Thank you for watching, please also see the video description for links to further viewing and reading on the story of this fascinating machine. What are your memories of the BBC Micro, did you have one at home or at school and can you remember what you did with yours? I'd love to hear your stories. Neil - RMC
ALAS! I've never had the opportunity to use a BEEB computer; they were quite rare here in Denmark. As far as i can tell, we mainly used Sinclairs, Amstrads, and Commodores here - plus a few obscure and little known machines like the Lambda/Power/Marathon chinese ZX81 clones which weren't that good.
I had an Electron in my early teens as a BBC B was too expensive for my Dad to buy me, but luckily my school had a newly-built computer suite with around 20 BBC Masters, although not using Econet but did have dual disk drives. Therefore, game piracy was rife as I had a lot of dual-format Electron/BBC games and so could duplicate them and swap disks around with kids. I bought my own BBC Master in my 20's as I'd kept a lot of software I'd written, and still have it now that I'm well into my forties. It has had it's battery changed but I'm interest in your Part 2 as I haven't re-capped anything PSU-wise if that's where it might be going. I have a career in IT thanks to Acorn, the BBC and my school for promoting computer usage.
I did my GCE O level in computer studies on a BBC Micro at school and a Electron at home. I remember the programme i wrote was a Pub Quiz type thing, I kept running out of RAM, hitting the end of the 32k space. So had to keep going back and simplifying things and creating more subroutines to slim things down.
My father was involved in the computer club at the school where he taught, and frequently brought a BBC Micro home with him for the holidays, so I got to use it then without needing to buy one (a bonus, as they weren't cheap). The only drawback: games were banned. Unless I wrote them myself. Talk about a motivator... when I did eventually get to school, with a network of BBC Masters running off an Econet file server in a locked booth (a good thing as the 20MB Winchester had a squeaky bearing and it screamed constantly), I ended up using a good half of that disk with my own stuff. Sadly, before I had a chance to make backups it got struck by lightning.
My parents bought A BBC model B in about 1982/3 (I was 10/11) and as I got interested in it also bought pretty much every accessory for it (2nd processor, all the ROMs, Teletext adaptor, floppy disc drives (dual) .... 35 years later I now have a comfortable life working as an IT engineer for an international company and I thank my parents for that start I was given.
dual drive - as if that's more - well yes it was. We have a dual drive too but it's more than that. Both drives are 40/80 track switchable and 'm pretty sure it'd access both sides of the floppy. We also have the teletext adaptor but not 'all the ROMs' just the TFS ROM and a 'colour dump ROM' which would dump the screen display to a colour printer. Impressing the local gliding club by dumping the day's weather forecast from Ceefax and taking the print-out to the club in the morning.
What I find completely grotesque is I had more opportunities to learn how computers really work in the late 80s than schoolkids do now. School PCs are now completely locked down, and in many schools, if you attempt to write a program on one you'll get suspended. School lessons that teach wordprocessing and spreadsheets are not computer lessons, they are office skill lessons and more akin to teaching kids how to touch type in past decades than what the computer literacy project achieved.
That's appalling! I was fortunate to begin learning about computing in high school considering that I graduated in 1974. One of the math teachers browbeat the school's administration into letting her build a "math lab" and create a for-credit math class called "Computer Analysis." She started with an (write this down) Olivetti-Underwood Programa 101. It's sometimes called the first Personal Computer, but it's really a programmable calculator and the predecessor to the TI-59, the ultimate programmable calculator which came out later in the 70's while I worked at Texas Instruments.. Her lab also had a Model 33 teletype, a telephone and a110 bps acoustic coupler along with user id's on the dual CDC 6000 series system at the University of Texas. I really envied what the BBC did for British kids back in the day, but at least I could afford to shell out the bucks for an Apple II (which I still have). It cost me about $3000 in 1978 but it was worth it. You might have thought I would have bought a TI-99/4, but no! It was appallingly bad at introduction.
it was 93 or 94 i got to use a computer at school for the first time ever ofc running windows 3.11. and you can guess i felt duped when i get to know kids back in the day really got to use and even program on computers. its like people got lazy
Yeah, we had one in primary school (1987-90 at that particular school) but we just use the games, whatever they were, unimpressive usually (I was used to better on the Acorn Electron at home since 85) when we were in secondary school it was RM Nimbus's and Windows 3x and we only got to learn Excel : ( we had the classroom with PCs as a form room so we sat there often and were able to play Worm (a Snake clone) and TAXI and Solitaire)
I managed to acquire a 128 Master from my first school along with the monitor and disk drive. I remember my teacher at the time jumping with joy when she was told it was a 128 Master the school was receiving and not a model A or B. No way to know if the BBC Micro I have was that very one. They only had two so it's 50/50. Lots of time playing Granny's Garden and Pod Can on that thing.
I never had one of these in my school. I was in the first year of secondary school when they came out. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it on TV. It just looked such better quality than any other home computer in the market. I was desperate to get one for Christmas, but we didn’t have much money and my mum told me they couldn’t get me one. Maybe next year if they could save up. Imagine my shock when I unwrapped my one Christmas present to find it was a BBC Micro Model B!! To this day, best present I ever had. Anyone remember the Welcome tape? That was brilliant! It had a teletext game at the end called Twin Kingdom Valley. After I played that all I wanted to do was learn to program. That machine didn’t just teach my BBC Basic, it taught me how to code and set me up for a future career as a software developer and consultant. Brilliant, brilliant computer!
My parents never had much money. We took a holiday away twice in my childhood, both times in the UK. We had a black-and-white 10" TV until I was 13, and it only had two channels, ITV and BBC1. I had to go to my best friend's house to watch _The High Chaparral,_ because it was on BBC 2. _Thunderbirds_ was my favourite childhood TV show, one of the first UK TV series in colour... but I had to take their word for it. But after I passed all my A Levels (Maths, Add. Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology), a few months before my 19th birthday in November 1981, I was STUNNED by my 19th birthday present from my parents: A BBC Micro, Model B 32k. My father, who worked in British Aerospace, had asked a friend in the computer department what the best home computer was for a technically-minded boy. The sacrifices my parents must have made to afford this... it still brings tears to my eyes. I learnt to write programs and games in BBC BASIC, but this showed its limitations when you had large iterative subroutines, so I learnt 6502 assembly language so I could talk directly to the silicon. Later, at college, I did a unit on coding. We had these machines called EMMA (I never found out what that stood for). At they were was a hex keyboard and some I/O, and a 6502 processor. I remember the first week we had to do a program to simulate the UK traffic light sequence (Red, Red & Amber, Green, Amber, Red). The lecturer came round after about quarter of an hour and asked me what I was doing, and I said I was doing the flowchart. He said, "You need to get a move on, some of the other students have started to write the code." I said, "I've already written the program, and it works," and I showed him. Baffled, the lecturer said, "But you're supposed to use the flowchart to help you write the program," and I said, "I didn't need one." As it was, instead of coming into the lesson and writing a program each week, I made a deal that I would come by every three weeks and write three programs. I ended up with a distinction. This was all thanks to the marvellous BBC Micro that my parents so generously bought me.
We got one because my mum was a teacher so you got a discount. I believe I was about 4 at the time, taking a tape to my dad too load a game, asking him to get it out for me (only one TV so we had to unpack and set it up) At 10 I learnt basic? Wrote graphics demos and, like, simulating a ball bouncing using the formula for acceleration in gravity. I also got the 6502 assembler manual, learnt it, but I couldn't figure out what it was for. Load reg 1 and 2, add, lshift and rshift. ... At the time I couldn't map it to draw, move, input, etc. Still haven't _actually_ learnt assembler, not practical assembler anyway.
@@MostlyPennyCat The main use for assembler is to speed up routines that are run over and over again, and take forever in BASIC. As an example, LDA# $10 means load hex 10 (16: in hex base 16, 1 x 16 + 0 x 1) into the accumulator. In hex, the actual language the processor speaks, if I remember rightly, LDA# is A9 in hex. So you would write A9 $10 on an EMMA. There are some good resources online if you're interested in learning 6502 assembler.
I lived in Germamy at the time and never recognized the BBC micro. I did know the sinclair maschines which I perceived as inadequate. In the last couple of month I am looking at a lot of emulators of machines from the time and I recognized how much better the BBC micro was, compared to Commodore and even Apple or Sinclair. That is a cool piece of kit.
