BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [video] | Hacker News Reader

BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [video]

bbc.co.uk

134 pointszeristor94 comments

My school had a classroom of BBC Micros which were connected over a primitive network to a "server" which I guess must have had a hard drive for saving files too. I can't take the credit but a school friend worked out how to view the memory of another machine over the network, from which we made the first remote keystroke capture I had ever seen, which got us the teachers' passwords.

Our first hack was born - with their password we could get onto the server and print out the password file (in plain text of course). The teachers started to realise they'd been hacked but I think thought it more likely we'd observed their typing when sat nearby and so changed their passwords. Of course we could just keep watching their passwords being entered at a distance.

I think we were caught in the end red handed with the password file printing out and unable to stop it printing when they came in the room. Luckily back then it was seen as experimentation not criminal!

That sounds very familiar!

There was essentially no security on those Econet networks. If you had a copy of the executable that could read and write the memory of a remote computer, you were good to go.

I remember I had a print-out of a hex dump of the REMOTE command and used it with exactly that key capture attack. I just typed in the executable then told the teacher I'd forgotten my password and needed it reset. I watched remotely as he logged on to his admin account.

The next day, all the BBC micros in the lab played Captain Pugwash when they started: very beep-heavy given the ability of a BBC to create sound.

Eventually I was caught re-entering the hex dump and my printout was confiscated. I didn't have another copy.

Must have been this: https://www.stairwaytohell.com/music/Frak.mp3

With the *REMOTE, *VIEW and *NOTIFY commands you could also have a huge amount of fun in class (much of it invisible to the teacher).

We also found a privilege escalation endpoint, and were only caught when the network server was upgraded to an Archimedes and the special badging on admin accounts in the GUI gave our MRBIG account away.

Don’t forget to change *PROT to *PR0T in the teachers !BOOT file.

I vaguely remember editing one of the boot files so it'd start up and display a fake > prompt. This was then used to print out an insult. Also because everyone just hit break you could set it with a *KEY0 command to just run the program and insult them some more. I remember getting in trouble more than exactly what I did - was a long time ago now! :)

NL/The Netherlands :

Around 1984 I got really interested and there was an Acorn Electron at our local library for everybody to use.

Around 1986 I went to a new school which had a fully equipped classroom with BBC B's, server with co-processor, networked(!). We all had our own floppy disks ( not drives ), which we could save to at the end of the hour. This class was opened up during lunch-breaks.

Late 1986 : Acorn dumped their Electron stock on the marktet and a national furniture chain ( Quantum ) carried them, and I acquired my first computer for a very modest price. I still remember that day and place.

Thank you Acorn for the wonderful products and the BBC/UK for the foresight.

And here we are.

My friends all got ZX Spectrums and had a larger pool of people to swap games with. My parents got me an Acorn Electron, which has a child i was disappointed. I loved the hell out of that thing and the lack of friends with the same system, meant i learn basic and things spiraled from there. So in a way, something i thought as a mistake turned out to be perfect.

I started reading the manual of our ZX Spectrum because when the kit arrived the tape-deck didn't work. We had a bunch of free games with the computer, but we couldn't load any of them!

No doubt I'd have gotten around to it eventually anyway, but that was the direct source of my programming career:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html

Mmm, our first computer was a TI99/4A, which my Dad picked up cheap when they were on sale as part of TI getting out of the home-computer business in the early 80s. Having very few commercial games for it was part of what nudged me into trying typing in games programs from books and user group magazines, which acted as a pretty good gradual introduction to programming as I had to figure out why things weren't working or try to adapt programs written for other BASIC dialects.

Wow, where was this? What library was that?

I was 12 at the time and had to take turns on my friend's BBC Micro (his parents' really). Of course, he was at the computer for 75% of the time, because "I know how to operate it".

My dad still has many in his loft as my secondary school chucked them out late 90s and we took them. They were even considered old rubbish when I was in middle school; that school had 1 Archimedes that sat forlornly in the corner.

