My mum was a primary school teacher and used to bring the school beeb home at weekends and holidays. Basically I am who I am now and do what I do now thanks to that computer. Thanks to all those involved.
My dad ran a business publishing books and educational software for the Beeb and the later Archimedes machines. I was given a beeb sometime around my 7th birthday. Guess it's no surprise I'm still writing code to this day. BBC BASIC was definitely my favourite of the various flavours of BASIC. Of course these days I use other languages that have descended from C, but I'll always be fond of the original BBC Micro
The story about the finger and the resistor pack...... What an amazing story. Putting a row of resistors there without understanding why but still having it work perfectly............ That is just WOW ! What happened was that you terminated the data lines with resistors and that swallows stray reflections on the line, which corrupt the signal. What you did was to terminate a transmission line.
The machine I used in my 2nd year of college here in Oz on the 1st year of their introduction (to our schools). Have a lot of nostalgia for this machine. One of my friends showed up a few days ago and gave me another one, but it has two working disk drives and the EPROM programmer option installed. Excellent interview series, please keep them coming.
My first computer the BBC model B - still use a BBC emulator on my Mac today. Search for a BBC film called 'Micromen' starring Martin Freeman as Steve Fuber & Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair. Watching this video pretty much confirms the accuracy of the movie. Sir Clive was know for his mood swings and the film portrays this well. Nice to see the newbrain mentioned, at the time I lived down the road from Newbury and remember the first machine coming to our school, before of course we stocked out on the BBC Micro.
In the early 80's I worked with a team developing code for 6502 microprocessors embedded in medical instruments. Our development system was the trusty BEEB with an attached EPROM programmer.
I remember my mother bringing home the first BBC Micro, (she was a primary school teacher in the '80's) It came with it's CUB screen monitor, a big heavy CRT lump (that was expensive as well). As I had computer studies knowledge from my secondary education in the late '70's early '80 's, ie BASIC programming on the Commodore PET, she wanted me to show her how it worked and how to set it up. I remember getting mesmerised by the 'Build' program, much like 3D wireframe lego!
Really commendable that the BBC was spearheading this computer revolution and I think it did Britain well. In fact I recently purchase a BBC Micro:bit V2 for my daughter to play around (yes it still has an ARM CPU).
I love listening to these videos because I'm from the era when the BBC came to life,.... well just before. I loved the TV drama 'Micro Men' it takes me right back to the dawn of the micro. And to quote Max Boyce....." I was there".
By far the biggest inspiration for coders in the UK had to be the Sinclair series of computers, especially the ZX Spectrum. I know many programmers, (myself included), that started out with this machine.
Most of my friends took the Sinclair route: ZX80/81/Spectrum, but I had to be different. The Oric-1 was my first computer. My next computer, and probably my greatest inspiration, was the BBC Micro. They were good times!
I love it when you fix something and you have no idea why what you did works but it does :) its an awesome feeling. Then you have the fun of working out what it is you did that fixes it .
I started watching this video with mild interest but when the "finger thing" came out I had to pause vid and say out loud "this is great!". The who knows why resistances in full production machines. Loved it. Also, 4 MHz RAM? wow, didnt knew that.
There was a marvellous music add-on to the BBC B, which included Ample, a music programming language, which could effectively synchronise words on the screen with the music, and which used a complex system of harmonic manipulation to achieve a variety of tone colours. If that music system was still around, I would be using it today.
That was AWESOME! I love these kind of interviews. And it's funny because I've been working on a way to replace DRAM with SRAM and multiplexers and to hear him discuss this issue was exciting. :-)
My uncle wrote from scratch a program for the BBC micro. I used it recently on a BBC Micro emulator. It's really an amazing program.. but it's the only one he ever wrote.
More of this please!! Fascinating trip down memory lane. I remember wrestling with a Research machines 380z and a recalcitrant cassette-corder, soldering together Nascom1 kits for computer club - even typing hex codes into a National Semiconductor SC/MP. It was more than jumpers for goal posts when I was at school!!