A few years ago someone on TH-cam was talking about their favorite computer movies and ,mentioned Micro Men. I went ahead and watched it, being here in the states, we hear about the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs story all the time, it was cool to see a similar thing going on over there.
Ah, here is my childhood, and the start of my lifelong obsession with computing. 33 years later, still going strong in IT. I owe it all to the BBC Micro. I should get myself one.
There are a lot of people like that. I think its safe to say that this project is one of the reasons the UK is the center for lots of software development (Were one of the leaders in games development for instance)
Same here! Learnt to code on one of these and still work in software development today. The closest I've come to buying one, is just picking up a manual from ebay to read the code.
Same here. I’m still shocked how small and fast emulators are for the bbc. Computer power is so powerful these days, kids have no idea their iPads are more powerful than super computers back in the bbc micro days! 🤡🤡🤡🌍🌍🌍
Yep Me as well . never thought i would ever see a bbc micro again. and has a lot of others it started my life long learning and yearning for all things computers. led to collage and a job as a programmer for BP and my love affair with the best programming language COBOL
My primary school had a total of 4 BBC Micros, when I started secondary school they had about 20 of them. I owe my entire career to the lessons I learned on this wonderful machine.
My folks couldn’t afford a full fledged BBC Micro at the time so I got an Electron. Finally got my hands on a BBC when my Middle School threw them all in to a skip in the early 90’s and a friend who lived near by let me know about it. I already had an Amiga by then but finally having my own BBC was still special.
When I first got to secondary school, there was a room of Acorn Atoms, very forward looking school I think in hindsight. They got the upgrade to BBC Basic (rather than the more limited Atom Basic). Because of this we were late getting BBC Micros, but got them about half way through my school life. Did not matter, Computer Science teacher took the 380Z home, added Econet to it, and wrote some software to share the 2nd floppy disk over the Econet port. We had a floppy disk for each class. Amazing stuff for early 80s, even more amazing was the Computer Science teacher. He sold the solution to a couple of other schools for the school coffers. The 380Z ended up being replaced by a BBC Micro with Acron Winchester Drive (10GB Harddrive I think that was the size -why were the call this?). when I left in 1988 the school had just got their first Archimedes. All the success I have today I owe to that school, and that very clever Computer Science teacher.
I somehow managed to get a free place at a 'posh' high school in Cambridge which got about 12 of these in 1983. The school year below me was the first to be offered 'computer studies' as an o-level, so our year had no actual education on them. They were networked together though, and I remember lunchbreaks where one boy would be at the door keeping lookout while some early game like pac-man loaded on all machines at once from a single tape drive. Ah, the amount of detentions we got, lol. One of my closest friends was rich enough to have one at home, though, and he showed me how to get started programming in BASIC - something that would prove to be a life-long hobby for me.
Can’t say my old school was posh but we did do pretty well when it came to computers. It got fitted out with a similar set up in about 1982/83 with BBC model B machines and my brother was in the first o-level class in 83-85 and then A-level class 85-87. I started in 84 and after a couple of years we got upgraded to BBC masters and then just before I left we got upgraded again with Archimedes machines which at the time seemed light years ahead of the old BBCs . Did you have a Winchester hard drive by any chance? It was the pride and joy of our computer studies teacher because of its huge capacity.
I have one I've recently refurbished (those old RIFA caps blew, of course)... it's absolutely the best machine of the 80's.... The expandability, the open nature of the hardware and it's adaptability, the various I/O that offered so many options, and a BASIC interpreter that included an in-line assembler... A real triumph of British computing.
This humble little computer is how I started my lifelong career in computing and software. When I bought it, I had no idea what I could do but I knew it was the future. Once I got started I never looked back and what an amazing career it’s been!
Yes, it was my first computer, and I made the trip from France to London back in the days (no, the tunnel didn't exits yet). In my opinion, it was far more advanced than Comodore and Apple. Thank you for this review.
My primary school had one. My year 4 teacher used to code his own basic games and test them out on us so this micro was literally my introduction to gaming. Havent played one since so id love to get my hands on one
@@Lbf5677 i think a lot of it is down to the luck of getting a teacher who is into that kind of thing. I think my teacher did it because he genuinly enjoyed doing it, not because it was part of the job. If there was any kind of tech curriculum my school definatly didnt follow it as he was the only teacher who ever made an effort with that kind of thing
A freak accident put me out of PE for several months. Off-PE class was in the same room that housed the school's Beebs. That was the first time I sat in front of a computer and typed things. I probably wouldn't have had the same friends or my career if it wasn't for that moment.
I must have gone to an affluent school as we had a couple of rooms full of Model B's, they were all connected to ECONET and we also had a Watford Electronics 30MB Winchester hard drive - I also really enjoyed the drama 'Micro Men'.
We had 3 rooms on a Second floor of a building with massive steel gates and the classrooms had multiple locks, ah the heat of 25 machines plus 30 school kids just after a PE class it hummed, Then the noise of the 9 pin dot matrix epson printing continually for 15-20 minutes
I benefited from the French equivalent of this plan, which you already covered (Thomson MO5's, Goupil PC server, nanoreseau and 'plan informatique pour tous'). I discovered computers thanks to it, became instantly obsessed and it eventually became my lifelong profession. It's hard to imagine than in the early 80's, politicians and the media were visionaries about micros and did something for the good of the people.
Great video. I used to have one of these plugged into a dial-tune black and white TV. Can honestly say I wouldn't be where I am today without it. One very very minor point - I don't think that there was ever an econet blanking plate. I remember the one we had was brand new and always had that hole. I remember thinking it was really scary and unsafe as a child!
I always remember my secondary school's computer room fondly. It was on the 4th floor and had a huge iron door for security. Like something from a bank. We must have had a few dozen BBC Micros in that room, all hooked up to a main computer controlled by the teacher. I never had much interest in computers back then (total tech nut now and the past 25 years, thanks to the Playstation I think) but I did get a slight twinge of interest when I saw someone had replicated Bomb the Bass's Into the Dragon album cover on a sheet of A4 on a Dot Matrix printer. I was like "woah, you can make your own posters". Wish it had got me more interested back then, although I was almost ready to leave school not long after. Pure nostalgia just looking at the machine though. Built like a tank to boot.
As a german pupil in that days i just envied the english/british for the many companies making computers and then even bringing them into the schools. We had nothing like that. Even worse, society and politicans were discussing if young people should have any contacts with this devil computers at all. Greetings from a RISC-OS user - even nowadays.
I remember my first student exchange in the late 80's, being welcomed in the family of a very British school teacher whom had custody of the school's BBC micro for the duration of the Easter holidays... My taste for the language was already high, but it really kicked my interest for computing into high gear, it was miles ahead of whatever we had in France at the time.
We had Tandy TRS 80s as first computers at school. So valuable, during the Christmas holidays, the teachers took them home - so if the school was broken into, they'd not get nicked. For info, it takes 6 hours to defrost a TRS 80 before it'll boot up having been left in the teacher's car over the holidays !
Top shelf video. Very interesting story. Here in Australia we are always in lock step with the USA and so we did not have the BBC micro. My kids had an Apple II in their classroom. I’m from the Stone Age - slide rules morphing into calculators in the early 1970’s.
The BBC Micro were actually very common in a lot of Australian schools, at least government schools. They certainly were in Tasmania and I’ve read that WA, SA and some other states were in lockstep to pool software and teaching strategies in the mid-1980s. Tassie stuck with the BBCs and later Archimedes systems well into the 90s… I was doing CAD classes on an A410 in 1995.
Love it, we upgraded the crap out of our model b. First with disk drives then dual disk drives making 3 in total, side ways ram then on the sideways ram icebox then eventually an acorn tube expansion (RISC I think not a legit BBC one custom built) essentially turning it into a supercharged BBC master. Very nearly got an Archimedes but instead went for a 086 very very briefly (like 2-3 months) before getting a 286. I loved that BBC i owe my career to it, i was programming from the age of 7. My dad would go mad at the amount of times i knackered an eprom playing with the sideways ram. We also had an RF/UHF card so i could download programs from teletext, take that internet :) As for the school bit one day sat in some lesson i can't remember what, a student from another year knocked on the door and said the headmaster wanted to see me in the library. I didn't think i had done anything wrong (or been caught) but was excused from my lesson and went down to the library. Turns out they could not get the BBC's to network and asked if i could do it, I did. Me and my 5 year older brother then went on to write 3 programs for the BBC (wells lots more really). Mathman (a pac man clone with maths) which was stolen and commercialised and then a bromine gas experiment simulation used to show vacuums and one where you would watch smoke particles bounce off air particles i forget the name of the experiment. The school used them for years even after the rise of the RM nimbus. I loved my BBC
We got a Model B in 1986, that was my first computer and I loved it! The RS423 port could also be used to connect two BBC Computers together and I even remember making up my own cable to connect mine and a friends to transfer programs! Also had to replace the Parallel printer driver chip when it failed; try that on today's computers!!
