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It'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 w
by pkage 4y ago
It'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
- bilekas 4y agoThanks! I was looking for something to play with over the weekend! Being an 80's baby I'm surprised I've never heard of it!
- thorin 4y agoAnd if you're interested in that watch the movie :-) https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM Micro men, story of the zx spectrum vs the bbc
- sedatk 4y agoAlso, BBC BASIC was developed by Sophie Wilson who later designed ARM processor architecture which we use everywhere today.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoWilson says it took one week from a design in her head, to design circuits, make the circuits, build prototype hardware and program it http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7307636.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7307636.stm. Looks like they had a team of 4 people. That's incredible.
- thombat 4y agoI doubt I shall ever again have such a feeling of warping into the future as I got when moving from coding 6502 assembler on the Beeb to ARM-2 on the Archimedes. Suddenly there were enough registers. And they were all general purpose: use for arithmetic, use as an index, do whatever you need to. And all the instructions were conditional; hardly needed branches. And the memory map was flat. And everything was 32-bit. And no weird operand modes. And the best Beeb feature was still there: the assembler was still built-in to BBC Basic.
- chasil 4y agoUnbelievable that ARM1 was only 25k transistors, when an 8086 was nearly 30k. The efficient use of resources was phenomenal.
- chasil 4y agoARM64 (AArch64) ripped out a lot of the original design ideas. No conditional execution, and the program counter is no longer directly addressable. This does increase performance, at the cost of code density (no thumb instructions either). Fujitsu's ARM supercomputer was the first that I'd heard of removing all 32-bit support, but mainline designs are about to do the same with phones.