Steve Gould Astoundingly not at all - Ebay is selling them for as little as £25 or less - £5 - if not working The acorn atom is up there for £399 BUT in as new condition - sadly mine isn't as new any more.
During the early 1990's, our mixed ability Year 7 and Tear 8 Maths lessons using The BBC computer were very popular with the pupils. They each worked at their own pace on Worksheets from the I.L.E.A.'S S.M.I.LE. package. Both the the computer and the worksheets were real successes.
Just got my Zx Spectrum out, my 8 year old loves playing The Hobbit and Jetpac. Got the BBC B fired up next, Elite here we come! Now I'm happy, she wants to learn programming and how to write games etc, just like I did.
If you've not got those three capacitors replaced in the PSU for the Beeb, get them done. I've replaced all mine. If you get a loud pop/crack and white smoke out the back of the Beeb, switch off and replace them, it'll be fine. Please don't think it's broken and throw it out!!!
The resistor network pulling up the data bus woks because it charges the stray capacitance making it easier for the processor to set the bits. I would guess resetting the bits is much more simple for the 6502 because the N channels it was using to do that have a lot smaller ON resistance than the P ones on top...
I had one of the linear power supplies. The heat created a permanent bulge in the top of the case. I swapped it for a switcher as soon as they came out.
This is a superb interview, indeed superb overview of the BBC Micro, although I'm none the wiser on physically how circuit boards and chips and a bit of electricity actually facilitate an interactive and operable computer system.
From the portrayal in the movie "Micro men" plus the observation of Professor Furber that Roger Wilson found a bug in his memory and it wasn't the last one he found, I get the feeling Roger was kind of a human computer himself.
Today, multi channel bus logic analysers and hi speed storage oscilloscopes could easily find the gremlins in bus timing and impedance issues. Even the PCB layout software takes this into account. Although the 1970-80 HP bus logic analysis stuff was pretty good but boy, you needed really deep pockets.
I'm not surprised that the BBC wanted a linear power supply. Getting a SMPS quiet is no mean feat, especially down into the longwave range and with the design methods of the time, and back in the '80s the AM bands obviously were very important still - shortwave was the closest thing to the internet that the general public had. Maybe they even kept ham radio use in mind. These days you can be happy if your fancy new LED lights don't keep wiping out the entire FM band nearby (along with DAB). I bet a lot of them are far from CE compliant regardless of what the label says. The only thing potentially even worse than SMPS is plasma screens, pure evil. Eventually Panasonic switched to shielded panels in about 2009, which reduced emissions dramatically, but LCDs took over the market soon after. I didn't know Astec were around in those days already. I used to have an early 2000 (Klamath) Pentium III system with an Astec 110 watter - these were good supplies and could take quite a beating. I would later use it to run an Asus P2B-D with two undervolted and underclocked 667 MHz Coppermine PIIIs with passive cooling, a Radeon 9000 and two harddrives. Eventually the system would develop stability issues though, I guess the electrolytics weren't so happy any more. Had to squeeze in a much bigger Fortron at this point.
The first computer we had in High School was a Data General Nova 2/10 which used punched tape - but I think that was considered a mini and not a micro. The first computer for schools in the States which saw really wide distribution was the Apple IIe.
I still need somebody to explain to me why the IBM PC was such a crock of sh** at this time, compared with the Beeb. My employers waltzed into my lab one day, in late '83, I think, took my model B, and left me with a twice as expensive brand new 640k IBM PC, thinking they were doing me a favour. I'd just written a mockup of a signal processing algorithm in lovely BBC Basic, and so I had to translate it into GW Basic. In spite of the much faster clock speed, and twice the data width, the GW version on the IBM was almost 3 times slower, it turned out, as I showed when I got my beeb back.
The PC was awesome because IBM didn’t patent it, made it expandable, made future machines backward compatible, and didn’t charge licensing fees so the peripheral, software, and clone market took off.
***** He gives a possible reason he thinks it'll be, not an unequivocal answer, history is full of such things later shown to be a gap in our knowledge / model. :D
Are you talking about 5:02 ? It's CP/M-86, which is CP/M that's compiled to run on an 8086, rather than an 8080 or Z80. The shot is perfectly valid, since the BBC Micro didn't have any of those CPUs.
