BBC Micro creators reunion tonight at London Science Museum
The London Science Museum will host a reunion for the creators of the beloved BBC Micro at an event tonight. The BBC Micro was a landmark in the evolution of the PC, a public-service computer invented to achieve national computer literacy:
Link to BBC article, Link to event details (via /.)
"Acorn and the BBC were very surprised at the impact it had and the interest in it as a piece of hardware," said Dr Blyth, curator of computing and information at the Science Museum.More than 1.5 million BBC computers were eventually sold; the BBC and Acorn had predicted they would sell 12,000.
"It was a very ambitious project. At the heart of it was education and bettering Britain; and helping us to understand what the computer could do and what you could with a computer."
She added: "I believe the history of the BBC Micro is really a fundamental one to understanding where we are today and explaining the British computer industry and our culture of computing that we have today.
(Image: BBC Micro, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Lord Biro's Flickr stream)
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I still miss the word processor I used on the BBC.
I was working for a company in the early 80s, firstly building the acorn atom kit and installing 'networks' in schools. We then went on to the BBC. Seemed to me at the time, our govmunt was very quietly working behind the scenes to get these systems in schools by hook or by crook.
It was part of the 'gravy train' drive we have with todays technology. We leanrt how to use them, then we went out and bought them, now we're pretty much enslaved to them. Bring back the atom!
Cory, I'm surprised you didn't mention your novella True Names (co-written with Benjamin Rosenbaum) and just starting on your podcast. Beeb is a main character and I presume the name was derived from the nickname for the Micro.
The first installment was awesome. I am also reading Postsingular by Rudy Rucker and Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. My brain is starting to overload with thoughts about the nature of identity.
Share and Enjoy!
I learned to program on the BBC Micro. For such a limited machine, it had some surprisingly cutting-edge features - a structured BASIC (with true subroutines), a powerful 'toolbox' of callable OS functions, and an impressive array of ports. You could even fit a second processor (in a kind of external 'sidecar').
My six-year old PDA is 144 times faster than the BBC Micro, has over 500 times the memory (more if you count the SD slot), cost me less and fits in my pocket. But in its day, the BBC seemed pretty revolutionary.
Unfortunately, the event -- and the room with the BBC Micros in it -- is not open to the general public.
I agree with your characterisation a fine artifact of a good project but...it was very expensive, I saved for a year to buy a ZX Spectrum which was half the price (48 whole K! Blimey!), there was no way me or my family could afford a BBC micro. So bettering Britain... for those who could afford it, very much in keeping with Thatcher's 80's. An early manifestation of a digital divide of sorts.
Yeah, these were the days. I remember assembling my Acorn Atom from the kit version (still have it today), and learning Acorn integer basic and 6502 assembler, all this with a 2Kbyte memory expanded to 8 Kb with 2114 chips :-) After that, I remember buying an Acorn Electron (the BBC computer little cheapo brother) and playing Elite...
BBC structured Basic was one of the best Basics i ever enjoyed. Thanks to all Acorn creators for those very happy computing and playing years.
Damn, damn, damn.
I would have liked to have gone to this.
'Elite' is solely responsible for my computer game addiction (though I think I first played it on a C64)