I was a Speccy kid, but at school we had lunchtime computer club that had the ZX80, 81, the PET, Vic20 and an Oric.... We then had our computer lab, BBCs on all four walls....geeky heaven. What I really liked about the BBC - BASIC, the keyboard and BASIC :) Fond memories of a really good learning machine - my 4th year project was to write a BBC Basic car garage booking system.
A computer i always wanted, and my friend got one for christmas, it cost £400 in 1985, a walk down memory lane, i had an acorn electron, which i still have in the box up in the loft. A good video very interesting, obviously being a kid then i had no idea what went on behind the scenes.
These videos with the more solemn documentary style are so awesome. I love how you manage to instill such a sense of quiet reverence for the subject matter.
Attended Oundle school in the 80s and we had some kind of connection with Cambridge which meant we had a couple of labs full of these wonderful machines (alongside Electrons, Research Machines 380Zs, 480Zs and other curios). Towards the end of my time they were connected to a 20MB Winchester drive over an Econet network. But in the early days the network had a dual double-sided floppy disk drive with (I think) 800K storage. My school life revolved around the computer lab (to the detriment of social interaction and some grades!). This machine was responsible for my career. Well done Acorn, the BBC and the government of the time. Maybe today’s government could get past its ideological idiocy and get behind projects like this and remember the unique power that the BBC has to reach a nation.
Strange how memories are triggered - as soon as I saw the Cub monitor, "Microvitec" came to mind, plus remembering one of my friends had one and I seem to recall it played awesome music while waiting for Elite to load? I had the Atari 800XL, and another friend had the Texas Instruments TI99/4A, and our secondary school had Research Machines 380Z & 480Z. We often went to each other's houses to play on whatever the latest cool game was. Truly a time where no one really cared about compatibility, you just got whatever computer you liked, or could afford.
1st computer at my sec school was an Exidy Sorcerer. For teacher use only ! TRS 80 I-2 became the pupils' machine. A ZX80 and a 380Z appeared as well. Of course Microvitec and econet came to mind with the CUB monitor but not at my school ! The BBC B was our first home computer - and we still have the computer desk dad made for it built out of old caravan furniture !
I started working in the Norwich Union IT department in 1979 so I missed out on micro computers in school. In school I had to use a teletype which communicated of the phone to the mainframe at Norwich City College. My first personal computer was a Nascom 2 followed by an Atari 800xl.
Brilliant stuff! I first used a Beeb in 1982 at school, and first got my own in 1992 (I'd had to make do with ZX81, Spectrum, Aquarius and MSX before then). Since 1992 I have always owned at least one Beeb, and at one point I adopted an entire primary school's worth that was otherwise headed for a skip. Numbers are gradually becoming sensible, as I slowly sell them off on ebay. I shall keep a B and a Master for sure. Eagerly awaiting the next episode!
An awesome thing with the bbc was that as you started to outgrow basic you could inline code assemble directly in your program! Something I needed the expert cartridge for on the c64.
I started primary school in 1994 and the classroom computer was still a BBC micro. I don't have a BBC myself, but I do own mint condition copies of Granny's Garden and Flowers of Crystal, the first video games I ever played and the most vivid memories I have of my primary school years
In France we had the Thomson TO5 and TO7 models (I wasn't born at the time but I found one randomly in an attic the other day...along with an Amstrad) These days I feel like we've stepped back when it comes to all that, we don't teach the young how to use their devices for work anymore, we instead forbid them from using them on school ground, what a waste.
I was in school back in the days you see through rose-tinted glasses now. Most of the time, the computers that were bought and shipped to the schools by the government stayed in their boxes well past their expiry date unless a Minister of some kind had a visit scheduled, and a computer room had to be proped like a film set for showing off purposes. Teachers had no time, no money and no credit to learn computing for themselves, and even less of those to build lectures around and with them. So unless you had an exceptionally selfless and motivated teacher, your chances to use a computer in school in the mid-late eighties were close to nil. In France, the "Plan Informatique pour Tous" was a ploy to inject public money into Thomson to save the semi public company from keeling over. Pupils were never a front and centre concern.
@@ordinosaurs I have come across that name before but being British I have never seen one in the wild as it were. In fact hasn't RMC done a video on Thompson?
We had the econet setup in an Australian School back in the early nineties. It was slow but had modules which stored games, programs and more. However... the network would work sometimes and it always crashed after 15+ students used it simultaneously, I had very little time using them but heavily wanted one. Too bad people sell these way out of my budget. But it’s a real surprise of how awesome technology was rapidly becoming more connected as we grown older
I was trying to decide what channel to subscribe to and give my money too, after watching your videos, some more than twice i have to say you draw me in everytime, im a retro pc man at heart and your channel does that justice. You take me back to my childhood and some of the machines i owned before life took some bad turns. You really are a gentleman that shows in your videos, thanyou Neil for this channel
Another great video, Neil. My school had a room of Beebs, all connected to Econet. Then we decided to write 2nd level password programs on our few KB of hard disk space... Until the computer studies teacher asked us to remove them as he couldn't circumvent it! Those were the days!!
One of the great things about the BBC Micro was that it had an actual operating system. Most other micros of the day were essentially CPUs in a box --- there would be a simple I/O layer with Microsoft Basic bolted on top, bodgable in various ways to allow access to devices, but once you outgrew the terrible Basic you ended up coding for the bare metal in machine code. The BBC Micro had pluggable filesystems, application ROMs, a proper system call interface, an administration shell, and all the abstraction layers needed to isolate the application from the actual hardware. If you used a Tube with the 6502 second processor, that system actually ran a completely different OS --- but it presented the same system call interface, so (well behaved) software would run on it just fine. The built-in Basic, which was superb, was just another application ROM; the Econet software just another file system (giving access to all your files on a remote file server).
That 1978 Horizon programme was the start of it for me. The 13 year old me was lucky enough to see the broadcast. 40 years later I’m still working in the industry as a sw engineer (via 5 years as an engineer at the BBC)
I have two of these still. Not been turned on for years. Need to watch the essential work part, and just remember them so fondly. I'm a programmer in no small part because of the BBC Micros at school.
The 16k BBC Basic Rom had a great assembler, they packed a lot into that 16k. I remember the first proper Machine Code program I wrote was to Unlock protected cassette based games so I could copy them to disk, and I was very proud of it LOL. All the information I needed was in the Basic Manual, a very unsecure copy protection.
I'm looking forward to this series. The whole BBC Micro thing passed me by completely. My middle school didn't have any computers and my secondary school had jumped down the Commodore road, so although I knew of the machine I have yet to even touch one.
My CHILDHOOD! Even in the early 1990s, this was the computer we were introduced to at primary school. Later, the Acorn. I have such happy memories of POD
I remember we figured out that if you flicked the tab up on the floppy drive while a game was loading it would break with an error. You could then type "LIST". Which is how we got the password for Granny's Garden Pt 2. Cracked.
It is still around, many of the gaming companies founded on those micros are still churning out praised games today (Rockstar North anyone?). Never mind that ARM powers most of the world outside of the desktop PC (though actual production happens anywhere but UK). The basic thing though is that unless you wear your nation's flag on your chest, it is hard to tell that you are not US based when all your marketing and such is in English.
Nicely put together video on an important computer. I bought the Acorn Atom as my first venture into computing and its sat in its orginal box upstairs, must dig it out one day soon. It started with 2K ram using 2114 ram chips which have metal top for heat dispation. I did add more ram but over 4K the supply line ripple became so bad producing a hum bar moving continuosly down the screen. What amazes me is the flexibility of the BBC micro runing on only a 2Mhz 6502 8 bit processor, running basic and driving a video generator chip, quite an achievement.