I am shocked... Minute 9:30 and on.. "If you put your fingers one the board (certain place) it would start to work. No idea how it worked, it just did". I am pretty sure that this miracle and many many more just like this, brought us into the information age. ( The gift of human touch.) Makes one wonder... Just exactly who did the designing...
DA!! How do you think we Russians just-just landed our 1st colony on Mars? We just LOVE KFC, so on Mars we lick our fingers...and then ALL systems seems to work! Only problem, chicken are compressed so weight is not same! Many fights is about 21-piece bucket only looks half full...and you DON'T rob RUSSIAN or I'll introduce them another finger! At least salesperson will scream like a ch I think KFC headquarters should experiment on SUPER-STEROIDS, get normal Earth chicken the size of ostridge! Nyet?
It's kind of ironic when the BBC went with Acorn's 6502 based machine while insisting on CP/M compatibility when Sinclair had a Z80 based machine and Amstrad's CPC was just a colourised PCW, the PCW being a Z80 machine that actually ran on CP/M (that I'd love to see Lazy Game Reviews review, but as it's an all-in-one that includes a CRT monitor, getting one of those over to America is going to be costly so it might never happen, sadly)
You can buy just the computer itself and get power cables off eBay relatively cheaply. You can also get TV cables as well so no need for a monitor any more.
As a teen I discovered my mum had given away our BBC Micro since me and my sister hadn't used it in years. Honestly I'd have sooner let her away my stuffed animal.
Sounds like I came in at about the right time with my Issue 4. If I were to buy and run a Beeb now would the transmissions interfere with other devices?
They don't actually transmit anything. The BBC wasn't keen on the RF bleed from switched mode power supply. They're used everywhere now. Properly shielded and filtered there are no problems.
Kit Vitae Good question as to why - seemed to be a BBC requirement, probably thought it'd play well on a TV programme (talking computer etc) - though the chips had been around a while and were in the Texas Instruments 'Speak & Spell' etc.... >Sean
I can definitely see the point of it as a PR thing. Talking computers/robots was cool at the time. Why do you need ringtones on your mobile phone? Playing back an advanced ringtone such as an MP3 takes more power than just a loud beep.
cjmillsnun ... And I don't think I've ever seen a single BBC B out of God only knows how many machines, which has had the speech chips fitted. I think the BBC misjudged the popularity of that one. Mode 7 (Teletext) was stunningly popular, though!
The BBC Micro pre-dates the ARM but, like a Pi, it was designed for expansion and users were encouraged to plug things into its user port, which was similar to the Pi's GPIO pins. The ARM was used for the first time in the successor to the BBC Micro.
SinthTeck You find it boring but if it weren't for men like this and this machine, you wouldn't be sat on the machine that you are now. Have some respect, cretin.
My mum was a primary school teacher and used to bring the school beeb home at weekends and holidays. Basically I am who I am now and do what I do now thanks to that computer. Thanks to all those involved.
Yet yuyu
My mum was also a teacher and did the same! Happy days.
My dad ran a business publishing books and educational software for the Beeb and the later Archimedes machines. I was given a beeb sometime around my 7th birthday. Guess it's no surprise I'm still writing code to this day. BBC BASIC was definitely my favourite of the various flavours of BASIC. Of course these days I use other languages that have descended from C, but I'll always be fond of the original BBC Micro
The story about the finger and the resistor pack...... What an amazing story. Putting a row of resistors there without understanding why but still having it work perfectly............ That is just WOW ! What happened was that you terminated the data lines with resistors and that swallows stray reflections on the line, which corrupt the signal. What you did was to terminate a transmission line.
The machine I used in my 2nd year of college here in Oz on the 1st year of their introduction (to our schools). Have a lot of nostalgia for this machine.
One of my friends showed up a few days ago and gave me another one, but it has two working disk drives and the EPROM programmer option installed.
Excellent interview series, please keep them coming.
Fantastic interview, the ‘engineer’s finger’ bit is brilliant!
