext) or sound, but most of the other stuff worked. Can you still read your old media?
- forinti 16y ago
  All of my cassettes and most of my 5,25" floppies don't work. My drives are also starting to fail, so I recently got some new 3,5" drives installed and wrote about it here (portuguese only, I'm afraid): http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/upgrade-historico.html http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/upgrade-historico.htm... The only floppies that still work are those that came in those nice black folders from Acornsoft.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    With cassettes the problem is usually copy-through, with one layer influencing the next on the wound up spools so you get pre and post echos of the signal. You can possibly fix that using a bunch of processing. The disks is a harder problem, surprising though, that they've already degraded that much, I would have expected the 5 1/4" to be readable a bit longer than this.
    - 16y ago

iuguy 16y ago

I'm amazed they're using BBC Micros for game programming, an awful choice. They should be using ZX Spectrums or C64s.

gaius 16y ago
BBC Basic was easily the best on the 8-bit micros. You can go straight to procedures and functions without ever using GOSUB or GOTO. Plus the OS provided an interface to its internals (e.g. *FX, the OS... routines like OSWRCH, the in-line 2-pass assembler) and vector tables, no need to peek and poke.
arethuza 16y ago
Having used a BBC Micro and ZX Spectrums I much preferred the Beeb - everything from the nice keyboard through to the (relatively) pleasant Basic where it was pretty simple to drop down to lower level stuff.
RichardRussell 16y ago
If you want to see what you can achieve using BBC BASIC for games programming these days (on a PC) look here: http://www.bb4wgames.com/ http://www.bb4wgames.com/

EamonLeonard 16y ago

I remember a brand of washing detergent running a "Computers for Schools" marketing campaign, here in Ireland around about 1986. Myself and my classmates had to cut out tokens from the packaging and bring them into school. After a year, all the tokens were counted up, and we finally had enough to get one "free" BBC Micro. All we were missing was a teacher who knew what to do with it. /doh

Tichy 16y ago

I for one would be intrigued to program a punch card computer. They were before my time and sound like fun.

balding_n_tired 16y ago
If you are excellent typist, perhaps. Otherwise, they were a pain.

gaius 16y ago

Some interesting points there about education in the UK 1) using Visual Basic by default (which is obsolete in industry and was never even intended to be a pedagogical language anyway) 2) The reference to "ICT" which is a term that doesn't exist outside of schools.

peterstjohn 16y ago
Depends what A-Level subject they're taking and school; at my school, they're taught Pascal and C (possibly moving into Objective-C this term if I finish installing the Macs into my department before the end of next week!)
- gaius 16y ago
  At secondary school we had BBC Basic running in an emulator on the RM Nimbus, which had the mysterious 80186 processor. You could run Turbo Pascal if you first ran the 8086 emulator. If I were designing the curriculum kids would be taught Forth or ML.
RichardRussell 16y ago
"using Visual Basic by default" I don't believe that is the case. I know some schools teach BBC BASIC (for Windows), which of course was specifically designed for the purpose: http://www.bb4w.com/ http://www.bb4w.com/