a few errors in your presentation:- the Master didn't 'include' a teletext adapter - it used the same adapter aka 'wedge' as the Model B. And the Prestel wedge was a very different ( ie not the same ) wedge to the Teletext unit. The Master also didn't come with the 80186 co pro - that was the very specialised Master 512,, designed to allow the master to run DOS and the GEM desktop. most masters came standard with no copro - the most popular co pro was the 65C12 co pro which ran at 3Mhz instead of 2Mhz. the X80 Co Pro allowed the Beebs to run CP/M and were also used by the Econet system to increase network file server speeds.
It's also worth noting that Teletext pages are hexadecimal numbers from 100 to 8FF (coded as 0FF) but pages with A-F in them are not accessible via remote controls other than via fastext shortcuts. The A-F pages were most notably used on Teletext's Bamboozle quiz for multiple choice answers but also used for engineering and PDC status pages. An additional note, pages are normally broadcast as magazines (100-1FF, 200-2FF and so on) but they can also be broadcast in serial (as done by SAT 1 Text in Germany).
I'm an American who learned of the Beeb long after it was a current machine. I managed to acquire a really nicely refurbished one and I have to say... Wow. It's a hell of a machine! I'm basically an Apple ][ user, but I can totally see myself being obsessed with the BBC Micro had I grown up in the UK. BBC Basic is amazing. Sideways ROMs are fantastic. And the Tube? Pure genius. I am a fan!
£399 for the Model B was a lot of money back in 1981 so it was out of reach of the average person. It was always the rich kids at school who had a Beeb at home. The 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 were both cheaper than the Beeb. Mind you if you could have afforded an Apple II back then you might've gone for a Beeb.
The Risc PC didn't offer any more MS DOS/Windows compatibility than the Archimedes, and indeed the Risc PC was an Archimedes mk2 with a new IOMD/VIDC chipset and compatibility with the new ARMv4 CPUs but with different branding. The Archimedes brand was dropped some time before with the Ax000 machines, only the Ax00 were ever called Archimedes by Acorn. The notable features of the new machine were the new multi-cpu support with 2 dedicated CPU slots (RISC OS never supported multiple ARM CPUs though), an improved but compatible Podule expansion bus (which finally supported DMA for at least two slots!) and an expandable modular case design. The incompatibilities only came from software trying to access hardware directly and/or differences in the CPUs, especially for machines equipped with a StrongARM. RISC OS itself maintained backwards compatibility. This mostly came down to games which tend to do more direct hardware programming for optimal performance. The DOS/Windows support was via the Aleph1 designed and built "PC Card" which already existed for the Archimedes and used the same PC virtualisation software. It was just redesigned to fit into one of the new CPU slots instead of using the Podule bus.
Whooooaaah HOLY shit acorn archimedes computer with an ARM cpu was already released in 1987??? That’s just absolutely incredible because for years i only tout that a prototype ARM was created at the time BUT that such chip will not be used yet untill the late 90’s, Seriously,this is sometjing i consider absolutely INCREDIBLE considering it’s time period when 16bit computers were just startint to raise up,and the fact that it was extreamly ahead of it’s time being 32bit all in 1987,holy cow just mind blowing🙏
Marvellous video! It bought back many happy memories of the Beeb! Thanks so much. My dad taught IT and electronics at a University and we had many different types of computers around the house. One of them was the BBC and we had a 1 megabyte hard disk drive for it, and my school mates didn't believe that we had such a thing, so I invited them over to see it. So many minds blown! Dad got so annoyed by the noise of me playing games, he made soldered a volume control into the BBC (no idea how he did it). And he used University equipment to copy the expansion chips, so we had our own speech chip and graphics chip which added commands for drawing more complex shapes. The BBC was an amazingly upgradable bit of hardware, and since dad taught at degree level his showed us his smarter student`s projects - one of them was a cartridge port that could instantly load software, but he never put games on it despite my constant begging!
Here in the USA, many of us saw the computer on The Computer Programme, shown on Public Television stations here. But we couldn't get the computer in stores, so ... oh well!
Regarding the Basic, my understanding is that Bill Gates tried to sell its MS-Basic to Acorn, who declined as they said they already had a very good Basic written by Sophie Wilson. Regarding the BBC Micro being sold in the U.S., the FCC strict rules on electromagnetic emissions were a major headache for the machine and its many I/O ports. But to be fair I don't know if the Beeb sold well in continental Europe either. Regarding the Archimedes, this machine deserves its own dedicated "10 Amazing facts" video.