My first computer the BBC model B - still use a BBC emulator on my Mac today. Search for a BBC film called 'Micromen' starring Martin Freeman as Steve Fuber & Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair. Watching this video pretty much confirms the accuracy of the movie. Sir Clive was know for his mood swings and the film portrays this well. Nice to see the newbrain mentioned, at the time I lived down the road from Newbury and remember the first machine coming to our school, before of course we stocked out on the BBC Micro.
In the early 80's I worked with a team developing code for 6502 microprocessors embedded in medical instruments. Our development system was the trusty BEEB with an attached EPROM programmer.
I remember my mother bringing home the first BBC Micro, (she was a primary school teacher in the '80's) It came with it's CUB screen monitor, a big heavy CRT lump (that was expensive as well). As I had computer studies knowledge from my secondary education in the late '70's early '80 's, ie BASIC programming on the Commodore PET,
she wanted me to show her how it worked and how to set it up. I remember getting mesmerised by the 'Build' program, much like 3D wireframe lego!
Really commendable that the BBC was spearheading this computer revolution and I think it did Britain well. In fact I recently purchase a BBC Micro:bit V2 for my daughter to play around (yes it still has an ARM CPU).
I love listening to these videos because I'm from the era when the BBC came to life,.... well just before. I loved the TV drama 'Micro Men' it takes me right back to the dawn of the micro. And to quote Max Boyce....." I was there".
+Michael Hawthorne When are we going to see the BBC4 drama on Commodore Business Machines starring Ben Kingsley as Jack Tramiel?
By far the biggest inspiration for coders in the UK had to be the Sinclair series of computers, especially the ZX Spectrum. I know many programmers, (myself included), that started out with this machine.
Most of my friends took the Sinclair route: ZX80/81/Spectrum, but I had to be different. The Oric-1 was my first computer. My next computer, and probably my greatest inspiration, was the BBC Micro. They were good times!
***** Yes, they were good times.
@somedeveloperblokey Me too. Moved from ZX81 to BBC Model B. Great fun! A did spend too much time playing Elite though ;)
I love it when you fix something and you have no idea why what you did works but it does :) its an awesome feeling. Then you have the fun of working out what it is you did that fixes it .
+Revolution Code
True up to a point. But an optimising compiler, critical sections, threading and message queues can bring you unstuck.
I started watching this video with mild interest but when the "finger thing" came out I had to pause vid and say out loud "this is great!". The who knows why resistances in full production machines. Loved it.
Also, 4 MHz RAM? wow, didnt knew that.
There was a marvellous music add-on to the BBC B, which included Ample, a music programming language, which could effectively synchronise words on the screen with the music, and which used a complex system of harmonic manipulation to achieve a variety of tone colours. If that music system was still around, I would be using it today.
Lang Jones, I wrote a number of pieces in Ample that played on the "Music 500" add-on. The longest and most complex was Bach's Great G-minor fugue...
Steve is the UK's Waz. What a legend! More please!
That was AWESOME! I love these kind of interviews. And it's funny because I've been working on a way to replace DRAM with SRAM and multiplexers and to hear him discuss this issue was exciting. :-)
My uncle wrote from scratch a program for the BBC micro. I used it recently on a BBC Micro emulator. It's really an amazing program.. but it's the only one he ever wrote.
More of this please!! Fascinating trip down memory lane. I remember wrestling with a Research machines 380z and a recalcitrant cassette-corder, soldering together Nascom1 kits for computer club - even typing hex codes into a National Semiconductor SC/MP. It was more than jumpers for goal posts when I was at school!!
I still have a Acorn Atom in the garage. A forerunner of the BBC micro. Learned a lot from it.
I should have added I also have a working BBC B micro as well as the modern off spring Raspberry Pi.
I bet that BBC B will be worth a few bob by now Richard Harris
Steve Gould
Astoundingly not at all - Ebay is selling them for as little as £25 or less - £5 - if not working The acorn atom is up there for £399 BUT in as new condition - sadly mine isn't as new any more.
Richard Harris I guess the fan base just isn't quite as wide as say, classic cars!
