The BBC micro model B was the first ever computer I programmed, at the tender age of 8 or 9. My dad was (still is, in fact) working in the computing department at a university all those years ago and managed to get us all kinds of nice little extras.

Like duel floppy drives - no tapes for me! And I didn't even realise how lucky I was until I visited a friend and we spend 20 minutes loading a game from tape. And visited another friend who saved some of his work to tape, only for the tape to get corrupted somehow, so it never loaded again.

Like sideways RAM. I always thought it was called this because it plugged sideways into the motherboard, but apparent this is not so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideways_address_space. This supported an extra 16kB (I think) of memory, and allowed us to run a complete word processor, and my dad used a Pascal compiler - which took up to half an hour to compile his code! I remember him setting it going over dinner... But it used to die on the first compile error found, which did tend to slow things down even more. And we had a daisy-wheel printer, which gave fantastic quality so long as you only required one font at a single size.

Then, a couple of years later, we got a 6502 co-processor connected via the 'tube' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_%28BBC_Micro%29) - an expansion port on the BBC micro. This more than doubled the memory, and ran faster. But various optimizations didn't work. You could no longer write directly to screen address-space, as this was still in the hosts address-space, whereas user programs now executed in the co-processors address space. But, excitingly, there were API calls that allowed you to read/write to/from memory in the host system, so I wrote a (very simple) windowing system that stored the graphics contents beneath each window in the host memory, while executing on the co-processor.

The most ambitious programme I ever wrote was a sideways scrolling shooter game, which was written almost entirely in assembly, and could have up to 50 moving sprites on the screen at the same time without dropping frame-rate. Sadly I never fully completed it, as my dad had just got his first PC at the time and I moved over fairly quickly.

And of course, no discussion of the BBC is complete without mentioning Elite, which was a truely awesome game. They completely re-implemented line drawing routines, as the inbuilt ones weren't fast enough. And they used two screen modes _at the same time_ to allow high definition at the top of the screen, but only in black and white; and lower definition, but in colour, at the bottom of the screen. Try doing _that_ on a PC!

Sigh... Wonderful times... And all in less than 32kB of memory...