5 ms·

There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro and accompanying TV programmes. It would come as a huge surprise to today's kids b

by spzb 8y ago

There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro and accompanying TV programmes. It would come as a huge surprise to today's kids but my school had just one computer (a BBC Micro, of course) which was wheeled on a trolley from one classroom to the next. We'd all take turns, usually in groups of three or four, to run whatever educational game was related to the work we were doing (usually maths quizzes)

rahimnathwani 8y ago
We're about the same age. My primary school also had a BBC Micro on a trolley. We didn't get to use it much, I guess because our teacher wasn't interested in it. When I was ~10, my parents spent £129.99 (a lot of money for them at the time) to buy me an Acorn Electron (a cut down version of the BBC Micro). One thing that was frustrating for me at the time is that I had no one to answer questions. For example, I was writing some 6502 assembly to do something simple (I don't remember what) and the book (either the user guide that came in the box, or the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide) said I had to provide some value using two's complement. I had no idea what it was or how to find an answer. So I wrote a letter (yes, with a stamp, in the mail) to a Teletext page where these things were discussed, and a few days/weeks later they actually answered my question on one of the pages.
- telesilla 8y ago
  The Acorn was my first programming computer at school - I didn't know it was from BBC Micro lineage! We were pretty lucky to have about 20 of them. I did NOT make enough use of this resource as a teenager, to my adult self's chagrin. This was largely because as a teenage girl, the last thing that was gonna happen was spending my lunch hours in the computer room where boys were playing adventure games. Lame. (Future me kicks teenage me).
  - Lio 8y ago
    Acorn was the manufacturer rather than the model. So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      This one started it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1 And this was the breakthrough Acorn Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom The lessons learned there all went into the BBC Micro.
      - Wildgoose 8y ago
        I still my have my Acorn Atom - a FANTASTIC computer. The manual was exceptionally good as well, with the catchy title "Atomic Theory and Practise". I taught myself to program using that.
    - nmstoker 8y ago
      I suspect that telesilla knew that and merely missed out the word Electron by mistake (given the post it was a response to mentioning the Electron connection).
      - Lio 8y ago
        Yep that could easily be possible, I would hope my reply hasn’t come across negatively. Certainly not my intention. I do remember from the time that referring the Electron simply as The Acorn (due the prominent Acorn logo on the top) was very common so my reading it as such in the parent post didn’t seem unusual. I always assumed it was because the BBC Micro had such strong branding that people didn’t realise it was an Acorn product. The logo was there on the back but very small.
- bjelkeman-again 8y ago
  Writing a paper letter to Teletext and get an answer, love it. The internet and the web has som serious warts, but it is also amazing.
  - timthorn 8y ago
    And if you were really into Teletext (and had enough cash) you could get an adaptor to download software OTA: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/ttx/ttxouse.html http://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/ttx/ttxouse.html
    - rahimnathwani 8y ago
      This reminds me that I saw a TV programme once where they played the tape of a program for the BBC Micro over the air, and suggested that a viewer hold up their tape recorder to the TV speaker, to record it, for later loading onto the computer. I never tried it. I'm not sure whether acoustic coupling would have worked well enough to load successfully.
      - Someone 8y ago
        It could be made to work, even without error correction. See for example https://www.hobbyscoop.nl/the-history-of-basicode/ https://www.hobbyscoop.nl/the-history-of-basicode/, which describes the Dutch way to broadcast (portable!) Basic programs over radio. I think they broadcast every program multiple times, though.
- rikkus 8y ago
  Same issue for me on the questions. I could see from the Spectrum 48k manual that there was more that could be done than writing plain BASIC but didn’t know how to find out more. I didn’t have any idea what all those POKES I saw in others’ code (typed in from magazines) were doing. Same issue when I got a BBC B. No reference beyond the simple user guide, and I couldn’t find anything out about other books that might be available by asking at the library, because they didn’t understand what I was asking about. Getting onto the Internet in 1994 made a huge difference!
timthorn 8y ago
Was it the L-Shaped Room, perhaps? <Dusts off memory>
dspillett 8y ago