During the early 1990's, our mixed ability Year 7 and Tear 8 Maths lessons using The BBC computer were very popular with the pupils. They each worked at their own pace on Worksheets from the I.L.E.A.'S S.M.I.LE. package. Both the the computer and the worksheets were real successes.
Just noticed the 16mbit slip, the chips were 16kbit! 16 needed for the 32K Byte!
Just got my Zx Spectrum out, my 8 year old loves playing The Hobbit and Jetpac. Got the BBC B fired up next, Elite here we come! Now I'm happy, she wants to learn programming and how to write games etc, just like I did.
If you've not got those three capacitors replaced in the PSU for the Beeb, get them done. I've replaced all mine. If you get a loud pop/crack and white smoke out the back of the Beeb, switch off and replace them, it'll be fine. Please don't think it's broken and throw it out!!!
They had these machines in my primary school growing up, they were my first gaming experience.
The resistor network pulling up the data bus woks because it charges the stray capacitance making it easier for the processor to set the bits. I would guess resetting the bits is much more simple for the 6502 because the N channels it was using to do that have a lot smaller ON resistance than the P ones on top...
I had one of the linear power supplies. The heat created a permanent bulge in the top of the case. I swapped it for a switcher as soon as they came out.
This is a superb interview, indeed superb overview of the BBC Micro, although I'm none the wiser on physically how circuit boards and chips and a bit of electricity actually facilitate an interactive and operable computer system.
Great video. Very interesting! We’ve got 3 Beebs in our shed and we love them!
Great video , brings back plenty of memories
Could you please turn on auto captions for this or upload some subtitles? Many thanks!
From the portrayal in the movie "Micro men" plus the observation of Professor Furber that Roger Wilson found a bug in his memory and it wasn't the last one he found, I get the feeling Roger was kind of a human computer himself.
This is what you call primary research. Thanks!
Great upload, very interesting. Thanks
Today, multi channel bus logic analysers and hi speed storage oscilloscopes could easily find the gremlins in bus timing and impedance issues. Even the PCB layout software takes this into account.
Although the 1970-80 HP bus logic analysis stuff was pretty good but boy, you needed really deep pockets.
The best thing I bought was the 6502 powered Electron. I haven't been without a computer since!
Fascinating. My favourite 8bit micro too. Thanks.
That last bit about the fingers is amazing haha
"Well, if Roger thinks we can..." I think this is going to be a new saying of mine.
A revolutionary device that helped set humanity on its technological journey.
10 print "Thank you for uploading, computerphile!!!"
20 goto 10
> run
>10 PRINT CHR$141 "THANKS FOR UPLOADING COMPUTERPHILE" ' CHR$141 "THANKS FOR UPLOADING COMPUTERPHILE" '
>20 GOTO 10
>RUN
And in double height letters!
10 print "Hello World!"
20 goto McDonald's
30 reconsider life choices
Bletchley park in Milton Keynes have a room full of them, interesting place.
Acorn BBC... Did a looooot of programming on it. Was pretty sophisticated for its time, I remember.
I'm not surprised that the BBC wanted a linear power supply. Getting a SMPS quiet is no mean feat, especially down into the longwave range and with the design methods of the time, and back in the '80s the AM bands obviously were very important still - shortwave was the closest thing to the internet that the general public had. Maybe they even kept ham radio use in mind.
These days you can be happy if your fancy new LED lights don't keep wiping out the entire FM band nearby (along with DAB). I bet a lot of them are far from CE compliant regardless of what the label says. The only thing potentially even worse than SMPS is plasma screens, pure evil. Eventually Panasonic switched to shielded panels in about 2009, which reduced emissions dramatically, but LCDs took over the market soon after.
I didn't know Astec were around in those days already. I used to have an early 2000 (Klamath) Pentium III system with an Astec 110 watter - these were good supplies and could take quite a beating. I would later use it to run an Asus P2B-D with two undervolted and underclocked 667 MHz Coppermine PIIIs with passive cooling, a Radeon 9000 and two harddrives. Eventually the system would develop stability issues though, I guess the electrolytics weren't so happy any more. Had to squeeze in a much bigger Fortron at this point.
