BBC Microcomputers

[roobarb!]

Hey everyone,

Apologies that I've not done so much with the OpenFrames as I would have liked recently, but I've been rediscovering my old pal, the 8-bit BBC Micro!

What is now my Model B was bought new back in 1982(ish) by my Dad. While searching for bits and pieces for it, I developed a habit of taking pity on the worst examples I saw on eBay, then fixing them up. Unfortunately for the home office, I appear not to have sold any yet...

In case any of you are ex-Beebers, there's a(nother) great community of very talented people on the Stardot forum. I'm really enjoying the @bbcmicrobot project and just finished wasting some of Twitter's bandwidth on @birdslikewires showing some of the code running on real hardware. Not sure 7-year-old me could have comprehended that when I was failing to play Elite back in the eighties.

Of course, kids these days..

Hope you're all keeping well!

[BuZz]

Love the BBC Micro. Got a couple in the loft (Including a Master) - I really should dust one off. Was one of the first computers I programmed on. Will check your twitter out thanks!

[hawsey]

Hey everyone,

Apologies that I've not done so much with the OpenFrames as I would have liked recently, but I've been rediscovering my old pal, the 8-bit BBC Micro!

What is now my Model B was bought new back in 1982(ish) by my Dad. While searching for bits and pieces for it, I developed a habit of taking pity on the worst examples I saw on eBay, then fixing them up. Unfortunately for the home office, I appear not to have sold any yet...

In case any of you are ex-Beebers, there's a(nother) great community of very talented people on the Stardot forum. I'm really enjoying the @bbcmicrobot project and just finished wasting some of Twitter's bandwidth on @birdslikewires showing some of the code running on real hardware. Not sure 7-year-old me could have comprehended that when I was failing to play Elite back in the eighties.

Of course, kids these days..

Hope you're all keeping well!

I've only ever used a BBC at school and a couple of times on the Doomsday Laser disc set up that they had , it was sort of the internet before it existed .
Also recently had my hands on a Merlin Tonto ( ICL OPD ) which is a strange device based on a Sinclair QL chip but has a telephone handset . The large colour monitor it comes with which also provides power to the Computer is actually a BBC colour monitor I've been informed .
There is also a Facebook page for the Doomsday project but I believe they are more interested in the discs an preserving them than the BBC computer set up .

Sent from my VOG-L29 using Tapatalk

[roobarb!]

I've only ever used a BBC at school and a couple of times on the Doomsday Laser disc set up that they had , it was sort of the internet before it existed .

A friend of mine, who I've not seen in many years, was the UK side of the CAMiLEON project which first read the data from those laserdiscs. Got to play with some of the kit in his office at Leeds, where I was an undergrad at the time. Lovely fella and a far better pool player than me.

We didn't get Domesday at my school, but we did have loan of a PC laserdisc system which, amongst other things, had an interactive laserdisc road safety disc which blew my mind. Think I was about 10 and I learned absolutely nothing about road safety from that thing. I did learn that laserdiscs are very, very cool and some stuff about genlock and compositing digital output over analogue video. Because laserdisc video is analogue! Wild.

When I visited the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park last year they had a working Domesday system just relaxing in the corner of a room. That place is an absolute tardis, I spent virtually an entire day chatting to the team there before I discovered it.

Actually, five minutes and I'll have a video for you.

Here we go: https://youtu.be/VGNetvuOAbI

[mickchip]

Before I got a BBC computer I had the the Acorn Atom 8 bit computer, they also manufactured the BBC computer.

[hawsey]

When I visited the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park last year they had a working Domesday system just relaxing in the corner of a room. That place is an absolute tardis, I spent virtually an entire day chatting to the team there before I discovered it.

Actually, five minutes and I'll have a video for you.

Here we go: https://youtu.be/VGNetvuOAbI

i would love to go to the Bletchley Park museum , i have fond memories of a training course i did there in the 80s when i was but a young man the video looks great , just like Google Earth , amazing really on an 8 bit Computer .

[roobarb!]

i would love to go to the Bletchley Park museum , i have fond memories of a training course i did there in the 80s when i was but a young man the video looks great , just like Google Earth , amazing really on an 8 bit Computer.

Well, I can highly recommend it. I was down there for something completely different and decided to spend the day before at the museum. I spent most of the day in the first two rooms with all the 50s - 70s kit, refreshing my memory on how instructions sets and memory actually work. Then one of the staff / volunteers said "we're doing the Colossus demo soon" and I remembered that the actual Lorenz code breaking machine was in the next room. Working.

Oh, and they have a full size (and a model) working Turing-Welchman Bombe reconstruction, which was demonstrated to us by absolutely the sharpest lady. She was easily twice my age and easily twice my intelligence. Fantastic.

[hawsey]

i would love to go to the Bletchley Park museum , i have fond memories of a training course i did there in the 80s when i was but a young man the video looks great , just like Google Earth , amazing really on an 8 bit Computer.

Well, I can highly recommend it. I was down there for something completely different and decided to spend the day before at the museum. I spent most of the day in the first two rooms with all the 50s - 70s kit, refreshing my memory on how instructions sets and memory actually work. Then one of the staff / volunteers said "we're doing the Colossus demo soon" and I remembered that the actual Lorenz code breaking machine was in the next room. Working.

Oh, and they have a full size (and a model) working Turing-Welchman Bombe reconstruction, which was demonstrated to us by absolutely the sharpest lady. She was easily twice my age and easily twice my intelligence. Fantastic.

Sounds amazing , I will get down there at some point . Thanks for the info .

Sent from my VOG-L29 using Tapatalk

[Paul Webster]

I went a couple of years ago and spent ages reliving my early career.
Well worth a trip for the history of computing with a UK flavour.
Had a good chat with some of the guides.

[offbeatdave]

Used the BBCs at school as a kid in the 80s before an Acorn Archimedes arrived in 1990. Remarkably there was still a BBC in use in a classroom at the school where I started teaching in 2001!

At home we had any Acorn Electron. Did this make me more or less middle class than BBC users?