My memories of the BBC micro may have started in middle school in the mid 80s. We had a computer at the back of the room and the teachers weren't great with it so they used to ask, I forget his name, a kid in our class to set it up for them. He'd do everything for them, printing out as well. But I can't really remember if it was a BBC or not. However a very clear memory was late 80s in high school. Gunnersbury Boys School. 1st year we had a room full of BBCs with the monitors. I wasn't fully into computers back then but enjoyed the lessons but it was 2 to a computer. And whoever I was ever with would always take over so I'd never get a proper go. All we had at home was a zx81 and I never really liked it. Hated the keyboard. Would of loved a BBC but there being 4 of us mum & dad could never afford one & they knew I'd get bored. Now I love computers and the history of them. Will always have a fond memory of the BBC despite never owning one.
I think my school was somewhere in the middle. We had an acorn Archimedes per classroom... I remember getting the chance to use it once a week with my now brother-in-law who was also computer mad. Happy days, glad to see the UK still involved in pioneering educational computing such as raspberry pi and BBC microbit. I hope my two kids will enjoy computing as much as I do.
I went to a council estate school, we didn’t have access to BBC micros , but most of us had our own micro at home , I had a zx81 , later I had a C 16 , and a +4 after that , I didn’t get to even see a BBC until 1986 in college , what a lovely machine , a proper computer with all the things you really need , yeah the home micros had the games , but the BBC was a proper computer
Interesting item.. I loved the BBC micro (I never could afford one here in Australia) but I had a Australian made microbee 128 as the first computer and I did use it with a modem to a telephone bulletin board and this was Omen and they had a TRS80 as the main computer there and the guys had lots of hard drives and it even auto-answered the modem calls.. Pity I never had a film camera on me then.
had a chance to play with one about 20-30 years ago -- aunt's neighbor in east anglia had one. thing that struck me at first was just how well-designed the thing was. still remember how incredible the keyboard was to type on!
i grew up in this era lol, i still have my BeeB in cupboard behind me witha 40/80 track floppy drive, loved it, best keyboard ever and the BBC B Basic was so good, enjoying this
That switch on sound takes me straight back to primary school and the little rooms our computer was in. I have one her but I've got to repair the monitor. I should get on and fix it.... I'm looking forward to this series of videos.
Fascinating. Here in Australia we had the Z80 based Microbee as the standard text based school computer. The C64 had pushed them out of the computer room, into dark corners of the library by the time I got to highschool in 1986.
BBC BASIC - I have good memories of that era. The Acorn Electron was my first Home Computer and the'BBC' BASIC got me into programming. I now 35 years on I program CNC engineering machinery lol.
Over in the States we used Apple IIs, lots of good memories with those old computers. A fun time to be a kid, it felt like the future would be a whole new world.
Listening to you, it was like Ian McNaught-Davis was back with us. Wonderful start to the series, seems like it's going to be a great journey. If you wanted to be an ARM developer (ARM 1) in the early days, you would have bought the ARM "co-pro" for your beeb. It is a real credit to the OS that anything can be plugged in and use the beeb for all user interaction and access to storage, leaving the co-pro to get on with some heavy lifting.
Fantastic video, I still have my childhood bbc b micro , cub monitor and cumana disc drive... we had beebs and masters at my high school all networked with econet...... happy days.... mine is a bit of a time machine for me...takes me back to a simpler time..cheers
The Basic on this was the best of it's time. So fast and easy to do 'structured' programming with procedures. Just brilliant. My beeb needed a new psu and keyboard but still going strong!
Flowers of Crystal and Grannies Garden were the two games I remember the most, I also remember rushing through my work to get a chance to play on the single BBC B we had in the classroom! I didn't start school until 1990 though so by the time I got to junior school they had started to swap over to the Acorn Archemedies computers and Pc's were the norm when I got to senior school.
I just started watching TH-cam videos related to the BBC computer. Next week I am considering buying one on eBay. I did come across them in the eighties when as a part time teacher I taught basic I.T. using the BBC computer. It will be a BBC B computer I am going to buy.
First time i played on a BBC Micro and seen one was back in around 1989 when i lived in a bedsit with my girlfriend in Stoke village in Plymouth when we made friends with the girl next door who was a teacher and had brought the computer home that weekend, don,t can not remember why she brought it home,but i loved it.
First computer I ever laid my hands on, I remember it being wheeled into the class on its trolley. We only had one for the whole school, infants and juniors so it had to be booked by the teachers for classes. Later on another was added and put on the trolley while the original got a permanent home in the school library.
We've got 3 of them and I totally agree. There is something very special indeed about this machine! Probably one of the reasons I love watching "Micro Men" so much. I have such very find memories of using a Beeb when they came out at school,. Then a friend had one at home, so I spent time using his playing Elite and Starship Command, then later on there was one at my work experience placement that controlled a dynamo test rig! Awesome machine and kick started so many careers. :)
BBC Micros at school in Australia, along with a Archimedes file server. Electron with Plus 1 expansion at home I had to buy in UK on holiday. I even had a third party mouse ! Played Elite, a lot. Lovely stuff.
Built like tanks and such a recognisable sound from those keys. I have one in similar condition to this with an SD card adaptor on it. Love it to bits!
I had one - loved it (including sideways RAM, Dual floppy’s and Z80 2nd processor)!!! This is great start to a series that I’m really looking forward to.👍👍👍
Ah the memories from primary school. Grannies garden, and zapping colleagues by touching the screen, and another pupil as it turned on and it gave an almighty shock to the pupil.
I have great memories of the BBC and also the RM Nimbus PC's that followed in the 90's. We felt like mad scientists writing our own computer programs on the BBC to control giant robots in our maths classes. I learnt BASIC and then Visual Basic at my school. Our school had loads of games as well. Once our school switched over to Nimbus PC's, me and my friends used to play games on them and make electronic music.
I bought a Sinclair ZX81 in '81 to learn BASIC programming. I was 30 years old and as I was working fulltime in the mainframe world, I didn't really feel I could get hands-on so in '82 I bought a BBC Model B and the BASIC implementation was about the best around at the time. From a programming point of view it had a powerful BASIC which included sub-routines, procedures and an in-built assembler. Yes, you could include assembly language programming (6502) within a BASIC program that would compile when run. A very powerful facility at the time.
I helped start a computer club at RAF Lossiemouth and was responsible for the purchase of 20 of the BBC micros and then moved down to RAF Northolt where I did the same again but this time got 30 of them. Happy days
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Thank you for watching, please also see the video description for links to further viewing and reading on the story of this fascinating machine. What are your memories of the BBC Micro, did you have one at home or at school and can you remember what you did with yours? I'd love to hear your stories. Neil - RMC
ALAS! I've never had the opportunity to use a BEEB computer; they were quite rare here in Denmark. As far as i can tell, we mainly used Sinclairs, Amstrads, and Commodores here - plus a few obscure and little known machines like the Lambda/Power/Marathon chinese ZX81 clones which weren't that good.
@@mjhartlebury fixed, thanks for spotting that
I had an Electron in my early teens as a BBC B was too expensive for my Dad to buy me, but luckily my school had a newly-built computer suite with around 20 BBC Masters, although not using Econet but did have dual disk drives. Therefore, game piracy was rife as I had a lot of dual-format Electron/BBC games and so could duplicate them and swap disks around with kids. I bought my own BBC Master in my 20's as I'd kept a lot of software I'd written, and still have it now that I'm well into my forties. It has had it's battery changed but I'm interest in your Part 2 as I haven't re-capped anything PSU-wise if that's where it might be going. I have a career in IT thanks to Acorn, the BBC and my school for promoting computer usage.
I did my GCE O level in computer studies on a BBC Micro at school and a Electron at home. I remember the programme i wrote was a Pub Quiz type thing, I kept running out of RAM, hitting the end of the 32k space. So had to keep going back and simplifying things and creating more subroutines to slim things down.
My father was involved in the computer club at the school where he taught, and frequently brought a BBC Micro home with him for the holidays, so I got to use it then without needing to buy one (a bonus, as they weren't cheap). The only drawback: games were banned. Unless I wrote them myself. Talk about a motivator... when I did eventually get to school, with a network of BBC Masters running off an Econet file server in a locked booth (a good thing as the 20MB Winchester had a squeaky bearing and it screamed constantly), I ended up using a good half of that disk with my own stuff. Sadly, before I had a chance to make backups it got struck by lightning.
