Acorn BBC Micro

Waaay back in the mists of time, when behemoths roamed the plains and cell phones smaller than bricks had yet to be invented, I was an undergraduate student in Physics at Imperial College, London. The physics teaching lab had a large number of BBC Micro computers, these were the precursor to the ARM RiscOS ones made by Acorn, and physics departments loved them because (a) they were full of ports that could be attached to experiments for data-gathering, and (b) they were easy to use and had a (for the time) fairly high-res screen for displaying results. One of those ports was the "econet" port, which linked all the computers together to a fileserver with (gasp) a hard disk on it, giving a primitive (by today's standards) networking ability. So we were all given YR1. usernames, and the letters more or less corresponded with our initials. I figured out that they'd actually just made all combinations of YR1.AA to YR1.ZZ, so I logged into a spare one for deniability using the supplied default password (it was a different age...), bought a copy of the "Advanced User Guide" and the "Econet user guide" and history was about to be made... Myself and a couple of friends decided we'd write a networked virus - viruses weren't very common in those days, they mainly came on floppy disks for Amigas or Atari ST's and did something nasty to your computer. Networked computers were rare outside of government or big business, so the opportunity was there, and we took it :) I probably ought to…

I remember jones-ing for that computer. It was too expensive though. Then I got a series of books about how to build an Elektor Junior, which was a cheaper alternative. I did that, I loved it; and then in short order the BBC Micro stole my heart. The through-line was the 6502, which retains a place in my heart even today. It's fascinating to me that there still remains interest in that CPU even today, with papers and publications and repos. That CPU has had a great innings. Both simple enough and complex enough. It went on to power the Apple, the Pet, various Acorns. It's interesting to look at the family tree, even the ARM chips have a family association (say, cousins through the Acorn line).

I aware of most of the history. I've used a Master briefly while I was at school and honestly it worked like a upgraded BBC Micro Model B and looking at the wikipedia page it looks like that was exactly the case.

Well, I still own the ancestor - a BBC B. As a schoolboy I was one of a handful who were in the computer club. We had a CBM (PET) 3016, a few Acorn System Ones and a UK101 that was built by our physics teacher. One day this big grey prototyping keyboard case turned up. There was a microcassette unit fitted for loading and saving programs, and the whole thing was connected to a colour TV via an umbilical cord that looked like a vacuum cleaner hose. We were given task sheets with projects to complete on this unit, and we could control the TV from the keyboard, read Teletext pages AND download programs. It was a fun piece of kit that stayed with us for a couple of months. In hindsight, I realised that the unit was a pre-production BBC Micro and we'd been part of a pre-launch test programme thanks to that same physics teacher.

Hardware architecture not, for very obvious reasons. But if you wrote BBC Basic you'd have felt right at home and this continuity was one of the reasons they sold quite well, lots of people that were using the BBC Micro in ways that it wasn't intended for had run into the limitations of the platform and wanted something similar but bigger and faster. The Archimedes was that - and more. To get maximum performance (still very anemic by today's standards) out of a 6502 based BBC you'd have been programming in assembly and that of course did not port at all to the ARM based machines. As I wrote in another comment I was pretty close to the fire and had very early access to the ARM architecture based beebs courtesy of a friendly contact but I realized soon enough that the future for home computing and SMB business computing did not lie with either Acorn, Atari, Commodore or any of the other contenders. In '88 or so (my memory is a bit hazy about the dates, there was a lot going on in my life back then) I moved to x86 professionally with a side of Atari ST (using the fantastic Mark Williams C compiler + documentation) for more fun stuff and with the advent of the availability of the internet for the masses I ran SGI Irix for a couple of years until I settled on Linux which has been my daily driver for decades now. Hardware architecture used to be a super important factor for me, now the only thing that matters is whether or not I can run Ubuntu and whether the hardware is sufficie…

> The simpler hardware of the Spectrum was much more approachable. I'd contest that assertion. I was 15 when when my folks bought my BBC Model B. It was a far more interesting machine to hack around on than the Spectrum. The BBC was set up my future as a software developer.

Somehow my school in a developing country had a fully equipped BBC Micro lab with network (Econet) and file servers. Due the BBC Basic I picked up assembly language for the first time there. Also the sound chip was very advanced with programmable envelopes. And all the screen modes were very useful for different applications. Amazing computer for its time.

I loved my BBC micro. I borrowed a book from a library that gave me a few hundred line of BASIC software I had to type in. It was great.