How good was the early Archimedes! I remember looking at Zarch playing on it and then looking at the conversions called virus on the AtariST and the Amiga and realising just how powerful the Architecture of the Arm chip was. ( it was also considerably dearer as well but pointed to a future we would see in the coming years )
I think I got my BBC Model B for Christmas 1984 - as they were so expensive it was a joint present shared between my parents and grandparents, and my Commodore VIC-20 had to be sold to put towards the cost. I still have it today, so shows it was a good investment to last this long. Also where I was working in the late 1990's had a BBC Master compact - didn't know what it was at the time, as it just looked like a BBC Micro keyboard in a smaller case connected to another box, no idea what happened to it.
Just not long had my BBC refurbished. Still have Chuckie Egg, Castle Quest and Twin Kingdom Valley and they really bring back memories! Well that amazing fact that I never knew Stanley Baxter was on an advert for the BBC!
Something that makes your channel unique amongst all the others is how you dredge up all the related adverts and media. You do your research thoroughly and you do so because of a genuine passion for the subject. It really makes a difference! Keep up the excellent edu-taining work! 😊
Every single teletext enabled tv I have ever used had a HOLD button that allowed you to block pages from changing into the next one of a Page/Total series. Never had any issue with being too slow to read the text. The only issue is that in the background, it would keep loading, so if you released hold, you might be shown the page 3 or 4 after if it took you a long time to finish reading.
Excellent video, but got a bit of a correction. The Tube interface was so called because other computers had a "Bus" interface. Get it? Very cool. The expansion processors were just devices that connected to The Tube. They weren't actually The Tube.
I was destined to get the archemdies in the late 80’s but the Amiga somehow won my heart. Fascinating history of the BBC micro, although little costly and out of reach I still adored the machines and the design principles behind them.
The BBC Micro has intrigued me ever since I watched Micro Men. It makes me think of the Apple II due to integration in schools, but I also see feature sets that remind me of the Commodore 64, while still being it's own unique machine. If collecting a machine, do you recommend a BBC Master over other variants? I believe I'm morally obligated to eventually buy an Acorn Electron for obvious reasons, but it sounds like there are better machines to collect.
'you are lost in the mist' but I just came from that direction! ah the later Archie me & a few others took over the side of the room with the Archies, good fun with Zarch
Please people correct me here, but I think that Teletext signal would be broadcast within a few lines that fell out of the overscan area and thus were not visible on screen, and that's one of the reasons there was no teletex in NTSC lands, at least not in the way we had in Europe: they had no lines to spare. I remember adjusting the overscan on a tv we used to own (the tv cropped like 1 cm top and bottom and I got tired of stuff getting out of bounds, so I twiddled with a screw and voila) and you conld see a bunch of lines with gibberish under the broadcast at all time.
I think the popularity or success of the BBC Master was a regional thing, as to this day I've never actually seen a BBC Master in person. Both schools I went to only ever had the regular Model B and they later upgraded to either an Acorn Archimedes/RiscPC or straight to RM PCs.
At university of Botswana, I've seen these micro computers in the storage area of the physics department. They were probably donated when the university opened in 80s. It's not known if they're still functioning.
Yes, only at school....in the library playing Blockbusters when it rained and we couldn't play footy, or during maths when playing snooker (for angles)...
I must admit as a Sinclair ZX Spectrum user I always wished I could have afforded a BBC Micro Model B with its very expandable system and excellent keyboard. The Master System was also fantastic, BBC Basic was excellent. SuperBASIC on the QL came very close but was nowhere near as fast although very extensible.
Ah yes nostalgia blast, BBC at school with games linked to Geordie Racer or whatever the educational show was at the time! If were lucky got to play centipede! I distinctly remember a programme to design an Easter bonnet l!? 😅but no idea what it was! Greatv system, as like u said that noone could really afford at home!! Nice informative vid man, yes I am old enough to remember Bamboozle on Ceefax too!! 😅👍
I'm Portuguese, and never saw one in Portugal, not even on the many magazines I bought at the time. I suppose it was a very British thing. By the way, at the time, I would never buy such an expensive computer with only 32 k of RAM. In the early 80s, the amount of RAM was one of the major selling points, at least in Portugal. Nobody would buy a 32k computer. Even the humble Zx Spectrum had 48k. Never actually knew anybody who did buy a 16k Spectrum. Anyway, it was an interesting video. Thank you 😊
Micros in schools came along as I was ending my time in high school, and I only ever saw one, it was a Research Machines model, I believe. I never got to use it, I think only the maths boffin kids got to do that. I had my own micro at home, though, so I didn't have to compete with others to use it.