This is broadcast quality. This channel keeps getting better and better.
My parents bought A BBC model B in about 1982/3 (I was 10/11) and as I got interested in it also bought pretty much every accessory for it (2nd processor, all the ROMs, Teletext adaptor, floppy disc drives (dual) ....
35 years later I now have a comfortable life working as an IT engineer for an international company and I thank my parents for that start I was given.
dual drive - as if that's more - well yes it was. We have a dual drive too but it's more than that. Both drives are 40/80 track switchable and 'm pretty sure it'd access both sides of the floppy. We also have the teletext adaptor but not 'all the ROMs' just the TFS ROM and a 'colour dump ROM' which would dump the screen display to a colour printer. Impressing the local gliding club by dumping the day's weather forecast from Ceefax and taking the print-out to the club in the morning.
What I find completely grotesque is I had more opportunities to learn how computers really work in the late 80s than schoolkids do now. School PCs are now completely locked down, and in many schools, if you attempt to write a program on one you'll get suspended. School lessons that teach wordprocessing and spreadsheets are not computer lessons, they are office skill lessons and more akin to teaching kids how to touch type in past decades than what the computer literacy project achieved.
You are far from the only one. And now you know why Eben Upton and his mates created the Raspberry π.
That's appalling! I was fortunate to begin learning about computing in high school considering that I graduated in 1974. One of the math teachers browbeat the school's administration into letting her build a "math lab" and create a for-credit math class called "Computer Analysis." She started with an (write this down) Olivetti-Underwood Programa 101. It's sometimes called the first Personal Computer, but it's really a programmable calculator and the predecessor to the TI-59, the ultimate programmable calculator which came out later in the 70's while I worked at Texas Instruments.. Her lab also had a Model 33 teletype, a telephone and a110 bps acoustic coupler along with user id's on the dual CDC 6000 series system at the University of Texas. I really envied what the BBC did for British kids back in the day, but at least I could afford to shell out the bucks for an Apple II (which I still have). It cost me about $3000 in 1978 but it was worth it. You might have thought I would have bought a TI-99/4, but no! It was appallingly bad at introduction.
In the past decade there was some discussion why schools had stooped teach programing - google "why johnny can't code"
it was 93 or 94 i got to use a computer at school for the first time ever ofc running windows 3.11. and you can guess i felt duped when i get to know kids back in the day really got to use and even program on computers. its like people got lazy
Yeah, we had one in primary school (1987-90 at that particular school) but we just use the games, whatever they were, unimpressive usually (I was used to better on the Acorn Electron at home since 85) when we were in secondary school it was RM Nimbus's and Windows 3x and we only got to learn Excel : ( we had the classroom with PCs as a form room so we sat there often and were able to play Worm (a Snake clone) and TAXI and Solitaire)
Recently rescued some beebs from the loft of my old school. The actual ones I used in primary all those years ago.
My secondary school had a BBC Master stitting in the biology classroom until 2006. Got chucked out the week before I asked if I could have it.
They were still using BBC Masters in train displays until about 10 years ago.
I managed to acquire a 128 Master from my first school along with the monitor and disk drive. I remember my teacher at the time jumping with joy when she was told it was a 128 Master the school was receiving and not a model A or B. No way to know if the BBC Micro I have was that very one. They only had two so it's 50/50. Lots of time playing Granny's Garden and Pod Can on that thing.
" ... which Tangerine could only Dream about" - I see what you did there
that made me lol or roar with bliss.
Tangerine dream good music band
th-cam.com/video/jFfw5mSuEbk/w-d-xo.html
I never had one of these in my school. I was in the first year of secondary school when they came out. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it on TV. It just looked such better quality than any other home computer in the market. I was desperate to get one for Christmas, but we didn’t have much money and my mum told me they couldn’t get me one. Maybe next year if they could save up. Imagine my shock when I unwrapped my one Christmas present to find it was a BBC Micro Model B!! To this day, best present I ever had. Anyone remember the Welcome tape? That was brilliant! It had a teletext game at the end called Twin Kingdom Valley. After I played that all I wanted to do was learn to program. That machine didn’t just teach my BBC Basic, it taught me how to code and set me up for a future career as a software developer and consultant. Brilliant, brilliant computer!
My parents never had much money. We took a holiday away twice in my childhood, both times in the UK. We had a black-and-white 10" TV until I was 13, and it only had two channels, ITV and BBC1. I had to go to my best friend's house to watch _The High Chaparral,_ because it was on BBC 2. _Thunderbirds_ was my favourite childhood TV show, one of the first UK TV series in colour... but I had to take their word for it.
But after I passed all my A Levels (Maths, Add. Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology), a few months before my 19th birthday in November 1981, I was STUNNED by my 19th birthday present from my parents: A BBC Micro, Model B 32k. My father, who worked in British Aerospace, had asked a friend in the computer department what the best home computer was for a technically-minded boy. The sacrifices my parents must have made to afford this... it still brings tears to my eyes. I learnt to write programs and games in BBC BASIC, but this showed its limitations when you had large iterative subroutines, so I learnt 6502 assembly language so I could talk directly to the silicon.
Later, at college, I did a unit on coding. We had these machines called EMMA (I never found out what that stood for). At they were was a hex keyboard and some I/O, and a 6502 processor. I remember the first week we had to do a program to simulate the UK traffic light sequence (Red, Red & Amber, Green, Amber, Red). The lecturer came round after about quarter of an hour and asked me what I was doing, and I said I was doing the flowchart. He said, "You need to get a move on, some of the other students have started to write the code." I said, "I've already written the program, and it works," and I showed him. Baffled, the lecturer said, "But you're supposed to use the flowchart to help you write the program," and I said, "I didn't need one."
As it was, instead of coming into the lesson and writing a program each week, I made a deal that I would come by every three weeks and write three programs. I ended up with a distinction. This was all thanks to the marvellous BBC Micro that my parents so generously bought me.
We got one because my mum was a teacher so you got a discount.
I believe I was about 4 at the time, taking a tape to my dad too load a game, asking him to get it out for me (only one TV so we had to unpack and set it up)
At 10 I learnt basic? Wrote graphics demos and, like, simulating a ball bouncing using the formula for acceleration in gravity.
I also got the 6502 assembler manual, learnt it, but I couldn't figure out what it was for.
Load reg 1 and 2, add, lshift and rshift.
...
At the time I couldn't map it to draw, move, input, etc.
Still haven't _actually_ learnt assembler, not practical assembler anyway.
@@MostlyPennyCat The main use for assembler is to speed up routines that are run over and over again, and take forever in BASIC. As an example, LDA# $10 means load hex 10 (16: in hex base 16, 1 x 16 + 0 x 1) into the accumulator. In hex, the actual language the processor speaks, if I remember rightly, LDA# is A9 in hex. So you would write A9 $10 on an EMMA. There are some good resources online if you're interested in learning 6502 assembler.
I was part of the Domesday BBC/laser disk project back in the 80's, and love the Beeb like it was a family pet. I also just want to say RIP Gareth.
I lived in Germamy at the time and never recognized the BBC micro. I did know the sinclair maschines which I perceived as inadequate. In the last couple of month I am looking at a lot of emulators of machines from the time and I recognized how much better the BBC micro was, compared to Commodore and even Apple or Sinclair. That is a cool piece of kit.
A few years ago someone on TH-cam was talking about their favorite computer movies and ,mentioned Micro Men. I went ahead and watched it, being here in the states, we hear about the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs story all the time, it was cool to see a similar thing going on over there.
Ah, here is my childhood, and the start of my lifelong obsession with computing. 33 years later, still going strong in IT. I owe it all to the BBC Micro. I should get myself one.
There are a lot of people like that. I think its safe to say that this project is one of the reasons the UK is the center for lots of software development (Were one of the leaders in games development for instance)
Same here! Learnt to code on one of these and still work in software development today. The closest I've come to buying one, is just picking up a manual from ebay to read the code.
