7 ms·

A BBC micro was my first computer. Americans had Amegas or something, but I had a BBC and a big book with example BASIC programs.

pavlov 1y ago
The Amiga was much bigger in Europe/UK than the US, though. The Apple II would be an example of the opposite.
- UncleSlacky 1y ago
  Currency exchange rates in the early 80s meant that most US machines were much more expensive than their European equivalents.
  - pavlov 1y ago
    Commodore, the owner of Amiga, was an American company but they had factories in Europe.
jameshart 1y ago
The American equivalent of the BBC Micro was very much the Apple II. Both based on the 6502, both dominated the market of ‘first computers purchased en masse by schools’ in the 1980s in their respective countries. I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.
- DrBazza 1y ago
  For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball. At the time the Archimedes blew the nascent PC and every other machine out of the water, and yet couldn't get a toe-hold in the US market for reasons I've never quite understood. At the same point MS Windows looked shoddy at best in comparison to RiscOS.
  - lproven 1y ago
    > For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball. Acorn's CPU division is the most successful CPU design house in the world and sells around 10x more than all forms of Intel and Intel-compatible chips put together. It was named after its first product, the Acorn RISC Machine: ARM. It is still called Arm Ltd. today. Arm alone is one half of the entire CPU market. https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/arm-2025-q4-and-fy-financials https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/arm-2025-q4-and-fy-fina... An Acorn-compatible CPU is inside half of the processor-powered devices in the world. How is that "dropping the ball"? It is the most successful processor design of all time, bar none.
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      It wasn't their goal to become a CPU vendor, come on. He was clearly meaning the Acorn computers. It was such a pity. As a British schoolboy in the early 90s we had a mix of Acorns and PCs, and I had a BBC Model B at home and then a bit later also a PC. Very lucky in hindsight. The Acorn machines were ridiculously better except for fewer games. At first I don't remember there being much of a gaming gap and there were plenty of games targeting the BBC Micros, but as games scaled up the bigger US economy started to matter much more and the app/game selection just wasn't as good. But in terms of engineering the GUI was better than Windows, but more importantly the reliability was way higher. My primary school teachers (!) were constantly getting me to fix the computers or install new apps because they always broke. When an Acorn "broke" it was something like the printer being out of paper. When the PC "broke" it was always something much, much harder.
      - lproven 1y ago
        I agree about the virtues of the kit. I owned several Archies and loved them. But the goal of a company is to survive, sell stuff, and make money. One division of Acorn survives, makes money, and dominates the industry, and the A in its name stands for Acorn. (Some other bits survive inside Broadcom and things.) It focussed on the successful bits and executed superbly. As the desktop PC industry consolidated on x86 and MS OSes it moved away. Good move. That's keeping your eye on the ball, in my book. I can't think of any other company that did so well. Sun, SGI, Cray, DEC, all either dead, or acquired, or sold on and split up, or sold off the divisions they were known for, and little or nothing of their tech lives on. IBM still makes POWER servers and workstations. That's about it. But not PCs. Apple makes machines that use the Acorn ARM instruction set and can't run any binaries from their own PowerPC era kit, let alone 68k. It's doing great but by savagely chopping away legacy tech. I think Acorn did great by comparison!
- Lio 1y ago
  Yep, Acorn competitor to the Amiga and ST would was the Archimedes (followed by the A series and Risc PC). The Archimedes was powered by a 32-bit ARM 2 and it was awesome. :D
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    The first time I started up an Archimedes and ran Lander it really felt like the future had arrived. The smoke particles in particular (heh) were very impressive.
  - sys_64738 1y ago
    The Archimedes was too expensive and not very well supported. The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - lproven 1y ago