I never did acquire a Beeb in my great retro gaming buying spree 10 - 15 years ago. I really wanted to though. I did get an Amstrad CPC 464 with mono monitor and a Sinclair +2 which I never did find the solution for getting a proper color display here in the US. That really dissuaded me to further invest in other PAL region machines.
With the Spectrum you need to get a +2a (black one) or a +3 because they have a proper RGB socket so you wouldn't have problem getting them to work with a U.S. TV or monitor.
In the early 80's, home computing was like the wild west. Who knew what was going to happen, next There were no incremental updates to existing PC's and home computers were all hugely different from each other. The BBC (model B) to me, was the perfect 80's home PC. (although the Electron was a large, plastic dog turd).
The BBC micro represented a lot wrong with the UK IT industry. It was driven by old school ties, and they knew the government would pay for them in education - hence the overspeccing and high price. Acorn already knew lots about what was being asked by the BBC. As much as I hate to admit it, what drove kids learning IT and later games industry wasn't the BBC, it was the spectrum and the low prices. They allowed real ownership, and something that a school BBC would never sanction.... Games. Clive Sinclair hated gaming. He had the right idea for low prices. He missed that it drove home purchases at first , and drove bright lads into learning to make games at a rate that dwarfed even the c64 (which I owned). For all its limitations the speccy truly did drive a generation of it knowledge by being inexpensive.
The Spectrum (and ZX 80/81 before it) certainly deserve a lot of credit, esp. for the UK games industry and getting home users into coding for an affordable price - but they really were aggressively built down to a price, with every corner that could be cut, cut. They were amazing at the price, and fantastic for platform games, but very limited, esp. when it came to more serious uses. Massive kudos for Sinclair for making a computer that actually worked at such a low price and enabled so many people to get into computing - but it just doesn't compare on power, features, versatility or robustness - and choosing it as the schools/computer literacy project machine would have very quickly lead to "buy cheap, buy twice". The BBC Micro spec made it a Swiss-army knife that could do a bit of everything - not just in terms of processing power, but things like a proper keyboard (so it could be used as a credible word processor), parallel printer and serial interfaces, internal sockets for networking and floppy disc interfaces, ROM sockets (often used for wordprocessors or alternative programming languages) a programmable I/O port and analogue inputs (ideal for use in school science). As for BBC BASIC - every nerd homes in on the built-in assembler, but it also featured things like long variable names, named procedures and functions with parameters and local variables, repeat/until loops which made it much better for teaching good programming practice and removed much of the need for GOTO-ridden spaghetti (later versions added even better 'structured programming' features). For what you actually got, it was incredible value c.f. what had come before. My 1981 copy of PCW has the newly launched BBC Micro B at £335. Or you could have an Apple II for £599, a Commodore Pet for £569 or a TRS 80 Model III for £619 (to be fair, the last two come with a display probably worth £100-£150 at the time). For a cheapskate option you could have a VIC 20 for £179 or a Video Genie TRS-80 knockoff for £279. I've used *most* of those and the BBC Micro runs rings around them in terms of power and versatility - the closest competitor is probably the Apple II with its internal expansion slots and actual bit-mapped graphics (the BBC micro has higher res than Apple II and didn't rely on weird hacks to get 4 colour graphics - and was faster) - unfortunately, in those days, US-made computers were insanely expensive in the UK. The 'Micro Men' story is kinda a technological tragedy - Sinclair made the ultimate home machine for games and learning to program on a shoestring, Acorn made an altogether more serious machine for small business, education and serious hobbyists... then rather than doubling down on what they were good at, Sinclair tried to make a serious computer (the QL, AKA "Quite Late") and Acorn tried to make a home machine (the Electron - AKA "a BBC Micro with all the nice bits cut out")... and we all know how that turned out.