I was using it in the early 90s when everyone else was playing on their Sega and early PCs. We were poor so had to make do with very last-generation tech. I enjoyed playing games on it and then got a programming book (Advanced Programming Techniques for the BBC Micro my Jim McGregor and Alan Watt - I bought a copy recently) from my school library as a teenager with thoughts of writing a game, when Pentiums IIs were appearing... the folly. I did my homework on its word processor and printed it out with a deafening Epson, which looked pretty rubbish compared to my contempory's Encarta-pictured-studded inkjet printouts with WordArt. Oh well.

As it turned out, the programming book was very interesting and had all manner of stuff in it I didn't understand like 3D programming methods with maths I didn't understand, but I did design my own glyph and animate it walking across the screen after designing it on grid paper.

My dad still has all the disk drives, second processor, A, B, B+ and Master units in his loft along with a series of Cub monitors. And various eeproms like Speech, View etc, and an AMX mouse. Even had an Integrex colour inkjet which I managed to get some output from (very quiet), but that went to the bin some years ago. I think he has all the manuals too.

Really fond of the Beeb as it served me well and introduced me to programming despite the inadequacies of the keybord. Will have to grab a Master from him. I certainly do miss the instant start-up time...

I ended up doing my paper round as a teenager and spending the money on PC Plus and Micromart in the hope of buying a PC but had to do with ones school threw out again, so I was languishing on a 486 DX2 when PIIIs and Celerons were around, but I don't regret it. Introduced me to Linux RedHat 6.2 and many more exciting computer journeys.

>inadequacies of the keyboard

cough ZX-Spectrum cough

cough Atari 400 cough

At least you could buy a cool replacement keyboard.

I used a ZX81 too and my word was that a bad keyboard!

Not as bad as a MK14.

Hey, I used to hang around toy shops and program on display C64 and CPC 464 and, in one shop, an Acorn Archimedes A3000.

I even wrote programs in VTech BASIC, on toy computers with 40x2 character (IIRC - definitely two lines, not sure about columns) LCD displays.

Compared to your average 8 bitter at the time the keyboard of the BBC was pretty good. It was also the only one that didn't fail after a couple of weeks of heavy use.

It also had much nicer graphics.

At my first job we used one as colour front end to a PDP 11/03 that was attached to a huge hydrodynamic model- It largest physical model in the world at the time and used 1/3 of our entire lab space related to a nuke plant in China.

When the Chinese delegation arrived they where stunned by the BBC micro and apparently spent the next weekend scouring the area for BBC micros to take back.

Interesting, my first job was also in hydrodynamic modelling using PDP-11/03 for data capture! I wonder if it was the same place? I left there in 1982 and I don't think they had any BBC Micros at that time.

BHRA (BHR Group now)

Mine still works: https://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/my-bbc-micro-model-b-and-plume-... https://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/back-from-dead-with-power-suppl...

I'd say the Spectrums and to a lesser extent (in the UK) C64s inspired more coders - the Spectrum in particular was much cheaper and more popular (and thus a bigger potential market for games), the Beeb was seen as a boring school PC by many kids, by dint of its presence in virtually every school in the UK - Apple didn't have a foothold in the UK education market like it did in the US.

Fair comment; I was regularly hacking games, programming, and playing on the Spectrum as were most of my friends.

Nobody I knew had a BBC - they were a "school computer", not a "fun computer". Though the games still stuck in my memory, "Granny's Garden" and some kind of economy game (where you raised taxes, and did similar things. You had to get elected again and keep your population happy. I wish I knew what that was called.)

> some kind of economy game (where you raised taxes, and did similar things. You had to get elected again and keep your population happy. I wish I knew what that was called.)

Yellow River Kingdom?

Thanks for the suggestion, from the video it doesn't match my memories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSE1NVaUs8s

I remember text-only, and being shown unemployment-rates, and similar. I think it was based on UK political parties, but my memory is so vague I can't remember any significant details.