Same here. I’m still shocked how small and fast emulators are for the bbc. Computer power is so powerful these days, kids have no idea their iPads are more powerful than super computers back in the bbc micro days! 🤡🤡🤡🌍🌍🌍
Yep Me as well . never thought i would ever see a bbc micro again. and has a lot of others it started my life long learning and yearning for all things computers. led to collage and a job as a programmer for BP and my love affair with the best programming language COBOL
My primary school had a total of 4 BBC Micros, when I started secondary school they had about 20 of them. I owe my entire career to the lessons I learned on this wonderful machine.
My folks couldn’t afford a full fledged BBC Micro at the time so I got an Electron.
Finally got my hands on a BBC when my Middle School threw them all in to a skip in the early 90’s and a friend who lived near by let me know about it.
I already had an Amiga by then but finally having my own BBC was still special.
BBC quality stuff for the BBC computer, honestly this is TV worthy would expect to see this on BBC2.
When I first got to secondary school, there was a room of Acorn Atoms, very forward looking school I think in hindsight. They got the upgrade to BBC Basic (rather than the more limited Atom Basic). Because of this we were late getting BBC Micros, but got them about half way through my school life. Did not matter, Computer Science teacher took the 380Z home, added Econet to it, and wrote some software to share the 2nd floppy disk over the Econet port. We had a floppy disk for each class. Amazing stuff for early 80s, even more amazing was the Computer Science teacher. He sold the solution to a couple of other schools for the school coffers. The 380Z ended up being replaced by a BBC Micro with Acron Winchester Drive (10GB Harddrive I think that was the size -why were the call this?). when I left in 1988 the school had just got their first Archimedes.
All the success I have today I owe to that school, and that very clever Computer Science teacher.
I somehow managed to get a free place at a 'posh' high school in Cambridge which got about 12 of these in 1983. The school year below me was the first to be offered 'computer studies' as an o-level, so our year had no actual education on them. They were networked together though, and I remember lunchbreaks where one boy would be at the door keeping lookout while some early game like pac-man loaded on all machines at once from a single tape drive. Ah, the amount of detentions we got, lol.
One of my closest friends was rich enough to have one at home, though, and he showed me how to get started programming in BASIC - something that would prove to be a life-long hobby for me.
Can’t say my old school was posh but we did do pretty well when it came to computers. It got fitted out with a similar set up in about 1982/83 with BBC model B machines and my brother was in the first o-level class in 83-85 and then A-level class 85-87. I started in 84 and after a couple of years we got upgraded to BBC masters and then just before I left we got upgraded again with Archimedes machines which at the time seemed light years ahead of the old BBCs . Did you have a Winchester hard drive by any chance? It was the pride and joy of our computer studies teacher because of its huge capacity.
I have one I've recently refurbished (those old RIFA caps blew, of course)... it's absolutely the best machine of the 80's.... The expandability, the open nature of the hardware and it's adaptability, the various I/O that offered so many options, and a BASIC interpreter that included an in-line assembler... A real triumph of British computing.
This humble little computer is how I started my lifelong career in computing and software. When I bought it, I had no idea what I could do but I knew it was the future. Once I got started I never looked back and what an amazing career it’s been!
Yes, it was my first computer, and I made the trip from France to London back in the days (no, the tunnel didn't exits yet). In my opinion, it was far more advanced than Comodore and Apple. Thank you for this review.
My primary school had one. My year 4 teacher used to code his own basic games and test them out on us so this micro was literally my introduction to gaming. Havent played one since so id love to get my hands on one
@@Lbf5677 i think a lot of it is down to the luck of getting a teacher who is into that kind of thing. I think my teacher did it because he genuinly enjoyed doing it, not because it was part of the job. If there was any kind of tech curriculum my school definatly didnt follow it as he was the only teacher who ever made an effort with that kind of thing
A freak accident put me out of PE for several months. Off-PE class was in the same room that housed the school's Beebs. That was the first time I sat in front of a computer and typed things. I probably wouldn't have had the same friends or my career if it wasn't for that moment.
I must have gone to an affluent school as we had a couple of rooms full of Model B's, they were all connected to ECONET and we also had a Watford Electronics 30MB Winchester hard drive - I also really enjoyed the drama 'Micro Men'.
Ditto. Shift-Break wasn't it, to start the program from the network?
We had 3 rooms on a Second floor of a building with massive steel gates and the classrooms had multiple locks, ah the heat of 25 machines plus 30 school kids just after a PE class it hummed, Then the noise of the 9 pin dot matrix epson printing continually for 15-20 minutes
Micro man was brilliant. Clive Sinclair is a hero of mine.....!
I benefited from the French equivalent of this plan, which you already covered (Thomson MO5's, Goupil PC server, nanoreseau and 'plan informatique pour tous'). I discovered computers thanks to it, became instantly obsessed and it eventually became my lifelong profession. It's hard to imagine than in the early 80's, politicians and the media were visionaries about micros and did something for the good of the people.
Pt1 of Many I hope. This could be Neil's best series, I really enjoyed this - Merry Christmas Neil!
Great video. I used to have one of these plugged into a dial-tune black and white TV. Can honestly say I wouldn't be where I am today without it.
One very very minor point - I don't think that there was ever an econet blanking plate. I remember the one we had was brand new and always had that hole. I remember thinking it was really scary and unsafe as a child!
I always remember my secondary school's computer room fondly. It was on the 4th floor and had a huge iron door for security. Like something from a bank. We must have had a few dozen BBC Micros in that room, all hooked up to a main computer controlled by the teacher. I never had much interest in computers back then (total tech nut now and the past 25 years, thanks to the Playstation I think) but I did get a slight twinge of interest when I saw someone had replicated Bomb the Bass's Into the Dragon album cover on a sheet of A4 on a Dot Matrix printer. I was like "woah, you can make your own posters". Wish it had got me more interested back then, although I was almost ready to leave school not long after. Pure nostalgia just looking at the machine though. Built like a tank to boot.
Still have mine from 1982, 5 1/4” floppy drive still working perfectly...happy memories from my school days
As a german pupil in that days i just envied the english/british for the many companies making computers and then even bringing them into the schools. We had nothing like that. Even worse, society and politicans were discussing if young people should have any contacts with this devil computers at all.
Greetings from a RISC-OS user - even nowadays.
This was ridiculously well presented, brings back many memories for me in school anyone remember Podd .
Podd can pop!
Nicely put together! Looking forward to part 2!
I remember my first student exchange in the late 80's, being welcomed in the family of a very British school teacher whom had custody of the school's BBC micro for the duration of the Easter holidays... My taste for the language was already high, but it really kicked my interest for computing into high gear, it was miles ahead of whatever we had in France at the time.
We had Tandy TRS 80s as first computers at school. So valuable, during the Christmas holidays, the teachers took them home - so if the school was broken into, they'd not get nicked. For info, it takes 6 hours to defrost a TRS 80 before it'll boot up having been left in the teacher's car over the holidays !
Top shelf video. Very interesting story. Here in Australia we are always in lock step with the USA and so we did not have the BBC micro. My kids had an Apple II in their classroom. I’m from the Stone Age - slide rules morphing into calculators in the early 1970’s.
The BBC Micro were actually very common in a lot of Australian schools, at least government schools. They certainly were in Tasmania and I’ve read that WA, SA and some other states were in lockstep to pool software and teaching strategies in the mid-1980s. Tassie stuck with the BBCs and later Archimedes systems well into the 90s… I was doing CAD classes on an A410 in 1995.
Love it, we upgraded the crap out of our model b. First with disk drives then dual disk drives making 3 in total, side ways ram then on the sideways ram icebox then eventually an acorn tube expansion (RISC I think not a legit BBC one custom built) essentially turning it into a supercharged BBC master. Very nearly got an Archimedes but instead went for a 086 very very briefly (like 2-3 months) before getting a 286. I loved that BBC i owe my career to it, i was programming from the age of 7. My dad would go mad at the amount of times i knackered an eprom playing with the sideways ram. We also had an RF/UHF card so i could download programs from teletext, take that internet :)
As for the school bit one day sat in some lesson i can't remember what, a student from another year knocked on the door and said the headmaster wanted to see me in the library. I didn't think i had done anything wrong (or been caught) but was excused from my lesson and went down to the library. Turns out they could not get the BBC's to network and asked if i could do it, I did.