A computer I never heard of EVER in the 80s in Spain for obvious reasons, but, I mean, not even a mention of its existence in the UK? None at all. And we had like 2 o 3 different magazines over the years we read and I head of a Dragon or an Oric, but not the BBC or Acorn AT ALL. WEIRD.
The BBC 'brand' actually had prestige, back then. Their commercial competitors in broadcasting - ITV - were reported in the computer press to be considering an 'ITV Micro', though I don't know how serious they were about it. I seem to recall some ill-feeling in the rest of the computer industry toward the BBC and Acorn, and not just Clive Sinclair.
Yeah the BBC had prestige, they were the state broadcaster, played the national anthem, had the most respected journalists etc. An educational computer would sell on their name alone because of that. RE: The ITV Computer - I was researching this online and it seems it was actually developed, but not all the regional broadcasters would sign off on it so it never actually went to market as planned.
the CBC is similar but that didn't equate to high tech - these arent designed by broadcasters and journalists . Its interesting ... CBC here also played BBC programming but it always seemed DATED and archaic as was their own stuff and still is to this day. The 'good' Canadian content is usually produced jointly with the states. the sucky stuff is similar to stupid coronation street type series. There was an excellent GUI based networked computer developed in Ontario but the public servants in that sector continuously tried to block it and they ended up destroying all the machines. BEfore that it was available to all the high schools. Its because those people watched CBC and BBC programming that made them disdainful and resentful. @@TheLairdsLair
The reason we have a games industry is due to the zx spectrum she sold 5 million machines a lot of the software for the bbc is actually illegal it infringes copyright a fact you and everybody glosses over
It was acceptable in the 80s... Every platform had its thinly disguised Pacman, Breakout/Arkanoid, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong knockoffs, and unlicensed film/TV tie-ins ('Star Trek' was a popular one). I don't think it was really established then that you could copyright or patent the idea of a game (still a bit of a grey area today) as long as you didn't step on a trademark or copyrightable character design. That said, some of the Acornsoft arcade clones *did* sail a bit close to the wind and some had to be modified - e.g. later versions of Snapper were modified to give the characters legs (lest someone mistake them for another well-known maze-running fruit eater) and "Defender" had to be re-named "Planetoid" (it was still a really impressive clone...) (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acornsoft) - they had their fair share of original games, though - the most notable being "Elite" and while the Spectrum was the biggest market, the BBC Micro did its bit to help develop the UK games industry.
a few errors in your presentation:-
the Master didn't 'include' a teletext adapter - it used the same adapter aka 'wedge' as the Model B.
And the Prestel wedge was a very different ( ie not the same ) wedge to the Teletext unit.
The Master also didn't come with the 80186 co pro - that was the very specialised Master 512,, designed to allow the master to run DOS and the GEM desktop. most masters came standard with no copro - the most popular co pro was the 65C12 co pro which ran at 3Mhz instead of 2Mhz. the X80 Co Pro allowed the Beebs to run CP/M and were also used by the Econet system to increase network file server speeds.
Thanks for that, really appreciate it. There was a lot of conflicting info online and it was hard for me to work out what was correct.
hello there! 😂 -cruxinc
It's also worth noting that Teletext pages are hexadecimal numbers from 100 to 8FF (coded as 0FF) but pages with A-F in them are not accessible via remote controls other than via fastext shortcuts. The A-F pages were most notably used on Teletext's Bamboozle quiz for multiple choice answers but also used for engineering and PDC status pages. An additional note, pages are normally broadcast as magazines (100-1FF, 200-2FF and so on) but they can also be broadcast in serial (as done by SAT 1 Text in Germany).
Not to nitpick further but the Tube is actually the name for the interface for second processors, not the second processor boxes themselves.
I'm an American who learned of the Beeb long after it was a current machine. I managed to acquire a really nicely refurbished one and I have to say... Wow. It's a hell of a machine! I'm basically an Apple ][ user, but I can totally see myself being obsessed with the BBC Micro had I grown up in the UK. BBC Basic is amazing. Sideways ROMs are fantastic. And the Tube? Pure genius. I am a fan!
£399 for the Model B was a lot of money back in 1981 so it was out of reach of the average person. It was always the rich kids at school who had a Beeb at home. The 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 were both cheaper than the Beeb. Mind you if you could have afforded an Apple II back then you might've gone for a Beeb.