Could it be Great Britain Ltd?

https://youtu.be/vnojOGjz578

Definitely!

Thank you so much, that game has been lurking at the back of my mind for the better part of 30 years!

You can play it here:

http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=1537

Almost certainly SimCity: https://www.mobygames.com/game/bbc-micro_/simcity

I hadn't realized that was available for the BBC!

One of the later replies successfully identified it as "Great Britain Ltd".

Yes - and the UK's third micro, the Amstrad CPC, which unlike the Spectrum and C64 had a decent BASIC, and unlike the BBC Micro was affordable.

And came with its own CRT so you wouldn't have to fight over the family TV.

Yeah, the BBC B was normally the thing your school had, and despite being a "boring school PC" your mates were probably too busy playing Elite on it too much for you to spend much time using it. BBCs were about twice the price of a C64 or three times the price of a ZX Spectrum, so not many people had them at home.

The BBC B was for the posh kids. It cost about £400 against (I think) £100 or so for a Spectrum (or £80 for my Dragon 32 that I got cheap after Dragon went bust). The only good thing about the BBC B at first was Elite.

There was the Acorn Electron, but that didn't come out until later and was still £200.

To be fair, having a home computer at all was for posh kids. Having a BBC B at home was for really posh kids.

It's all relative, but I managed to get a Dragon 32 after they went bust despite growing up on and off benefits.

I don't think we could afford anything, but I could over a period of time build my own.

Nice! I wish I had been smart enough to do that.

I'd disagree, my folks who were both working class saved for about two years to get me a BBC Micro B. My dad wouldn't let me have anything less after seeing Spectrums, C64's etc in the shops at the time, he figured they were (in his words, not mine :) ) cheap toys.

I in the meantime pleaded for them to let me get a Spectrum, or basically anything; I ended up going to friends houses for my computer fix :)

But I'm very glad they patiently scrimped and saved for the BBC and made me wait. The built-in 6502 assembler was one of the first things I learned, it was a joy to use. That machine kicked off my career in software development, it was well worth the wait.

The Spectrum and ZX81 were super-affordable, so a lot of working class families bought them, often as games machines at Christmas.

Some of those kids made a career out of them. If you programmed a game you could set up a business for the price of some cheap print ads and cassette labels.

The BBC was for (mostly) posh parents who could afford the inflation adjusted equivalent of £1500 to £2500 (with disk drives) on something more serious. It was really the UK's Apple II.

But they were still cheap computers. An S-100 business system would cost between two and five times as much as a BBC, and a low-end minicomputer like a PDP-8 or low-spec PDP-11 would be more like five to ten times as much.

IMO Acorn lost out by selling to education. If they'd sold a rebadged version as a business machine with support they'd have stormed the market.

I think the business market was the target of the Torch/Acorn joint venture, which never really got off the ground:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torch_Computers#Acorn_Computer...

Yeh I think the role of the BBC Micro is overstated

We had a ZX81, then a ZX Spectrum then a Dragon 32

Other mates had Vic 20s or C64s

I can think of only one friend who had a BBC Micro at home - the were 3 or 4 times the price of a Spectrum

The role of the BBC Micro wasn't just about what the kids had at home. It was about providing kids access to a machine -- many kids wouldn't have had computers at home. It was also about providing a framework, lessons, course materials, TV shows, etc all centred around development on a standard system. It's what encouraged other home computers to run BASIC (for example the Locomotive Basic, which is what the Amstrad CPC ran, was heavily influenced by BBC Basic).

The BBC Micro was a massive influence to the education of IT, to the home computing industry and to 80s kids (even if sometimes indirectly).

Locomotive BASIC was indeed influenced by BBC Basic, but I think you'd have a hard time arguing that the Spectrum (direct descendant of the ZX81) or the C64 (developed in America) were, and they were by far the two most popular micros in the UK.

