8 ms·
BBC Basic Editor
- themodelplumber 4y agoWow, that's really impressive. The VirtualBeeb feature is kind of mind-blowing too! I did not expect to see everything working in interactive 3D on top of all the rest.
- pmyteh 4y ago...and the 'Elite' disc seems to be in the drive by default!
- OnlyMortal 4y agoRight On Commander!
- iasay 4y agoYeah that is dangerously good. Now I shall be off to eBay to buy a real one again!
- wigster 4y agoit's lovely. the sound of the keys...
- abrax3141 4y agoOh my gosh; this is a truly awesome hack!
- peter_retief 4y agoThe share code didn't fit in a tweet. What am I missing here?
- makeworld 4y agoThe tweet comes first. > BBC Micro bot runs your tweet on an 8-bit computer emulator. https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/owlet-test2.html https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/owlet-test2.html
- zabzonk 4y agoSorry, don't get what this is about, and I'm an ex BBC Micro user. Enlighten me?
- angrygoat 4y agoThere's an explanation here: https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/owlet-test2.html https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/owlet-test2.html > BBC Micro bot runs your tweet on an 8-bit computer emulator. Below is output from 1000 programs that different users submitted to the bot. Click any to see source.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvg 4y agoPrevious 50 comment discussion from Nov 2020 with some author talk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25256853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25256853
- sequoia 4y agoIs basic always this inscrutable? Not a great intro example.
- zerkten 4y agoIt's not the best general example, but I'm curious why it was selected. I was wondering if it was selected as a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Furber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Furber given that he's from Manchester and was involved with original BBC Micro. Many UK folks would get the Joy Division reference, but they are a bit more of a niche globally.
- fit2rule 4y ago
- asciiresort 4y agoBased on the package.json, this seems like a reskinned Monaco plus some bespoke extensions
- bilekas 4y agoI've been playing with the editor and seeing the effects. It's pretty fun but can someone explain to me like I'm 5 and fill me in on what this is ? BBC is the British broadcasting channel in the UK for me, and their 80/90's graphics were pretty much the same!?
- hvs 4y agoBASIC for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
- FooHentai 4y agoThe language shipped on a computer the BBC released. This should fill in the gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
- lproven 4y agoThe BBC did not release the BBC Micro. Acorn designed, built, released and sold it. You should have heard of them: Acorn is the original "A" in ARM. The BBC wanted to promote computer literacy in the UK, so intended to run TV and radio series, magazines, etc. It wanted a high-end user-programmable home computer that would be very expandable, with the priorities being a good BASIC, fairly fast, and a wide range of ports... rather than affordable (cf. ZX Spectrum) or a videogames machine (cf. Commodore VIC20 & C64, Atari 8-bits). It got it. For a while UK schools and universities ran almost entirely on BBC Micros. They weren't so common in the home as they were about 3-4x the price of a ZX Spectrum or C64. Acorn evaluated various chips for its planned next-gen machine, and discarded all of them as being too expensive, not powerful enough, etc. This included the Motorola 680000, the Intel 80186, the WDC 65C816, the NatSemi 32016 and others. So it designed its own: the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM for short. It's now the best-selling CPU in the world by about 2 orders of magnitude, so I reckon you've probably heard of it.
- pkage 4y agoIt's an emulation environment for the BBC Micro[0], a popular home computer distributed by the BBC in the early 1980s. There's a long history of /why/ the BBC was involved in producing computers, but the short version is that the BBC wanted to increase computer literacy in the UK and decided the best way of doing that was to create their own machine (partnered with private industry). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
- talideon 4y agoBBC BASIC was/is the wonderful lovechild of BASIC and BCPL, and was a joy to code in back in the day. Significant amounts of the regular user applications that weren't CPU bound for RISC OS were coded in it, and most of the rest were coded with it, as it had a built-in multipass assembler.
- jll29 4y agoTo whoever doesn't know BCPL: It's a language that is the predecessor of B (which itself was the predecessor of C), like a flavor of C without types or structs (words instead), developed by Martin Richards for system programming: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bcpl.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bcpl.html EDIT: The predecessor of BCPL was CPL, the Cambridge Programming Language.
- pjmlp 4y agoBCPL original purpose was to Bootstrap CPL, it wasn't just a predecessor. The UNIX world is built on a language whose original purpose was to bootstrap a compiler and move on.
- talideon 4y agoThat's the thing about stuff like that: it's sometimes unreasonably effective and ends up replacing the thing it was meant to be a step towards.
- jamiek88 4y agoOh the memories! I haven’t coded since then and am about to start again, I wish learning now was as easy as control break to start again. We squeezed everything out of basic then started learning assembly. We fucking owned our school econet making a port scanner that polled station 100 (the teacher admin station) to eventually get his password for *I AM SYS. Password was paramecium!!! It took days to poll. Then we got a copy of the advanced user guide for BBC Master and became gods. My best mate and hacking buddy went by Bruteus, I was Apollo! Bruteus ? You on hacker news?! We then used to change our station number to 100 whenever we logged in to do naughtiness. (?&d22=100) It drove the admin crazy reading logs or the printer spool we’d randomly trigger. Our opsec was poor though and we boasted to the wrong person who snitched. Suspended from school and banned from all networked machines. Still think they should have brought us in to volunteer instead. A physics teacher actually let us use his non networked computer because he saw we had talent and interest and he tried to harness it. He was awesome. He put us in charge of downloading the NOAA data to do weather maps via cassette tape! Then when the admins car had left we had a sneaky super long eco net cable we made that we hung out of a window to the floor below to a network socket and resumed our pwnage. Man we were little arseholes!
- dotancohen 4y ago> ...let us use his non networked computer... > ...put us in charge of downloading the NOAA data... I hope that my non networked machines are incapable of downloading data!
- jamiek88 4y agoIt was literally radio! Record the audio on a tape recorder load into computer like a game.
- dotancohen 4y agoThat's terrific. Seriously, you should write up a story or blog post about this stuff. It's right up HN's alley. I thought that I had a diverse hobby and career in tech, but I was never downloading off the radio!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]