@@Parknest£399 was a hell of a lot cheaper than an Apple ii at the time.
The Risc PC didn't offer any more MS DOS/Windows compatibility than the Archimedes, and indeed the Risc PC was an Archimedes mk2 with a new IOMD/VIDC chipset and compatibility with the new ARMv4 CPUs but with different branding. The Archimedes brand was dropped some time before with the Ax000 machines, only the Ax00 were ever called Archimedes by Acorn. The notable features of the new machine were the new multi-cpu support with 2 dedicated CPU slots (RISC OS never supported multiple ARM CPUs though), an improved but compatible Podule expansion bus (which finally supported DMA for at least two slots!) and an expandable modular case design.
The incompatibilities only came from software trying to access hardware directly and/or differences in the CPUs, especially for machines equipped with a StrongARM. RISC OS itself maintained backwards compatibility. This mostly came down to games which tend to do more direct hardware programming for optimal performance.
The DOS/Windows support was via the Aleph1 designed and built "PC Card" which already existed for the Archimedes and used the same PC virtualisation software. It was just redesigned to fit into one of the new CPU slots instead of using the Podule bus.
This is the one 8 bit system I just wasn't familiar with as I'm Canadian. Thanks young lad. Brilliant content.
Whooooaaah HOLY shit acorn archimedes computer with an ARM cpu was already released in 1987???
That’s just absolutely incredible because for years i only tout that a prototype ARM was created at the time BUT that such chip will not be used yet untill the late 90’s,
Seriously,this is sometjing i consider absolutely INCREDIBLE considering it’s time period when 16bit computers were just startint to raise up,and the fact that it was extreamly ahead of it’s time being 32bit all in 1987,holy cow just mind blowing🙏
Marvellous video! It bought back many happy memories of the Beeb! Thanks so much.
My dad taught IT and electronics at a University and we had many different types of computers around the house. One of them was the BBC and we had a 1 megabyte hard disk drive for it, and my school mates didn't believe that we had such a thing, so I invited them over to see it. So many minds blown!
Dad got so annoyed by the noise of me playing games, he made soldered a volume control into the BBC (no idea how he did it). And he used University equipment to copy the expansion chips, so we had our own speech chip and graphics chip which added commands for drawing more complex shapes.
The BBC was an amazingly upgradable bit of hardware, and since dad taught at degree level his showed us his smarter student`s projects - one of them was a cartridge port that could instantly load software, but he never put games on it despite my constant begging!
Here in the USA, many of us saw the computer on The Computer Programme, shown on Public Television stations here. But we couldn't get the computer in stores, so ... oh well!
Regarding the Basic, my understanding is that Bill Gates tried to sell its MS-Basic to Acorn, who declined as they said they already had a very good Basic written by Sophie Wilson.
Regarding the BBC Micro being sold in the U.S., the FCC strict rules on electromagnetic emissions were a major headache for the machine and its many I/O ports. But to be fair I don't know if the Beeb sold well in continental Europe either.
Regarding the Archimedes, this machine deserves its own dedicated "10 Amazing facts" video.
Yeah I was speaking to somebody in America who has a BBC and he was telling me that it's so heavy you can barely lift it because of all the shielding.
How good was the early Archimedes! I remember looking at Zarch playing on it and then looking at the conversions called virus on the AtariST and the Amiga and realising just how powerful the Architecture of the Arm chip was. ( it was also considerably dearer as well but pointed to a future we would see in the coming years )
I think I got my BBC Model B for Christmas 1984 - as they were so expensive it was a joint present shared between my parents and grandparents, and my Commodore VIC-20 had to be sold to put towards the cost. I still have it today, so shows it was a good investment to last this long. Also where I was working in the late 1990's had a BBC Master compact - didn't know what it was at the time, as it just looked like a BBC Micro keyboard in a smaller case connected to another box, no idea what happened to it.
Just not long had my BBC refurbished. Still have Chuckie Egg, Castle Quest and Twin Kingdom Valley and they really bring back memories! Well that amazing fact that I never knew Stanley Baxter was on an advert for the BBC!
Something that makes your channel unique amongst all the others is how you dredge up all the related adverts and media. You do your research thoroughly and you do so because of a genuine passion for the subject. It really makes a difference! Keep up the excellent edu-taining work! 😊
Wow, thank you so much for your praise, it really means a lot!