I didn't say the C64 and Spectrum were directly influenced by the BBC (though I can see why you read my comment that way) but that the wider industry was. eg Parents bought kids BASIC systems because schools had BBCs so the C64, whilst often just used as a games system, was bought because it was also "educational".

If it weren't for the BBC, I'd wager far fewer homes would have had BASIC-based micro computers and thus that industry would have been much smaller.

Yeh but we could have just easily as put ZX Spectrums into schools and had twice as many

As far as I can remember my school didn't have BBC Micro's we had Commodore Pets when I was doing O levels

Not sure why we didn't have any BBCs though

Sinclair wasn’t interesting in targeting that demographic, which is part of the reason Chris Curry left Sinclair to found Acorn. And you can see the difference in the build quality of machines like the ZX vs the BBC Micro. I’m really not convinced ZX Spectrums would have lasted long with a school of, often unmonitored, children banging away at the computer.

Not to mention that the BBC Micro came with a proper monitor. Granted home users could get away with plugging their computer into the TV but buying a TV for their computer would have been an extra cost for schools.

Commodore PET is a few years older than the BBC Micro so that might be why your school has then instead?

My primary school in the early 90s had one Apple, several BBC and mostly Acorn computers.

I'd definitely agree. BBC Micro - total sales 1 million. CBM-64 between 10 and 17 million. Meanwhile Raspberry Pis are well over 30 million.

Never had the pleasure of having (or even seeing) a BBC Micro, but I grew up with the contemporary ZX Spectrum (and the predecessor ZX81) and I have the fondest memories of that time [0].

There was something magical about its simplicity and immediacy. From OFF to a BASIC interpreter in about one second. No boilerplate, you could be drawing stuff on the screen in one line.

I've wondered many times if there's anything equivalent for the current generations. Teaching CG in university showed me just how many abstractions there are between a person and the computer these days. Some of my students didn't have a clear understanding of the difference between RAM and disk; I suppose SSDs make this difference even more tenuous. For me growing up it was pretty obvious what was in the computer and what was in the tape.

[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/d...

I was a Micro kid - I guess it would have been ‘89 when I started at a new school, and they had an old bomb shelter with half a dozen micros and amigas in it. The amigas were off limits, for seniors only, but the micros were free to use in breaks, evenings after prep, sundays. None had any storage - nor was there any software - but there were heaps and heaps of BBC Micro magazines.

We all taught ourselves to code, following tutorial series in magazines, swapping tips with each other, and copying games line by line from listings in magazines, modifying them or fixing (and creating) bugs as we went. Then of course the power would go off, and we’d lose everything - stuff we cared about keeping got written out with pencil on graph paper.

By the time I was ten, I found basic trivial, assembler natural, the idea of everything just being a set of simple operations and reading and writing memory addresses intuitive.

The same applies for all of us - our little clique of half a dozen kids who accidentally learned computer science in a bomb shelter because they wanted to play games. We made a half decent little dungeon crawler, which got us into no end of trouble when one of the masters discovered us poring over the notebook we were writing it in, as they thought we were plotting to blow up the school. Which we were - just in the game, which was about escaping school.

I feel like because the computers were less accessible as utility devices, they were more accessible as computers. You had to grok the thing to do anything with it - necessity, invention, mothers and all that.

To be fair to the the master in question, violent rebellions in British schools do have a history, although it's been a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1797_Rugby_School_rebellion#Ru...

There's not much boilerplate for drawing in JS which every computer has installed.

I get what you're saying, but microcomputers of that era felt more like appliances. It was like switching on a radio. You plugged it in, switched it on, and there it was the prompt greeting you, ready for typing your program.

And -- get this -- there was no shutdown procedure either. You just switched it off!

For javascript in the browser you still have a complex stack, including a pretty complex operating system, which must have been booted up first.

The colour Maximite [1] is a good approximation to this for the modern era. Arm Cortex M7 at 480MHz so quite powerful but not many abstraction layers between user code and the hardware.