Me and my 5 year older brother then went on to write 3 programs for the BBC (wells lots more really). Mathman (a pac man clone with maths) which was stolen and commercialised and then a bromine gas experiment simulation used to show vacuums and one where you would watch smoke particles bounce off air particles i forget the name of the experiment. The school used them for years even after the rise of the RM nimbus. I loved my BBC
We got a Model B in 1986, that was my first computer and I loved it! The RS423 port could also be used to connect two BBC Computers together and I even remember making up my own cable to connect mine and a friends to transfer programs! Also had to replace the Parallel printer driver chip when it failed; try that on today's computers!!
Growing up in Australia I never came across a BBC Micro (it was all C64 here) but I was always fascinated by it due to the ads in computer magazines
Clicked like first. Then started watching.
That's how it's done :)
I was a Speccy kid, but at school we had lunchtime computer club that had the ZX80, 81, the PET, Vic20 and an Oric.... We then had our computer lab, BBCs on all four walls....geeky heaven. What I really liked about the BBC - BASIC, the keyboard and BASIC :) Fond memories of a really good learning machine - my 4th year project was to write a BBC Basic car garage booking system.
A lot and time and effort put into that. Well done.
Cant wait to see the rest of these episodes.. Hope I get to see Granny's Garden........that's so not a euphemism.
A computer i always wanted, and my friend got one for christmas, it cost £400 in 1985, a walk down memory lane, i had an acorn electron, which i still have in the box up in the loft. A good video very interesting, obviously being a kid then i had no idea what went on behind the scenes.
These videos with the more solemn documentary style are so awesome. I love how you manage to instill such a sense of quiet reverence for the subject matter.
Attended Oundle school in the 80s and we had some kind of connection with Cambridge which meant we had a couple of labs full of these wonderful machines (alongside Electrons, Research Machines 380Zs, 480Zs and other curios).
Towards the end of my time they were connected to a 20MB Winchester drive over an Econet network. But in the early days the network had a dual double-sided floppy disk drive with (I think) 800K storage.
My school life revolved around the computer lab (to the detriment of social interaction and some grades!). This machine was responsible for my career.
Well done Acorn, the BBC and the government of the time. Maybe today’s government could get past its ideological idiocy and get behind projects like this and remember the unique power that the BBC has to reach a nation.
Proud Canadian owner of a BBC Model B+ , cant be many of us in North America but what an awesome machine
Strange how memories are triggered - as soon as I saw the Cub monitor, "Microvitec" came to mind, plus remembering one of my friends had one and I seem to recall it played awesome music while waiting for Elite to load? I had the Atari 800XL, and another friend had the Texas Instruments TI99/4A, and our secondary school had Research Machines 380Z & 480Z. We often went to each other's houses to play on whatever the latest cool game was. Truly a time where no one really cared about compatibility, you just got whatever computer you liked, or could afford.
1st computer at my sec school was an Exidy Sorcerer. For teacher use only ! TRS 80 I-2 became the pupils' machine. A ZX80 and a 380Z appeared as well. Of course Microvitec and econet came to mind with the CUB monitor but not at my school ! The BBC B was our first home computer - and we still have the computer desk dad made for it built out of old caravan furniture !
I started working in the Norwich Union IT department in 1979 so I missed out on micro computers in school. In school I had to use a teletype which communicated of the phone to the mainframe at Norwich City College. My first personal computer was a Nascom 2 followed by an Atari 800xl.
Brilliant stuff! I first used a Beeb in 1982 at school, and first got my own in 1992 (I'd had to make do with ZX81, Spectrum, Aquarius and MSX before then). Since 1992 I have always owned at least one Beeb, and at one point I adopted an entire primary school's worth that was otherwise headed for a skip. Numbers are gradually becoming sensible, as I slowly sell them off on ebay. I shall keep a B and a Master for sure. Eagerly awaiting the next episode!
An awesome thing with the bbc was that as you started to outgrow basic you could inline code assemble directly in your program! Something I needed the expert cartridge for on the c64.
This is exceptional, even by your already high bar of quality content.
Thank you old friend
@@RMCRetro Quite welcome. Can't wait to watch the rest of this series.
Ahh, old Geordie Racer - My Dad did (still does) race pigeons so that program is a double nostalgia hit for me ;)
I can still remember the music bleeping out of that mono speaker
I started primary school in 1994 and the classroom computer was still a BBC micro. I don't have a BBC myself, but I do own mint condition copies of Granny's Garden and Flowers of Crystal, the first video games I ever played and the most vivid memories I have of my primary school years
In France we had the Thomson TO5 and TO7 models (I wasn't born at the time but I found one randomly in an attic the other day...along with an Amstrad)
These days I feel like we've stepped back when it comes to all that, we don't teach the young how to use their devices for work anymore, we instead forbid them from using them on school ground, what a waste.
I was in school back in the days you see through rose-tinted glasses now. Most of the time, the computers that were bought and shipped to the schools by the government stayed in their boxes well past their expiry date unless a Minister of some kind had a visit scheduled, and a computer room had to be proped like a film set for showing off purposes. Teachers had no time, no money and no credit to learn computing for themselves, and even less of those to build lectures around and with them. So unless you had an exceptionally selfless and motivated teacher, your chances to use a computer in school in the mid-late eighties were close to nil. In France, the "Plan Informatique pour Tous" was a ploy to inject public money into Thomson to save the semi public company from keeling over. Pupils were never a front and centre concern.
@@ordinosaurs I have come across that name before but being British I have never seen one in the wild as it were. In fact hasn't RMC done a video on Thompson?
We had the econet setup in an Australian School back in the early nineties. It was slow but had modules which stored games, programs and more. However... the network would work sometimes and it always crashed after 15+ students used it simultaneously, I had very little time using them but heavily wanted one. Too bad people sell these way out of my budget. But it’s a real surprise of how awesome technology was rapidly becoming more connected as we grown older
I was trying to decide what channel to subscribe to and give my money too, after watching your videos, some more than twice i have to say you draw me in everytime, im a retro pc man at heart and your channel does that justice. You take me back to my childhood and some of the machines i owned before life took some bad turns. You really are a gentleman that shows in your videos, thanyou Neil for this channel
That's very kind thank you Tommy
Another great video, Neil. My school had a room of Beebs, all connected to Econet. Then we decided to write 2nd level password programs on our few KB of hard disk space... Until the computer studies teacher asked us to remove them as he couldn't circumvent it! Those were the days!!
This, and the electron still have the best keyboard to date, never found a PC equivalent to its clicky satisfaction
One of the great things about the BBC Micro was that it had an actual operating system. Most other micros of the day were essentially CPUs in a box --- there would be a simple I/O layer with Microsoft Basic bolted on top, bodgable in various ways to allow access to devices, but once you outgrew the terrible Basic you ended up coding for the bare metal in machine code. The BBC Micro had pluggable filesystems, application ROMs, a proper system call interface, an administration shell, and all the abstraction layers needed to isolate the application from the actual hardware. If you used a Tube with the 6502 second processor, that system actually ran a completely different OS --- but it presented the same system call interface, so (well behaved) software would run on it just fine. The built-in Basic, which was superb, was just another application ROM; the Econet software just another file system (giving access to all your files on a remote file server).
I stupidly sold my BBC Micro B, double disk drives and Z80 second processor more than 20 years ago. Loved that machine.
Wow, the new full-time approach is really bringing the already great production value right up! This is amazing!
That 1978 Horizon programme was the start of it for me. The 13 year old me was lucky enough to see the broadcast. 40 years later I’m still working in the industry as a sw engineer (via 5 years as an engineer at the BBC)
I have two of these still. Not been turned on for years. Need to watch the essential work part, and just remember them so fondly. I'm a programmer in no small part because of the BBC Micros at school.
The 16k BBC Basic Rom had a great assembler, they packed a lot into that 16k. I remember the first proper Machine Code program I wrote was to Unlock protected cassette based games so I could copy them to disk, and I was very proud of it LOL. All the information I needed was in the Basic Manual, a very unsecure copy protection.
I'm looking forward to this series. The whole BBC Micro thing passed me by completely. My middle school didn't have any computers and my secondary school had jumped down the Commodore road, so although I knew of the machine I have yet to even touch one.
My CHILDHOOD! Even in the early 1990s, this was the computer we were introduced to at primary school. Later, the Acorn. I have such happy memories of POD
I remember we figured out that if you flicked the tab up on the floppy drive while a game was loading it would break with an error. You could then type "LIST". Which is how we got the password for Granny's Garden Pt 2. Cracked.