Every single teletext enabled tv I have ever used had a HOLD button that allowed you to block pages from changing into the next one of a Page/Total series. Never had any issue with being too slow to read the text. The only issue is that in the background, it would keep loading, so if you released hold, you might be shown the page 3 or 4 after if it took you a long time to finish reading.
Ah yes I remember having a hold button, but not all TVs had that and like you said, when you unpaused it you missed some pages so it wasn't ideal.
I feel the like the girl at 3.32 is going to turn around and see mushroom cloud outside the window while the Smiths play in background
Excellent video, but got a bit of a correction. The Tube interface was so called because other computers had a "Bus" interface. Get it? Very cool.
The expansion processors were just devices that connected to The Tube. They weren't actually The Tube.
I did wonder how the tube got its name! What a great fact!!!!
Wake up Logo Turtle, new Laird video just dropped.
Great video. Love my BBC Micro. "Ollies Folly" made me laugh.
I wasn't sure anyone would pick that up!
I programmed a DOS for the Acorn BBC great basic.
I was destined to get the archemdies in the late 80’s but the Amiga somehow won my heart. Fascinating history of the BBC micro, although little costly and out of reach I still adored the machines and the design principles behind them.
The BBC Micro has intrigued me ever since I watched Micro Men. It makes me think of the Apple II due to integration in schools, but I also see feature sets that remind me of the Commodore 64, while still being it's own unique machine.
If collecting a machine, do you recommend a BBC Master over other variants? I believe I'm morally obligated to eventually buy an Acorn Electron for obvious reasons, but it sounds like there are better machines to collect.
Yes, a BBC Master, or even better IMO, a Master Compact is the one you want.
'you are lost in the mist' but I just came from that direction! ah the later Archie me & a few others took over the side of the room with the Archies, good fun with Zarch
I remember the teacher's fear of these alien devices and how they really struggled with their introduction
My first ever computer i used first year in highschool in 1984 great memories and great computer
Please people correct me here, but I think that Teletext signal would be broadcast within a few lines that fell out of the overscan area and thus were not visible on screen, and that's one of the reasons there was no teletex in NTSC lands, at least not in the way we had in Europe: they had no lines to spare. I remember adjusting the overscan on a tv we used to own (the tv cropped like 1 cm top and bottom and I got tired of stuff getting out of bounds, so I twiddled with a screw and voila) and you conld see a bunch of lines with gibberish under the broadcast at all time.
That makes sense, I didn't look it up to be honest.
You are correct. It was encoded in the spare part where the electron beam went back to the top of the screen.
I think the popularity or success of the BBC Master was a regional thing, as to this day I've never actually seen a BBC Master in person. Both schools I went to only ever had the regular Model B and they later upgraded to either an Acorn Archimedes/RiscPC or straight to RM PCs.
At university of Botswana, I've seen these micro computers in the storage area of the physics department.
They were probably donated when the university opened in 80s.
It's not known if they're still functioning.
Very interesting, would be good to get them going again!
Yes, only at school....in the library playing Blockbusters when it rained and we couldn't play footy, or during maths when playing snooker (for angles)...
I have a BBC Master Compact. I didn't realise I was hardcore ;-)
I must admit as a Sinclair ZX Spectrum user I always wished I could have afforded a BBC Micro Model B with its very expandable system and excellent keyboard. The Master System was also fantastic,
BBC Basic was excellent. SuperBASIC on the QL came very close but was nowhere near as fast although very extensible.
Ah yes nostalgia blast, BBC at school with games linked to Geordie Racer or whatever the educational show was at the time! If were lucky got to play centipede! I distinctly remember a programme to design an Easter bonnet l!? 😅but no idea what it was! Greatv system, as like u said that noone could really afford at home!! Nice informative vid man, yes I am old enough to remember Bamboozle on Ceefax too!! 😅👍
I still think it is funny when you hear the word Scheme used positively in the UK, where it is has a very negative tone in the US,
Are you a Sutton United fan? I saw the Ceefax screen showing news on the U’s! Just wondered as I grew up just down the road! 😂
No, LOL
I'm a bit further North, I have watched them play though as I used to go to a lot of St. Albans City games and they were in the same league.
@@TheLairdsLair Lol. Fair enough! I used to watch a few games when I was a kid in the 80’s.
Just seen the BBC computer in Ghostbusters Frozen Empire.