More coverage here from the 8-bit guy here. [2]

[1] https://geoffg.net/maximite.html

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7REQxohV4

They were just about becoming obsolete when I was in infant/junior school but even so, playing Chuckie Egg and using that drawing turtle (when available) really left an impression. Played around with BASIC (as much as an 8 year old can) and then got a bug for it. Few years later got a 286 donated by my mum and dad (yay qbasic), then a few years later some thing called linux came out which opened up a new horizon all together.

I then had the pleasure of working in R&D at the beeb for a few years where I got briefly involved testing the microbit for thermal dissipation and usage with different USB cable lengths (it was a colleague how kicked off the project, amongst several others, who also pushed the idea).

Here's to the Micro! Who knows what computing will look like in 40 years but I can guarantee they'll be an emulator running BBC Micro code ;)

The clip doesn't mention the importance of the BBC Micro in the history of Arm - but without the success of the BBC, Acorn surely wouldn't have been in a position to create the Archimedes with its novel processor.

The BBC made an effort in establishing web literacy, but that never quite seemed to take off. I seem to remember something called Auntie, which makes the success of this all the more interesting.

There was a Barry Norman programme on Saturdays where they played programmes over the radiowaves for people to record and play. Or did I dream that?

Edit: It would seem not, it was called Chip Shop:

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/58aae80bd5844a729097ca16998c6c02

Weirdly they have the address to write to in the programme listing with the post code removed, I don't know if it is defunct or for GDPR.

It appears the postcode was W12 8QT

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/downloads/14545

It's the old postcode for BBC Television Centre, so it's defunct (and the Royal Mail address search doesn't list it any more)

There was also Micro Live which was pretty successful and well remembered I think. BBC Micros were in lots of schools

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc5vFmedE1c

There was a show called The Net: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(British_TV_series)

It used the MOS 6502 CPU, which was also used for the Apple I, Apple II, the Commodores and Atari and Nintendo (NES, SNES) game consoles!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWqBmmPQP40

http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html

https://eater.net/6502

You are not wrong, but at least the C64 used the 6510 ( a variant ).

That CPU is still going strong. In fact, I'm currently building an assembler for the 6502 in Rust.

https://mos.datatra.sh

And clocked at 2 MHz! Twice the frequency of the Apple II or the C64.

Luxury! Though I did have a VIC 2 and SID to solve many problems.

Elite was very slow on the C64 because of the CPU speed. Line drawing and hidden surface removal were expensive.

I remember the PC World Computer Fair at the Barbican in the early Eighties, walking past the Acorn stand with a BBC with a voice synthesiser singing “I am working for the BBC”.

<slight rant> I remember these mysterious computers from primary school... I never got to even touch one, only the "cleverest" kids seemed to be blessed with the chance to use it and merely to learn typing - remember when that was considered a skill? Later on in the mid 90s my dad got me an old Atari ST where my first exposure to programming and fun with computers began, It might seem dated by that point but I am still extremely grateful for it to this day.

I will never know how useful the BBC would have been. My memory of schools back then were not the most inclusive, they seem to arbitrarily decide who should and shouldn't get a chance to do something based on their perception of who is the cleverest.

> remember when that was considered a skill?

Yeah ;) That era was like being given a car and pretending it's a horse. Skills for the future was mostly typing on a word processor, not programming the thing.

The ST was a good machine. GEM worked well though the API was poor.

Source: Mac Plus C/68K developer.

Video series I enjoyed a while back on history and repair. (I would post the playlist but it is out of order)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rgEzG7F5d8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQCgzIWZo0o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKDMZCEeBd4

"Chuckie Egg" was my introduction to hacking.

I wrote an assembler program to load the game from tape, disassemble the code and overwrite the instruction that decremented the life count.

The inline assembler in BBC Basic was an incredible feature. I wish more systems today had the same mix of high-level and bare-metal.

Gave away my Beeb decades ago. It was awesome. I wrote a timekeeping system for my Dad's firm on it that got me through my Computer Studies A-level :)

Also played a shit-ton of Elite on it. I suspect Elite was the driver behind 90% of the floppy drive sales for the Beeb.