> There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro Only just in 40s here so I was a bit late for the TV programs, but the Acorn computers (Micros and Master Series on trollies in school, and an Electron then later a Master at home) are essentially why I've ended up as a senior-developer-come-DBA. A large part of that is BBC Basic. Compared to anything else available at home at the time it was magical. Instantly accessible (10 PRINT "Expletive" 20 GOTO 10), had proper sub-procedures & functions and long identifier names (so you could create usefully structured code), build-in multi-pass assembler for when you started to need/want lower level access, many of BASIC's parts could be accessed in a documented manner from assembled code too and not just those where it was providing a thin wrapper around other ROM functions, ... That and many type-in examples in magazines of the time to try, learn from and modify: from "frivolous" one-liners (usually producing something pretty on screen), through little "ten liner" games and other demos, to much larger projects. Heck, they fuelled some of my interest in mathematics too as those examples sometimes explored concepts such as fractals, strange attractors, 3D transforms, and so on, while making the pretty display (the explanations were fairly superficial, but usually had the right keywords for me to go lookup more detail in the library when my interest was awoken).
parenthesis 8y ago
Yes! The BBC Micro came out just before I started primary school. Initially our school (200-300 pupils) had one, on a trolley, with a concept keyboard too ( http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/8bitadd/Concept.html http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/8bitadd/Concept.html ). By the time I left primary school, we had three or four! In primary one, I remember some very simple `cat and mouse' game. Later on, a text adventure game, possibly something to do with a frog. And then Granny's Garden, and The Flowers of Crystal. At some point, I got permission to basically mess around on one during some lunchtimes. There is so much more I could say!
- CmdrKrool 8y ago
  Love that people are repeating the detail about the trolley. I too remember that almost as vividly as the computer itself :) Never saw a Concept Keyboard though, it looks both forward thinking and antiquated (reminiscent of the ZX81). But as it happens I read about an Amiga version of this keyboard just the other day. It was expensive: https://archive.org/details/amigaformatmagazine-026/page/n135 https://archive.org/details/amigaformatmagazine-026/page/n13...
- TomAnthony 8y ago
  Yes, Granny's Garden! I remember there was a Part 2 for Granny's Garden, but it wasn't there when you did the default load key combo. You had to *CAT then CHAIN the second file. I recall being 7/8 years old and a student fetching me to go to the other classroom to load it for another class!
darrenf 8y ago
My high school (years 1987-90) was crazily well equipped – we actually had two rooms full of BBC Micros and gasp an Archimedes. What's more, they were networked so we could chat to each other ... in between political simulation games. Thought it was called "Prime", but perhaps it was Great Britain Ltd: http://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?search=Simulation+%28Politics%29&on_G=on http://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?search=Simulation+%28Politic... I don't recall actually having classes there so perhaps I only used them at lunch hours. We did also have a BBC Micro-on-a-trolley in my form room though, and I do remember vaguely impressing my classmates by "hacking" some BASIC Lunar Lander game to start with -1 lives, ensuring the "decrement, check against zero" game over condition would never trip. Though in reality that just gave some of the kids licence to never relinquish control, since their game never finished.
mywacaday 8y ago
We had one in a small Irish school, all I remember are logotron,some word editing and Mr. Ee. We used to leave one of the windows off the latch and go back into the school after hours to play Mr Ee, good times :-)
rollthehard6 8y ago
Slightly older but there were BBCs at my school and a pal had one, but I was never allowed to use them at school as this was a privilege reserved for those that were better at maths than I :) Probably also the reason I ended up studying Chemistry at Uni and getting a hodge podge of credits Science BSc at the end of it. Exposure there to a VAX/VMS cluster ultimately took me on my journey from analyst/programmer to sysadmin/DBA/SAN/backup and now cloud IaC Devops engineer.
ben7799 8y ago
It wasn't a BBC Micro but this is actually pretty similar to what we had in the US in the 1980s... I'm 41, mid 1980s we had one Apple IIe that got wheeled around on a trolley. There were a handful of us who had parents who worked in the computer/tech/software industry, it was hilarious cause some of us were already ahead of the teachers by 10 or 11. I had taken my first BASIC class in 4th grade at a local college. The teachers were reading from a script teaching us about how to switch between insert and delete mode on the keyboard and giving us assignments that amounted to writing out a sentence and then editing it in a word processor and there were a handful of us kids ready to do BASIC, etc..
stevekemp 8y ago
I wonder how many peoples's eyes would light up if I said "Granny's Garden?" Me? I know we had a BBC at our school, but I did my coding on the computer I had, a rubber-keyed 48k ZX Spectrum. That's what my friends had too. Nobody I knew owned a BBC, so it was wheeled out now and again and somehow a class was supposed to share it in 45-minute windows. Didn't really work. I have fond memories of GG, and some kind of game where you were Prime Minister and you had to raise taxes, and handle unemployment. I guess a text-based sim-city, of a kind!