It makes a person wonder where UK computing would be if Margaret Thatcher hadn't destroyed the government's support for public computer education.
Looks like the U.K. survived nonetheless.
@@infinitecanadian Exactly. Why endeavor to thrive when you can merely survive.
@@CAHSR2020 The United Kingdom _did_ thrive. In less than a decade the first of the powerful Acorn Archimedes line of computers was launched.
It is still around, many of the gaming companies founded on those micros are still churning out praised games today (Rockstar North anyone?).
Never mind that ARM powers most of the world outside of the desktop PC (though actual production happens anywhere but UK).
The basic thing though is that unless you wear your nation's flag on your chest, it is hard to tell that you are not US based when all your marketing and such is in English.
The Witch is dead, but I don't think she managed to kill all the computer enthusiasts before she went to hell.
Nicely put together video on an important computer. I bought the Acorn Atom as my first venture into computing and its sat in its orginal box upstairs, must dig it out one day soon. It started with 2K ram using 2114 ram chips which have metal top for heat dispation. I did add more ram but over 4K the supply line ripple became so bad producing a hum bar moving continuosly down the screen. What amazes me is the flexibility of the BBC micro runing on only a 2Mhz 6502 8 bit processor, running basic and driving a video generator chip, quite an achievement.
My memories of the BBC micro may have started in middle school in the mid 80s. We had a computer at the back of the room and the teachers weren't great with it so they used to ask, I forget his name, a kid in our class to set it up for them. He'd do everything for them, printing out as well. But I can't really remember if it was a BBC or not. However a very clear memory was late 80s in high school. Gunnersbury Boys School. 1st year we had a room full of BBCs with the monitors. I wasn't fully into computers back then but enjoyed the lessons but it was 2 to a computer. And whoever I was ever with would always take over so I'd never get a proper go. All we had at home was a zx81 and I never really liked it. Hated the keyboard. Would of loved a BBC but there being 4 of us mum & dad could never afford one & they knew I'd get bored. Now I love computers and the history of them. Will always have a fond memory of the BBC despite never owning one.
This is like watching an actual TV show. Great production.
I think my school was somewhere in the middle. We had an acorn Archimedes per classroom... I remember getting the chance to use it once a week with my now brother-in-law who was also computer mad. Happy days, glad to see the UK still involved in pioneering educational computing such as raspberry pi and BBC microbit. I hope my two kids will enjoy computing as much as I do.
I went to a council estate school, we didn’t have access to BBC micros , but most of us had our own micro at home , I had a zx81 , later I had a C 16 , and a +4 after that , I didn’t get to even see a BBC until 1986 in college , what a lovely machine , a proper computer with all the things you really need , yeah the home micros had the games , but the BBC was a proper computer
Interesting item.. I loved the BBC micro (I never could afford one here in Australia) but I had a Australian made microbee 128 as the first computer and I did use it with a modem to a telephone bulletin board and this was Omen and they had a TRS80 as the main computer there and the guys had lots of hard drives and it even auto-answered the modem calls..
Pity I never had a film camera on me then.
had a chance to play with one about 20-30 years ago -- aunt's neighbor in east anglia had one. thing that struck me at first was just how well-designed the thing was. still remember how incredible the keyboard was to type on!
i grew up in this era lol, i still have my BeeB in cupboard behind me witha 40/80 track floppy drive, loved it, best keyboard ever and the BBC B Basic was so good, enjoying this
That switch on sound takes me straight back to primary school and the little rooms our computer was in. I have one her but I've got to repair the monitor. I should get on and fix it....
I'm looking forward to this series of videos.
Fascinating. Here in Australia we had the Z80 based Microbee as the standard text based school computer. The C64 had pushed them out of the computer room, into dark corners of the library by the time I got to highschool in 1986.
My primery school had 3 BBC's for the whole school but my secondery had a whole room and a dedicated IT lesson each week.
BBC BASIC - I have good memories of that era.
The Acorn Electron was my first Home Computer and the'BBC' BASIC got me into programming.
I now 35 years on I program CNC engineering machinery lol.
Over in the States we used Apple IIs, lots of good memories with those old computers. A fun time to be a kid, it felt like the future would be a whole new world.
Our school took part in the Domesday Project and we had a classroom full of them I enjoyed using it
Listening to you, it was like Ian McNaught-Davis was back with us. Wonderful start to the series, seems like it's going to be a great journey. If you wanted to be an ARM developer (ARM 1) in the early days, you would have bought the ARM "co-pro" for your beeb. It is a real credit to the OS that anything can be plugged in and use the beeb for all user interaction and access to storage, leaving the co-pro to get on with some heavy lifting.
Fantastic video, I still have my childhood bbc b micro , cub monitor and cumana disc drive... we had beebs and masters at my high school all networked with econet...... happy days.... mine is a bit of a time machine for me...takes me back to a simpler time..cheers
Neil acting as a BBC presenter in front of the BBC Micro is definitely an interesting switch up!
THE machine that got me into computers.
Seeing that "Welcome" pack brings back memories of my BBC B 32k!
I still think that John Coll's reference guide is one of the best programming tutorials of all time.
The Basic on this was the best of it's time. So fast and easy to do 'structured' programming with procedures. Just brilliant. My beeb needed a new psu and keyboard but still going strong!
Flowers of Crystal and Grannies Garden were the two games I remember the most, I also remember rushing through my work to get a chance to play on the single BBC B we had in the classroom!
I didn't start school until 1990 though so by the time I got to junior school they had started to swap over to the Acorn Archemedies computers and Pc's were the norm when I got to senior school.
I just started watching TH-cam videos related to the BBC computer. Next week I am considering buying one on eBay. I did come across them in the eighties when as a part time teacher I taught basic I.T. using the BBC computer. It will be a BBC B computer I am going to buy.
First time i played on a BBC Micro and seen one was back in around 1989 when i lived in a bedsit with my girlfriend in Stoke village in Plymouth when we made friends with the girl next door who was a teacher and had brought the computer home that weekend, don,t can not remember why she brought it home,but i loved it.
First computer I ever laid my hands on, I remember it being wheeled into the class on its trolley. We only had one for the whole school, infants and juniors so it had to be booked by the teachers for classes. Later on another was added and put on the trolley while the original got a permanent home in the school library.
We've got 3 of them and I totally agree. There is something very special indeed about this machine! Probably one of the reasons I love watching "Micro Men" so much. I have such very find memories of using a Beeb when they came out at school,. Then a friend had one at home, so I spent time using his playing Elite and Starship Command, then later on there was one at my work experience placement that controlled a dynamo test rig! Awesome machine and kick started so many careers. :)
I remember the BBC Micro from primary school and we had an Acorn Electron at home. Great times.
BBC Micros at school in Australia, along with a Archimedes file server. Electron with Plus 1 expansion at home I had to buy in UK on holiday. I even had a third party mouse ! Played Elite, a lot. Lovely stuff.
Built like tanks and such a recognisable sound from those keys. I have one in similar condition to this with an SD card adaptor on it. Love it to bits!
I had one - loved it (including sideways RAM, Dual floppy’s and Z80 2nd processor)!!! This is great start to a series that I’m really looking forward to.👍👍👍
My old firm was still using the machines in 2016, they run the test software when we did burn in on our equipment
Ah the memories from primary school. Grannies garden, and zapping colleagues by touching the screen, and another pupil as it turned on and it gave an almighty shock to the pupil.
I have great memories of the BBC and also the RM Nimbus PC's that followed in the 90's. We felt like mad scientists writing our own computer programs on the BBC to control giant robots in our maths classes. I learnt BASIC and then Visual Basic at my school. Our school had loads of games as well. Once our school switched over to Nimbus PC's, me and my friends used to play games on them and make electronic music.
I bought a Sinclair ZX81 in '81 to learn BASIC programming. I was 30 years old and as I was working fulltime in the mainframe world, I didn't really feel I could get hands-on so in '82 I bought a BBC Model B and the BASIC implementation was about the best around at the time. From a programming point of view it had a powerful BASIC which included sub-routines, procedures and an in-built assembler. Yes, you could include assembly language programming (6502) within a BASIC program that would compile when run. A very powerful facility at the time.
I helped start a computer club at RAF Lossiemouth and was responsible for the purchase of 20 of the BBC micros and then moved down to RAF Northolt where I did the same again but this time got 30 of them. Happy days