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.
December 1st, 2005 at 1:06 am
Robert
BBC BASIC is available for the PC!
See my website:
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~richardweston/
or rather than type this address, its easier to put “richard weston” into Google; my site comes up top, called “BBC Basic Programming”. Then download Richard Russell’s superb “BBC Basic for Windows” for free. If you buy the full version with extra capabilities its only £30.
Best wishes
Richard Weston
April 23rd, 2007 at 6:16 pm
A Breath from the past.
The BBC B got me hooked. I remember using a ROM device from Watford Electronics which enabled me to do (today) web top publishing.
I played Elite which was state of the art. My accounts and life were centred around the PC, 2xDisc Drives and truly state of the art at the time.
My first association with IT (c.1966 as a user) was with a large LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) Computer which was a valve driven large comouter housed in a air conditioned environment used for collating Government statistics on bakance of trade statistics.
I was overseas for a number of years and then joined a large government (in 1975) orgainisation as a PLAN programmer where I dutifully submitted my programming attempts on punched cards. I developed quickly into COBOL programming then into Operations Management using ICL 1900 and ICL2900 kit. I left the organisation then utilised my skills in UNIX/Tandem environments.
To my skillset were added database skills (I qualified as a Oracle 9i Oracle professional) communications and the necessity for good front ends whether provided by Microsoft, Linux or any other provider. I am now retired but am appreciative of the grounding and vision that my old BBC B machine gave me.