by spzb 8y ago

rahimnathwani 8y ago

We're about the same age. My primary school also had a BBC Micro on a trolley. We didn't get to use it much, I guess because our teacher wasn't interested in it. When I was ~10, my parents spent £129.99 (a lot of money for them at the time) to buy me an Acorn Electron (a cut down version of the BBC Micro). One thing that was frustrating for me at the time is that I had no one to answer questions. For example, I was writing some 6502 assembly to do something simple (I don't remember what) and the book (either the user guide that came in the box, or the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide) said I had to provide some value using two's complement. I had no idea what it was or how to find an answer. So I wrote a letter (yes, with a stamp, in the mail) to a Teletext page where these things were discussed, and a few days/weeks later they actually answered my question on one of the pages.

telesilla 8y ago
The Acorn was my first programming computer at school - I didn't know it was from BBC Micro lineage! We were pretty lucky to have about 20 of them. I did NOT make enough use of this resource as a teenager, to my adult self's chagrin. This was largely because as a teenage girl, the last thing that was gonna happen was spending my lunch hours in the computer room where boys were playing adventure games. Lame. (Future me kicks teenage me).
- Lio 8y ago
  Acorn was the manufacturer rather than the model. So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    This one started it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1 And this was the breakthrough Acorn Atom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom The lessons learned there all went into the BBC Micro.
    - Wildgoose 8y ago
      I still my have my Acorn Atom - a FANTASTIC computer. The manual was exceptionally good as well, with the catchy title "Atomic Theory and Practise". I taught myself to program using that.
  - nmstoker 8y ago
    I suspect that telesilla knew that and merely missed out the word Electron by mistake (given the post it was a response to mentioning the Electron connection).
    - Lio 8y ago
      Yep that could easily be possible, I would hope my reply hasn’t come across negatively. Certainly not my intention. I do remember from the time that referring the Electron simply as The Acorn (due the prominent Acorn logo on the top) was very common so my reading it as such in the parent post didn’t seem unusual. I always assumed it was because the BBC Micro had such strong branding that people didn’t realise it was an Acorn product. The logo was there on the back but very small.
bjelkeman-again 8y ago
Writing a paper letter to Teletext and get an answer, love it. The internet and the web has som serious warts, but it is also amazing.
- timthorn 8y ago
  And if you were really into Teletext (and had enough cash) you could get an adaptor to download software OTA: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/ttx/ttxouse.html http://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/ttx/ttxouse.html
  - rahimnathwani 8y ago
    This reminds me that I saw a TV programme once where they played the tape of a program for the BBC Micro over the air, and suggested that a viewer hold up their tape recorder to the TV speaker, to record it, for later loading onto the computer. I never tried it. I'm not sure whether acoustic coupling would have worked well enough to load successfully.
    - Someone 8y ago
      It could be made to work, even without error correction. See for example https://www.hobbyscoop.nl/the-history-of-basicode/ https://www.hobbyscoop.nl/the-history-of-basicode/, which describes the Dutch way to broadcast (portable!) Basic programs over radio. I think they broadcast every program multiple times, though.
rikkus 8y ago
Same issue for me on the questions. I could see from the Spectrum 48k manual that there was more that could be done than writing plain BASIC but didn’t know how to find out more. I didn’t have any idea what all those POKES I saw in others’ code (typed in from magazines) were doing. Same issue when I got a BBC B. No reference beyond the simple user guide, and I couldn’t find anything out about other books that might be available by asking at the library, because they didn’t understand what I was asking about. Getting onto the Internet in 1994 made a huge difference!

timthorn 8y ago

Was it the L-Shaped Room, perhaps? <Dusts off memory>

dspillett 8y ago

> There's a lot of us mid-forties IT staff who owe our careers to the BBC Micro Only just in 40s here so I was a bit late for the TV programs, but the Acorn computers (Micros and Master Series on trollies in school, and an Electron then later a Master at home) are essentially why I've ended up as a senior-developer-come-DBA. A large part of that is BBC Basic. Compared to anything else available at home at the time it was magical. Instantly accessible (10 PRINT "Expletive" 20 GOTO 10), had proper sub-procedures & functions and long identifier names (so you could create usefully structured code), build-in multi-pass assembler for when you started to need/want lower level access, many of BASIC's parts could be accessed in a documented manner from assembled code too and not just those where it was providing a thin wrapper around other ROM functions, ... That and many type-in examples in magazines of the time to try, learn from and modify: from "frivolous" one-liners (usually producing something pretty on screen), through little "ten liner" games and other demos, to much larger projects. Heck, they fuelled some of my interest in mathematics too as those examples sometimes explored concepts such as fractals, strange attractors, 3D transforms, and so on, while making the pretty display (the explanations were fairly superficial, but usually had the right keywords for me to go lookup more detail in the library when my interest was awoken).