Solid gold
Wow, great insight into a lost part of computer history.
@Uterr It's an optional chip.
I would love a video on the Commodore64. I've got one sitting in the backseat of my car awaiting repairs and replacement parts, haha
"occasionally caught fire"
LOFL
Great info. That was very strange for the reason they wanted a linear PSU.
feels nice to sit on a 4ghz video rendering beast
Maybe you need to do a series on MSX as well...
The system was very popular in Europe. But you're correct it would be tough to do.
David Edwards
It was popular in Europe, yes! However, the Japanese invented it, so you'd have to talk to them to find out about how it was designed.
David Edwards The whole point of the Beeb was that it appeared in every school in the UK. Did that happen with the MSX?
The first computer we had in High School was a Data General Nova 2/10 which used punched tape - but I think that was considered a mini and not a micro. The first computer for schools in the States which saw really wide distribution was the Apple IIe.
I remember them from primary school, 1984 roughly?
"No idea why, but it's still working" .... sounds like not a lot has changed in the world of IT 🤣💖
I learned something about keeping my beebs runnin' and no it wasn't about the psu. Thankyou!
Wonderful story.
I still need somebody to explain to me why the IBM PC was such a crock of sh** at this time, compared with the Beeb. My employers waltzed into my lab one day, in late '83, I think, took my model B, and left me with a twice as expensive brand new 640k IBM PC, thinking they were doing me a favour. I'd just written a mockup of a signal processing algorithm in lovely BBC Basic, and so I had to translate it into GW Basic. In spite of the much faster clock speed, and twice the data width, the GW version on the IBM was almost 3 times slower, it turned out, as I showed when I got my beeb back.
The PC was awesome because IBM didn’t patent it, made it expandable, made future machines backward compatible, and didn’t charge licensing fees so the peripheral, software, and clone market took off.
@@ryanyoder7573 as did Acorn on the Beeb with the Tube, the User Port, the ROM support etc.
10:45 More like finger-on-the-board engineering, amirite?
Absolutely fascinating.... 👍
In 50 years time somebody'll discover why 'that finger' works & it'll probably change the world! :D
Jimbo Jones This comment should be kept safe.
What's 'that finger'? And yes, I'm to lazy to google.
Ioan Dragomir
Dude, it’s in the video. Have you not watched it?
***** He gives a possible reason he thinks it'll be, not an unequivocal answer, history is full of such things later shown to be a gap in our knowledge / model. :D
*****
I asked this laterally 10 seconds before he mentioned it in the video
Don't know if you folks were told, but that's not CP/M you displayed. Other than that, thanks for the video - was always curious about the BBC Micro.
Are you talking about 5:02 ? It's CP/M-86, which is CP/M that's compiled to run on an 8086, rather than an 8080 or Z80. The shot is perfectly valid, since the BBC Micro didn't have any of those CPUs.
@@johnm2012 Although there is now the Pi on the Tube which runs an 80286 in emulation and can run GEM.
"... and occasionally caught fire..."
Good ol' 8 bit days, they'll never be back!
...wait, why is my smartphone so hot?
I am shocked... Minute 9:30 and on.. "If you put your fingers one the board (certain place) it would start to work. No idea how it worked, it just did". I am pretty sure that this miracle and many many more just like this, brought us into the information age. ( The gift of human touch.) Makes one wonder... Just exactly who did the designing...
DA!! How do you think we Russians just-just landed our 1st colony on Mars? We just LOVE KFC, so on Mars we lick our fingers...and then ALL systems seems to work! Only problem, chicken are compressed so weight is not same! Many fights is about 21-piece bucket only looks half full...and you DON'T rob RUSSIAN or I'll introduce them another finger! At least salesperson will scream like a ch I think KFC headquarters should experiment on SUPER-STEROIDS, get normal Earth chicken the size of ostridge! Nyet?
You'd probably be surprised how many other industries operation in that mode.
Awesome channel and videos!
