3 ms·

Never had the pleasure of having (or even seeing) a BBC Micro, but I grew up with the contemporary ZX Spectrum (and the predecessor ZX81) and I have the fondest

Never had the pleasure of having (or even seeing) a BBC Micro, but I grew up with the contemporary ZX Spectrum (and the predecessor ZX81) and I have the fondest memories of that time [0]. There was something magical about its simplicity and immediacy. From OFF to a BASIC interpreter in about one second. No boilerplate, you could be drawing stuff on the screen in one line. I've wondered many times if there's anything equivalent for the current generations. Teaching CG in university showed me just how many abstractions there are between a person and the computer these days. Some of my students didn't have a clear understanding of the difference between RAM and disk; I suppose SSDs make this difference even more tenuous. For me growing up it was pretty obvious what was in the computer and what was in the tape. [0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/dedication.html https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/d...

madaxe_again 6y ago
I was a Micro kid - I guess it would have been ‘89 when I started at a new school, and they had an old bomb shelter with half a dozen micros and amigas in it. The amigas were off limits, for seniors only, but the micros were free to use in breaks, evenings after prep, sundays. None had any storage - nor was there any software - but there were heaps and heaps of BBC Micro magazines. We all taught ourselves to code, following tutorial series in magazines, swapping tips with each other, and copying games line by line from listings in magazines, modifying them or fixing (and creating) bugs as we went. Then of course the power would go off, and we’d lose everything - stuff we cared about keeping got written out with pencil on graph paper. By the time I was ten, I found basic trivial, assembler natural, the idea of everything just being a set of simple operations and reading and writing memory addresses intuitive. The same applies for all of us - our little clique of half a dozen kids who accidentally learned computer science in a bomb shelter because they wanted to play games. We made a half decent little dungeon crawler, which got us into no end of trouble when one of the masters discovered us poring over the notebook we were writing it in, as they thought we were plotting to blow up the school. Which we were - just in the game, which was about escaping school. I feel like because the computers were less accessible as utility devices, they were more accessible as computers. You had to grok the thing to do anything with it - necessity, invention, mothers and all that.
- simonh 6y ago
  To be fair to the the master in question, violent rebellions in British schools do have a history, although it's been a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1797_Rugby_School_rebellion#Rugby_School_and_discipline_in_18th_century_public_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1797_Rugby_School_rebellion#Ru...
swiley 6y ago
There's not much boilerplate for drawing in JS which every computer has installed.
- the_af 6y ago
  I get what you're saying, but microcomputers of that era felt more like appliances. It was like switching on a radio. You plugged it in, switched it on, and there it was the prompt greeting you, ready for typing your program. And -- get this -- there was no shutdown procedure either. You just switched it off! For javascript in the browser you still have a complex stack, including a pretty complex operating system, which must have been booted up first.
klelatti 6y ago
The colour Maximite [1] is a good approximation to this for the modern era. Arm Cortex M7 at 480MHz so quite powerful but not many abstraction layers between user code and the hardware. More coverage here from the 8-bit guy here. [2] [1] https://geoffg.net/maximite.html https://geoffg.net/maximite.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7REQxohV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7REQxohV4

madaxe_again 6y ago

I was a Micro kid - I guess it would have been ‘89 when I started at a new school, and they had an old bomb shelter with half a dozen micros and amigas in it. The amigas were off limits, for seniors only, but the micros were free to use in breaks, evenings after prep, sundays. None had any storage - nor was there any software - but there were heaps and heaps of BBC Micro magazines. We all taught ourselves to code, following tutorial series in magazines, swapping tips with each other, and copying games line by line from listings in magazines, modifying them or fixing (and creating) bugs as we went. Then of course the power would go off, and we’d lose everything - stuff we cared about keeping got written out with pencil on graph paper. By the time I was ten, I found basic trivial, assembler natural, the idea of everything just being a set of simple operations and reading and writing memory addresses intuitive. The same applies for all of us - our little clique of half a dozen kids who accidentally learned computer science in a bomb shelter because they wanted to play games. We made a half decent little dungeon crawler, which got us into no end of trouble when one of the masters discovered us poring over the notebook we were writing it in, as they thought we were plotting to blow up the school. Which we were - just in the game, which was about escaping school. I feel like because the computers were less accessible as utility devices, they were more accessible as computers. You had to grok the thing to do anything with it - necessity, invention, mothers and all that.

simonh 6y ago
To be fair to the the master in question, violent rebellions in British schools do have a history, although it's been a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1797_Rugby_School_rebellion#Rugby_School_and_discipline_in_18th_century_public_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1797_Rugby_School_rebellion#Ru...

swiley 6y ago

There's not much boilerplate for drawing in JS which every computer has installed.

the_af 6y ago
I get what you're saying, but microcomputers of that era felt more like appliances. It was like switching on a radio. You plugged it in, switched it on, and there it was the prompt greeting you, ready for typing your program. And -- get this -- there was no shutdown procedure either. You just switched it off! For javascript in the browser you still have a complex stack, including a pretty complex operating system, which must have been booted up first.

klelatti 6y ago

The colour Maximite [1] is a good approximation to this for the modern era. Arm Cortex M7 at 480MHz so quite powerful but not many abstraction layers between user code and the hardware. More coverage here from the 8-bit guy here. [2] [1] https://geoffg.net/maximite.html https://geoffg.net/maximite.html [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7REQxohV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7REQxohV4