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A comment on BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [video].

Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by 72deluxe on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @06:00AM (#26248714)
My dad still has many in his loft as my secondary school chucked them out late 90s and we took them. They were even considered old rubbish when I was in middle school; that school had 1 Archimedes that sat forlornly in the corner.

I was using it in the early 90s when everyone else was playing on their Sega and early PCs. We were poor so had to make do with very last-generation tech. I enjoyed playing games on it and then got a programming book (Advanced Programming Techniques for the BBC Micro my Jim McGregor and Alan Watt - I bought a copy recently) from my school library as a teenager with thoughts of writing a game, when Pentiums IIs were appearing... the folly. I did my homework on its word processor and printed it out with a deafening Epson, which looked pretty rubbish compared to my contempory's Encarta-pictured-studded inkjet printouts with WordArt. Oh well.

As it turned out, the programming book was very interesting and had all manner of stuff in it I didn't understand like 3D programming methods with maths I didn't understand, but I did design my own glyph and animate it walking across the screen after designing it on grid paper.

My dad still has all the disk drives, second processor, A, B, B+ and Master units in his loft along with a series of Cub monitors. And various eeproms like Speech, View etc, and an AMX mouse. Even had an Integrex colour inkjet which I managed to get some output from (very quiet), but that went to the bin some years ago. I think he has all the manuals too.

Really fond of the Beeb as it served me well and introduced me to programming despite the inadequacies of the keybord. Will have to grab a Master from him. I certainly do miss the instant start-up time...

I ended up doing my paper round as a teenager and spending the money on PC Plus and Micromart in the hope of buying a PC but had to do with ones school threw out again, so I was languishing on a 486 DX2 when PIIIs and Celerons were around, but I don't regret it. Introduced me to Linux RedHat 6.2 and many more exciting computer journeys.

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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by sloucher on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @06:12AM (#26248771)
>inadequacies of the keyboard

cough ZX-Spectrum cough

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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by protomyth on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @06:50AM (#26248978)
cough Atari 400 cough

At least you could buy a cool replacement keyboard.

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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by 72deluxe on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @07:18AM (#26249119)
I used a ZX81 too and my word was that a bad keyboard!
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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by dboreham on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @07:43AM (#26249265)
Not as bad as a MK14.
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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by barrkel on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @06:22AM (#26248828)
Hey, I used to hang around toy shops and program on display C64 and CPC 464 and, in one shop, an Acorn Archimedes A3000.

I even wrote programs in VTech BASIC, on toy computers with 40x2 character (IIRC - definitely two lines, not sure about columns) LCD displays.

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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by jacquesm on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @07:30AM (#26249186)
Compared to your average 8 bitter at the time the keyboard of the BBC was pretty good. It was also the only one that didn't fail after a couple of weeks of heavy use.
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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by Mauricebranagh on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @08:02AM (#26249394)
It also had much nicer graphics.

At my first job we used one as colour front end to a PDP 11/03 that was attached to a huge hydrodynamic model- It largest physical model in the world at the time and used 1/3 of our entire lab space related to a nuke plant in China.

When the Chinese delegation arrived they where stunned by the BBC micro and apparently spent the next weekend scouring the area for BBC micros to take back.

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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by julian55 on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @10:35AM (#26250970)
Interesting, my first job was also in hydrodynamic modelling using PDP-11/03 for data capture! I wonder if it was the same place? I left there in 1982 and I don't think they had any BBC Micros at that time.
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Re:BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [... by Mauricebranagh on Thursday February 25, 2021 @07:01AM (#26261988)
BHRA (BHR Group now)
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