It's kind of ironic when the BBC went with Acorn's 6502 based machine while insisting on CP/M compatibility when Sinclair had a Z80 based machine and Amstrad's CPC was just a colourised PCW, the PCW being a Z80 machine that actually ran on CP/M (that I'd love to see Lazy Game Reviews review, but as it's an all-in-one that includes a CRT monitor, getting one of those over to America is going to be costly so it might never happen, sadly)
You can buy just the computer itself and get power cables off eBay relatively cheaply. You can also get TV cables as well so no need for a monitor any more.
As a teen I discovered my mum had given away our BBC Micro since me and my sister hadn't used it in years. Honestly I'd have sooner let her away my stuffed animal.
Great story. Thanks!
Sounds like I came in at about the right time with my Issue 4. If I were to buy and run a Beeb now would the transmissions interfere with other devices?
They don't actually transmit anything. The BBC wasn't keen on the RF bleed from switched mode power supply. They're used everywhere now. Properly shielded and filtered there are no problems.
At 8:00 he said "16 Megabit"... Haha good to see that not only me gets these little details wrong. Of course it must be Kilobit.
Why BBC micro needed what speech generation chip? if target was to make a accessible computer, why adding expensive part to it?
the impression i got was that it was another of the bbc's odd requirements? just one that didn't break the machine like the psu thing.
Kit Vitae Good question as to why - seemed to be a BBC requirement, probably thought it'd play well on a TV programme (talking computer etc) - though the chips had been around a while and were in the Texas Instruments 'Speak & Spell' etc.... >Sean
Uterr It was an option. One that if you could afford it, you bought later. The computer worked perfectly fine without it.
I can definitely see the point of it as a PR thing. Talking computers/robots was cool at the time. Why do you need ringtones on your mobile phone? Playing back an advanced ringtone such as an MP3 takes more power than just a loud beep.
cjmillsnun ... And I don't think I've ever seen a single BBC B out of God only knows how many machines, which has had the speech chips fitted. I think the BBC misjudged the popularity of that one. Mode 7 (Teletext) was stunningly popular, though!
I wonder if anyone's ever tried to figure out why the quirks mentioned at the end of the video worked as they did...
I always thought the BBC Micro was a *real* machine... now I know it was!
Fantastic video!!! =D
@smalltime0 time to give Daikin a call?
Om the acorn atom what is 'Ø' doing there?
10:58: How he immediately shut down the interviewer's misconception on what overengineering means.
the BBC micro is kind of a distant ancestor of the Pi because of ARM architecture?
The BBC Micro pre-dates the ARM but, like a Pi, it was designed for expansion and users were encouraged to plug things into its user port, which was similar to the Pi's GPIO pins. The ARM was used for the first time in the successor to the BBC Micro.
@@johnm2012 and the ARM was part-designed using the BBC Micro
I have a Spectrum that only boots up if I open it up and put my hand inside.
The final proof that finger-in-the-air engineering can get you very far.
...if you can make it reproducible.
video on when computers started structurally resembling what we have today?
Really wish I lived in that time to be able to more easily build architectures.
But oh well, programming will suffice for now :)
Everything goes over my head, I am not specialist.
can someone explain what is this all about. Thanks!
lol 35C? Australian desert?
Try my room in one of the major cities at any time for 4 months of the year.
Indeed.
The BBC had a much better keyboard than a modern machine .
It had real keyswitches, not foam and foil contacts.
Why was there no designer in the team? The thing looks hideous. Even the manual designer could have helped a lot here. The cover was pretty neat.
wow... it was like alchemy back in the days :)
BBC micro? Is that not a contradiction?
The Engineer's Finger. LOL.
Damn, that dude aged!
And so shall you !
He's lucky. Not everyone lives long enough.
chuckie egg
0x0001
***** nope
***** 1 in hex lol
jigglybandit that's more like it
***** even better!!
0000'0000'0000'0001 ? :D
Wholly cockroach!
Zzzzz... Zzzzz... Zzzzz...
SinthTeck You find it boring but if it weren't for men like this and this machine, you wouldn't be sat on the machine that you are now. Have some respect, cretin.
thecassman not true
SinthTeck Explain...
CerealKiller No need to offend
thecassman So many processors, architectures and computer system have been invented in time. This is just a drop in the ocean.