Yep, I was really surprised!
I'm Portuguese, and never saw one in Portugal, not even on the many magazines I bought at the time. I suppose it was a very British thing.
By the way, at the time, I would never buy such an expensive computer with only 32 k of RAM. In the early 80s, the amount of RAM was one of the major selling points, at least in Portugal. Nobody would buy a 32k computer. Even the humble Zx Spectrum had 48k. Never actually knew anybody who did buy a 16k Spectrum.
Anyway, it was an interesting video. Thank you 😊
Acorn used the bbc to develop the arm processors now in mobile fones but not even manufactured in uk
Only in Britain could you have a grown ass man dressed as a schoolgirl selling computers. Come to think of it maybe Japan 😂
Micros in schools came along as I was ending my time in high school, and I only ever saw one, it was a Research Machines model, I believe. I never got to use it, I think only the maths boffin kids got to do that. I had my own micro at home, though, so I didn't have to compete with others to use it.
7:54 Beachhead!!!!
Please do a 3x 4 play series on Beachhead 1 and 2 and Raid over Moscow!
I bought all 3 Bundled together for Apple II.
I never did acquire a Beeb in my great retro gaming buying spree 10 - 15 years ago. I really wanted to though. I did get an Amstrad CPC 464 with mono monitor and a Sinclair +2 which I never did find the solution for getting a proper color display here in the US. That really dissuaded me to further invest in other PAL region machines.
With the Spectrum you need to get a +2a (black one) or a +3 because they have a proper RGB socket so you wouldn't have problem getting them to work with a U.S. TV or monitor.
@@TheLairdsLair Damn. My +2 is the original gray one. 😕 Wish I would have known that back then.
We know im not british. But whats the deal with song sample during the text? Power on tune? Power down?
It was the music that played when the BBC logo was shown on the TV screen at the beginning and end of the day's programming in the 1980s.
@@TheLairdsLair I only recall hearing it on BBC video tapes, but I recognised it straight away.
2:41 This AD never run in UK today, maybe Portugal or Romenia. But never UK or California
In Portugal, I have many doubts. I would have seen it, for sure. 🤔
In the early 80's, home computing was like the wild west. Who knew what was going to happen, next There were no incremental updates to existing PC's and home computers were all hugely different from each other. The BBC (model B) to me, was the perfect 80's home PC. (although the Electron was a large, plastic dog turd).
Watching on my mobile??? LOL I have never had a cellphone. And I built this PC from scrap parts since I am poor. :P
Awesome!
The BBC micro represented a lot wrong with the UK IT industry. It was driven by old school ties, and they knew the government would pay for them in education - hence the overspeccing and high price. Acorn already knew lots about what was being asked by the BBC.
As much as I hate to admit it, what drove kids learning IT and later games industry wasn't the BBC, it was the spectrum and the low prices.
They allowed real ownership, and something that a school BBC would never sanction.... Games. Clive Sinclair hated gaming. He had the right idea for low prices. He missed that it drove home purchases at first , and drove bright lads into learning to make games at a rate that dwarfed even the c64 (which I owned).
For all its limitations the speccy truly did drive a generation of it knowledge by being inexpensive.
The Spectrum (and ZX 80/81 before it) certainly deserve a lot of credit, esp. for the UK games industry and getting home users into coding for an affordable price - but they really were aggressively built down to a price, with every corner that could be cut, cut. They were amazing at the price, and fantastic for platform games, but very limited, esp. when it came to more serious uses. Massive kudos for Sinclair for making a computer that actually worked at such a low price and enabled so many people to get into computing - but it just doesn't compare on power, features, versatility or robustness - and choosing it as the schools/computer literacy project machine would have very quickly lead to "buy cheap, buy twice".
The BBC Micro spec made it a Swiss-army knife that could do a bit of everything - not just in terms of processing power, but things like a proper keyboard (so it could be used as a credible word processor), parallel printer and serial interfaces, internal sockets for networking and floppy disc interfaces, ROM sockets (often used for wordprocessors or alternative programming languages) a programmable I/O port and analogue inputs (ideal for use in school science). As for BBC BASIC - every nerd homes in on the built-in assembler, but it also featured things like long variable names, named procedures and functions with parameters and local variables, repeat/until loops which made it much better for teaching good programming practice and removed much of the need for GOTO-ridden spaghetti (later versions added even better 'structured programming' features).