      > The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it. And yet... Do you own a smartphone of any kind? It has an Acorn-compatible CPU inside it. In fact, if it isn't 20+ years old, it has several: it has a multicore main CPU with several different Arm cores, and there are more in the Wifi controller, and more in the Bluetooth controller. There is a pretty good chance that if you own an x86 machine with wifi, it includes multiple Arm cores too. Whatever OS you run, from Windows to BSD, if you were to search your SSD, you will find BLOBs of Arm code on it. Is there any Amiga or ST derived tech in them? Not that I know of. But a company with "A" for Acorn in its name is in very nearly every device with a microprocessor.
      - sys_64738 1y ago
        I first used an Archimedes back in 1988 running Arthur 1.2.
        lproven 1y ago
- pansa2 1y ago
  > in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles That’s my understanding as well. In the US the NES was huge in the late 80s, but in the UK home computers were dominant. The NES never sold well in the UK. The 16-bit consoles did later on, though. So did the 8-bit Sega Master System, but not until the early 90s - it wasn’t a predecessor to the 16-bit machines, but a budget-friendly contemporary.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- forinti 1y ago
  There's a very important distinction to be made between the Beeb and the Apple II (or most other 8 bit micros). The Beeb was a very well engineered machine, including the BASIC (which allowed in-line assembly and also allowed its functions to be called from assembly, ie other programs).
DrBazza 1y ago
Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were 16-bit 68000 chips. The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following: BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64 Atari 400/800 XL Tandy TRS80 Oric Atmos Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL Amstrad CPC 464 Dragon 32/64 MSX machines
- lproven 1y ago
  I am not sure what your point is here. You miscategorize most of the lines in this list. > Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were 16-bit 68000 chips. And the Mac which outsold both in the long run. You missed: Sinclair QL -- also a MC 680x0. > The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following: > BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master > Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64 > Atari 400/800 XL All 6502, yes. But you missed: > Oric Atmos Then you do not have a category for Zilog kit. Powered by the Z80: > Tandy TRS80 > Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL Not the QL, no. > Amstrad CPC 464 > MSX machines Then another error. This line: > Dragon 32/64 Is neither 6502 nor Z80. It is a Motorola 6809, along with 1 model of TRS-80. Given this confusion I am not sure what you were trying to say.
- dcminter 1y ago
  The Sinclair QL was a 68k machine, not an 8-bit (and famously what Linus Torvalds had before he got a 386 based PC). Edit: 8-bit data bus though, which I didn't know until reading up on the Motorola 68008 just now! Trust Uncle Clive to cheap-out as usual... I cut my teeth on a ZX81 and even had a Spectrum +3 later on - that was the last gasp of the 8-bit Z80 Sinclair line, although the IP was owned by Amstrad by then.
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    The QL indeed had a 68008, and at the time there was a lot of debate about what bitness it really was. Bit the real cheapskatery was the microdrives.
zoeysmithe 1y ago
The Amiga was more 2nd gen. I think the Micro equivalent was more like an Apple I/II. TRS-80/Tandy Color, or Vic-20/C64. The Amiga was Motorola 68000 based and at a clockspeed that really outran those zlog and 6502 based early devices. The Amiga was a pretty impressive device with an OS that was fairly advanced. You could probably use it still today for word processing and sound design and not feel like you're missing much. The OS looks a lot like one of those super low-resource linux DE's.
sys_64738 1y ago
The BBCs were niche products in Britain where they were mostly used in education. They were too expensive so parents bought Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s. Even the cheap BBC Model B, the Electron, was a poor seller.
- mcv 1y ago
  We had an Electron. It was a fun little machine, that you could expand to a fun big machine. Originally 32kB RAM and 32kB ROM, ours eventually ended up with 224kB ROM due to all the expansions you could hook on the back of that thing. Didn't really help its stability, though.

