Mon 28 Nov 2005
Today winter finally arrived here in Oslo. To think we were swimming in the fjord only a four months ago! I’ll be heading out to but some skis at the weekend - both alpine (downhill) and cross-country - so I can have the full nordic skiing experience this winter around Olso.
Sun 27 Nov 2005
The BBC Model B computer. The computer was bought by my father in 1984 using some money which he received from the death of his father. I was nine years old. This was our grandfather’s legacy for us. That single purchase for £400 in Beatties department store in Wolverhampton 21 years ago changed my life greater than any other single purchase made before or since. It wholly responsible for my career since that time.
In terms of the hardware of the time, the BBC Microcomputer was something special. It had 32 kB of RAM for programs and the display and 32 kB of ROM containing the operating system and BBC BASIC, occupying the 64 kB address space of the 6502 CPU. We had a somewhat unreliable cassette deck for storing programs.
I probably spent thousands of hours over the next four years learning to program, mostly in the fantastic BBC BASIC (real prodecures with parameters, REPEAT..UNTIL loops and no real need to use GOTO, and of course integrated 6502 assembler) which gave me an excellent grounding in structured, procedural programming. I had a good line in writing software for my father to help in his land and engineering surveying work, which was my first introduction to writing mathematical and engineering software - all in BBC BASIC.
I also spent time fiddling with the hardware side of things, very much encouraged by the massive expandability of the BBC Micro. Usuually this would involve connecting home-made devices, motor controllers and the like, to the User Port (pretty raw access to a 6522 VIA chip) or to the Analogue Port. All of this was inspired by a series of articles by Mike Cook in The Micro User (later Acorn Computing) Magazine called The Beeb Body Building Course.
So why the nostalgia?
Well, two reasons. The first is that this early exposure computing is largely responsible for my career path, and the fact today that I now work as a software developer. The second reason is that last week I downloaded an impressively good BBC Micro emulator for my PC called BeebEm.
Obviously, a BBC emulator isn’t much use to me these days for software development, and all the interesting hardware aspects of the Beeb are of course not relevant. Nonetheless, it did give me the opportunity to indulge in some serious nostalgia playing old games such as Thrust, Elite and Exile.
Sat 26 Nov 2005
1984: BBC Model B Computer 2 MHz 8-bit 6502 CPU, 32 KiB RAM. OS 1.2
1988: Acorn A3000 8 MHz 32-bit ARM2 CPU, 1 MiB RAM. RISCOS 2
1990: Acorn Archimedes A420/1 8 MHz 32-bit ARM2 CPU, 2 MiB RAM, 20 MB hard disk. RISC OS 2
1992: Acorn A4000 12 MHz 32-bit ARM250 CPU, 2 MiB RAM, 80 MB hard disk. RISCOS 3
1994: Generic PC. 66 MHz 486 DX2 32-bit CPU, 4 MiB RAM, MS-DOS and Windows 3.1
1997: Generic PC. 333 MHz Pentium II 32-bit CPU, 64 MB RAM. 6.4 GB disk. Windows 95.
2000: Generic PC 500 MHz AMD Athlon 32-bit CPU, 128 MB RAM. 18 GB disk. Windows 2000.
2001: Generic PC 2 x 533 MHz Celeron 32-bit CPUs, 128 MB RAM. 18 GB disk. Windows 2000.
2003: Generic PC 1 GHz AMD Athlon 32-bit CPU, 256 MB RAM. 18 GB disk. Windows 2000.
2003: Toshiba Portege R100. 900 MHz Pentium M 32-bit CPU, 768 MB RAM. 30 GB disk. Windows XP
2004: Sun Microsystems Sunblade 100. 500 MHz UltraSPARC IIi 64-bit CPU, 768 MB RAM. 80 GB disk. Solaris 10.
2006: Apple Mac Mini. 1.66 GHz Core Duo. 32-bit CPU. 512 MB RAM. 80 GB disk. Mac OS X Tiger