For what you actually got, it was incredible value c.f. what had come before. My 1981 copy of PCW has the newly launched BBC Micro B at £335. Or you could have an Apple II for £599, a Commodore Pet for £569 or a TRS 80 Model III for £619 (to be fair, the last two come with a display probably worth £100-£150 at the time). For a cheapskate option you could have a VIC 20 for £179 or a Video Genie TRS-80 knockoff for £279. I've used *most* of those and the BBC Micro runs rings around them in terms of power and versatility - the closest competitor is probably the Apple II with its internal expansion slots and actual bit-mapped graphics (the BBC micro has higher res than Apple II and didn't rely on weird hacks to get 4 colour graphics - and was faster) - unfortunately, in those days, US-made computers were insanely expensive in the UK.
The 'Micro Men' story is kinda a technological tragedy - Sinclair made the ultimate home machine for games and learning to program on a shoestring, Acorn made an altogether more serious machine for small business, education and serious hobbyists... then rather than doubling down on what they were good at, Sinclair tried to make a serious computer (the QL, AKA "Quite Late") and Acorn tried to make a home machine (the Electron - AKA "a BBC Micro with all the nice bits cut out")... and we all know how that turned out.
If you sell 5million machines that is what started the games industry not the 1.5 million bbcs
A computer I never heard of EVER in the 80s in Spain for obvious reasons, but, I mean, not even a mention of its existence in the UK? None at all. And we had like 2 o 3 different magazines over the years we read and I head of a Dragon or an Oric, but not the BBC or Acorn AT ALL. WEIRD.
That is strange!
Wor, that version of Bruce Lee lacks the visual charm of the C64 version!
Why BBC in the name ? IN Canada no one would touch any product with 'CBC" attached to it..
The BBC 'brand' actually had prestige, back then. Their commercial competitors in broadcasting - ITV - were reported in the computer press to be considering an 'ITV Micro', though I don't know how serious they were about it. I seem to recall some ill-feeling in the rest of the computer industry toward the BBC and Acorn, and not just Clive Sinclair.
Yeah the BBC had prestige, they were the state broadcaster, played the national anthem, had the most respected journalists etc. An educational computer would sell on their name alone because of that.
RE: The ITV Computer - I was researching this online and it seems it was actually developed, but not all the regional broadcasters would sign off on it so it never actually went to market as planned.
the CBC is similar but that didn't equate to high tech - these arent designed by broadcasters and journalists . Its interesting ... CBC here also played BBC programming but it always seemed DATED and archaic as was their own stuff and still is to this day. The 'good' Canadian content is usually produced jointly with the states. the sucky stuff is similar to stupid coronation street type series. There was an excellent GUI based networked computer developed in Ontario but the public servants in that sector continuously tried to block it and they ended up destroying all the machines. BEfore that it was available to all the high schools. Its because those people watched CBC and BBC programming that made them disdainful and resentful. @@TheLairdsLair
The reason we have a games industry is due to the zx spectrum she sold 5 million machines a lot of the software for the bbc is actually illegal it infringes copyright a fact you and everybody glosses over
The ZX Spectrum had more than its fair share of illegal clones too!
It was acceptable in the 80s... Every platform had its thinly disguised Pacman, Breakout/Arkanoid, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong knockoffs, and unlicensed film/TV tie-ins ('Star Trek' was a popular one). I don't think it was really established then that you could copyright or patent the idea of a game (still a bit of a grey area today) as long as you didn't step on a trademark or copyrightable character design.
That said, some of the Acornsoft arcade clones *did* sail a bit close to the wind and some had to be modified - e.g. later versions of Snapper were modified to give the characters legs (lest someone mistake them for another well-known maze-running fruit eater) and "Defender" had to be re-named "Planetoid" (it was still a really impressive clone...) (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acornsoft) - they had their fair share of original games, though - the most notable being "Elite" and while the Spectrum was the biggest market, the BBC Micro did its bit to help develop the UK games industry.
@TheLairdsLair true but just how many were made by acorn soft? Planetoid?!
rum runner
Yall really gonna force this guy to add a text overlay saying welcome stun runner to the intro lol
I might block his comments, the joke's getting a bit boring 😛
Very informative video. I really enjoy learning about these computers and systems that I havent heard of before. Thank you