parenthesis 8y ago

Yes! The BBC Micro came out just before I started primary school. Initially our school (200-300 pupils) had one, on a trolley, with a concept keyboard too ( http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/8bitadd/Concept.html http://www.beebmaster.co.uk/8bitadd/Concept.html ). By the time I left primary school, we had three or four! In primary one, I remember some very simple `cat and mouse' game. Later on, a text adventure game, possibly something to do with a frog. And then Granny's Garden, and The Flowers of Crystal. At some point, I got permission to basically mess around on one during some lunchtimes. There is so much more I could say!

CmdrKrool 8y ago
Love that people are repeating the detail about the trolley. I too remember that almost as vividly as the computer itself :) Never saw a Concept Keyboard though, it looks both forward thinking and antiquated (reminiscent of the ZX81). But as it happens I read about an Amiga version of this keyboard just the other day. It was expensive: https://archive.org/details/amigaformatmagazine-026/page/n135 https://archive.org/details/amigaformatmagazine-026/page/n13...
TomAnthony 8y ago
Yes, Granny's Garden! I remember there was a Part 2 for Granny's Garden, but it wasn't there when you did the default load key combo. You had to *CAT then CHAIN the second file. I recall being 7/8 years old and a student fetching me to go to the other classroom to load it for another class!

darrenf 8y ago

My high school (years 1987-90) was crazily well equipped – we actually had two rooms full of BBC Micros and gasp an Archimedes. What's more, they were networked so we could chat to each other ... in between political simulation games. Thought it was called "Prime", but perhaps it was Great Britain Ltd: http://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?search=Simulation+%28Politics%29&on_G=on http://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?search=Simulation+%28Politic... I don't recall actually having classes there so perhaps I only used them at lunch hours. We did also have a BBC Micro-on-a-trolley in my form room though, and I do remember vaguely impressing my classmates by "hacking" some BASIC Lunar Lander game to start with -1 lives, ensuring the "decrement, check against zero" game over condition would never trip. Though in reality that just gave some of the kids licence to never relinquish control, since their game never finished.

mywacaday 8y ago

We had one in a small Irish school, all I remember are logotron,some word editing and Mr. Ee. We used to leave one of the windows off the latch and go back into the school after hours to play Mr Ee, good times :-)

rollthehard6 8y ago

Slightly older but there were BBCs at my school and a pal had one, but I was never allowed to use them at school as this was a privilege reserved for those that were better at maths than I :) Probably also the reason I ended up studying Chemistry at Uni and getting a hodge podge of credits Science BSc at the end of it. Exposure there to a VAX/VMS cluster ultimately took me on my journey from analyst/programmer to sysadmin/DBA/SAN/backup and now cloud IaC Devops engineer.

ben7799 8y ago

It wasn't a BBC Micro but this is actually pretty similar to what we had in the US in the 1980s... I'm 41, mid 1980s we had one Apple IIe that got wheeled around on a trolley. There were a handful of us who had parents who worked in the computer/tech/software industry, it was hilarious cause some of us were already ahead of the teachers by 10 or 11. I had taken my first BASIC class in 4th grade at a local college. The teachers were reading from a script teaching us about how to switch between insert and delete mode on the keyboard and giving us assignments that amounted to writing out a sentence and then editing it in a word processor and there were a handful of us kids ready to do BASIC, etc..

stevekemp 8y ago

I wonder how many peoples's eyes would light up if I said "Granny's Garden?" Me? I know we had a BBC at our school, but I did my coding on the computer I had, a rubber-keyed 48k ZX Spectrum. That's what my friends had too. Nobody I knew owned a BBC, so it was wheeled out now and again and somehow a class was supposed to share it in 45-minute windows. Didn't really work. I have fond memories of GG, and some kind of game where you were Prime Minister and you had to raise taxes, and handle unemployment. I guess a text-based sim-city, of a kind!