pavlov 1y ago

The Amiga was much bigger in Europe/UK than the US, though. The Apple II would be an example of the opposite.

UncleSlacky 1y ago
Currency exchange rates in the early 80s meant that most US machines were much more expensive than their European equivalents.
- pavlov 1y ago
  Commodore, the owner of Amiga, was an American company but they had factories in Europe.

jameshart 1y ago

The American equivalent of the BBC Micro was very much the Apple II. Both based on the 6502, both dominated the market of ‘first computers purchased en masse by schools’ in the 1980s in their respective countries. I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.

DrBazza 1y ago
For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball. At the time the Archimedes blew the nascent PC and every other machine out of the water, and yet couldn't get a toe-hold in the US market for reasons I've never quite understood. At the same point MS Windows looked shoddy at best in comparison to RiscOS.
- lproven 1y ago
  > For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball. Acorn's CPU division is the most successful CPU design house in the world and sells around 10x more than all forms of Intel and Intel-compatible chips put together. It was named after its first product, the Acorn RISC Machine: ARM. It is still called Arm Ltd. today. Arm alone is one half of the entire CPU market. https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/arm-2025-q4-and-fy-financials https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/arm-2025-q4-and-fy-fina... An Acorn-compatible CPU is inside half of the processor-powered devices in the world. How is that "dropping the ball"? It is the most successful processor design of all time, bar none.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    It wasn't their goal to become a CPU vendor, come on. He was clearly meaning the Acorn computers. It was such a pity. As a British schoolboy in the early 90s we had a mix of Acorns and PCs, and I had a BBC Model B at home and then a bit later also a PC. Very lucky in hindsight. The Acorn machines were ridiculously better except for fewer games. At first I don't remember there being much of a gaming gap and there were plenty of games targeting the BBC Micros, but as games scaled up the bigger US economy started to matter much more and the app/game selection just wasn't as good. But in terms of engineering the GUI was better than Windows, but more importantly the reliability was way higher. My primary school teachers (!) were constantly getting me to fix the computers or install new apps because they always broke. When an Acorn "broke" it was something like the printer being out of paper. When the PC "broke" it was always something much, much harder.
    - lproven 1y ago
      I agree about the virtues of the kit. I owned several Archies and loved them. But the goal of a company is to survive, sell stuff, and make money. One division of Acorn survives, makes money, and dominates the industry, and the A in its name stands for Acorn. (Some other bits survive inside Broadcom and things.) It focussed on the successful bits and executed superbly. As the desktop PC industry consolidated on x86 and MS OSes it moved away. Good move. That's keeping your eye on the ball, in my book. I can't think of any other company that did so well. Sun, SGI, Cray, DEC, all either dead, or acquired, or sold on and split up, or sold off the divisions they were known for, and little or nothing of their tech lives on. IBM still makes POWER servers and workstations. That's about it. But not PCs. Apple makes machines that use the Acorn ARM instruction set and can't run any binaries from their own PowerPC era kit, let alone 68k. It's doing great but by savagely chopping away legacy tech. I think Acorn did great by comparison!
Lio 1y ago
Yep, Acorn competitor to the Amiga and ST would was the Archimedes (followed by the A series and Risc PC). The Archimedes was powered by a 32-bit ARM 2 and it was awesome. :D
- jacquesm 1y ago
  The first time I started up an Archimedes and ran Lander it really felt like the future had arrived. The smoke particles in particular (heh) were very impressive.
- sys_64738 1y ago
  The Archimedes was too expensive and not very well supported. The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lproven 1y ago
    > The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it. And yet... Do you own a smartphone of any kind? It has an Acorn-compatible CPU inside it. In fact, if it isn't 20+ years old, it has several: it has a multicore main CPU with several different Arm cores, and there are more in the Wifi controller, and more in the Bluetooth controller. There is a pretty good chance that if you own an x86 machine with wifi, it includes multiple Arm cores too. Whatever OS you run, from Windows to BSD, if you were to search your SSD, you will find BLOBs of Arm code on it. Is there any Amiga or ST derived tech in them? Not that I know of. But a company with "A" for Acorn in its name is in very nearly every device with a microprocessor.
    - sys_64738 1y ago
      I first used an Archimedes back in 1988 running Arthur 1.2.
      - lproven 1y ago
pansa2 1y ago
> in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles That’s my understanding as well. In the US the NES was huge in the late 80s, but in the UK home computers were dominant. The NES never sold well in the UK. The 16-bit consoles did later on, though. So did the 8-bit Sega Master System, but not until the early 90s - it wasn’t a predecessor to the 16-bit machines, but a budget-friendly contemporary.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
forinti 1y ago
There's a very important distinction to be made between the Beeb and the Apple II (or most other 8 bit micros). The Beeb was a very well engineered machine, including the BASIC (which allowed in-line assembly and also allowed its functions to be called from assembly, ie other programs).

DrBazza 1y ago

Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were 16-bit 68000 chips. The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following: BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64 Atari 400/800 XL Tandy TRS80 Oric Atmos Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL Amstrad CPC 464 Dragon 32/64 MSX machines

lproven 1y ago
I am not sure what your point is here. You miscategorize most of the lines in this list. > Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were 16-bit 68000 chips. And the Mac which outsold both in the long run. You missed: Sinclair QL -- also a MC 680x0. > The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following: > BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master > Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64 > Atari 400/800 XL All 6502, yes. But you missed: > Oric Atmos Then you do not have a category for Zilog kit. Powered by the Z80: > Tandy TRS80 > Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL Not the QL, no. > Amstrad CPC 464 > MSX machines Then another error. This line: > Dragon 32/64 Is neither 6502 nor Z80. It is a Motorola 6809, along with 1 model of TRS-80. Given this confusion I am not sure what you were trying to say.
dcminter 1y ago
The Sinclair QL was a 68k machine, not an 8-bit (and famously what Linus Torvalds had before he got a 386 based PC). Edit: 8-bit data bus though, which I didn't know until reading up on the Motorola 68008 just now! Trust Uncle Clive to cheap-out as usual... I cut my teeth on a ZX81 and even had a Spectrum +3 later on - that was the last gasp of the 8-bit Z80 Sinclair line, although the IP was owned by Amstrad by then.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  The QL indeed had a 68008, and at the time there was a lot of debate about what bitness it really was. Bit the real cheapskatery was the microdrives.

zoeysmithe 1y ago

The Amiga was more 2nd gen. I think the Micro equivalent was more like an Apple I/II. TRS-80/Tandy Color, or Vic-20/C64. The Amiga was Motorola 68000 based and at a clockspeed that really outran those zlog and 6502 based early devices. The Amiga was a pretty impressive device with an OS that was fairly advanced. You could probably use it still today for word processing and sound design and not feel like you're missing much. The OS looks a lot like one of those super low-resource linux DE's.

sys_64738 1y ago

The BBCs were niche products in Britain where they were mostly used in education. They were too expensive so parents bought Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s. Even the cheap BBC Model B, the Electron, was a poor seller.

mcv 1y ago
We had an Electron. It was a fun little machine, that you could expand to a fun big machine. Originally 32kB RAM and 32kB ROM, ours eventually ended up with 224kB ROM due to all the expansions you could hook on the back of that thing. Didn't really help its stability, though.