Still got my Acorn Atom, though 12Kb of memory (including the expansion pack), and that includes roughly 1Kb of system memory, a BASIC interpreter and Assembler. Now all I need is to find some way of connecting it to a PAL-compatible TV again, and finding a cassette recorder to act as the storage device... I suspect I'll be giving this one away soon too.

This has been covered many times in the past[1], but for anyone looking to play with the BBC Micro these days: https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I remember (aged about 17) going to see Chris Curry demonstrate the BBC computer at the South Yorkshire Personal Computer Group which met in a Sheffield University lecture theatre.

He was just nonchalantly smoking at the front of the lecture theatre, demonstating what it was capable of.

There was a mass stampede down to the front when he ended his demonstration, with nearly everybody wanting to place pre-orders.

I’d suggest that, in the UK, it’d be the C64 and Spectrum, not the BBC Model B. Cost alone restricted the BBC to wealthy families and schools.

I’d play games on my C64 and then took an interest in cracking games. This lead into writing demos and, eventually, a job writing 68k and C with MPW in the Mac (via Amiga and Atari).

The BBC Model B played no part in my career.

I enjoy messing around in the Owlet browser-based BBC BASIC editor. 8-bit graphics still has a place in modern web design ;)

https://bbcmic.ro/

Related doc on youtube:

"Birth of BASIC"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYPNjSoDrqw

It was great that you could get ROMs for other languages. I learnt Pascal on a Beeb. There was also Lisp, Forth, and a few others.

It also had the best resolution I ever saw on an 8 bit micro: mode 0 was 640x256 with one bit colour depth. This meant you could have 80 columns.

The one thing that I missed were colours: you only really had 8.

I had the Acornsoft version of Forth, which loaded from a cassette tape :) But yeah, the sideways ROM feature was pretty amazing. I wrote up my final year college project in Wordwise running in a sideways ROM. Then I snagged a Torch Z80 coprocessor and could run a port of WordStar on CP/N (Torch's clone of CP/M). The project (all 600 pages of it) was then printed on a Juki 6100 daisywheel printer :)

> Juki 6100 daisywheel printer

Ahh, thanks, I’ve been trying to remember what that printer was for about 30 years!

The noisiest thing ever as well, clackety clack at 12cps, and thumpity thump as it did a carriage return :)

I had the Acornsoft Forth as well, (for the Acorn Atom).

Ah, the memories!

Loved my BBC Micro model B. 32Kb RAM was a luxury back then. It was attached to a huge black and white 1970’s TV as real computer monitors were very expensive back then.

Planetoid was my go-to game. Got me into BASIC programming and 6502 assembly.

Actually the BBC color monitor was very cheap - at the time a color Vt100 clone cost over £2k the BBC one was £800 approx.

The basic Tektronix graphics display was a lot! more

My first contact with computers was with an unlicensed clone of the Zx81.Too bad the acorns never catched in south america. They seen far more capable computers. At least they have better keyboards.

This is one of the best Twitter bots to follow: https://twitter.com/bbcmicrobot

I remember Chris Serle learning about email from Ian McNaughton in 1982, I just couldn’t understand how fax was a thing for the next couple of decades.

"... fax was a thing for the next couple of decades."

Inertia. I accidentally dropped my company's fax machine in the skip when we moved a few years back. I also forgot to move the phone line or even order one for it.

Fax is still a thing. Not long ago did some work for a publisher, who take orders from their stockists via forms submitted either via ftp as EDIs, or fax as either EDI or a hand-filled form for transcription to EDI - the majority still fax in handwritten forms.

I also had to send a fax of documentation to a government a few weeks ago - their rationale was that fax was secure, and email wasn’t - the irony of course being that I used some random web to fax service, which is likely much less secure than either email or fax!

Fax is absolutely still out there. Before he retired, someone I know who ran a machine shop got drawings by fax right up to the very end.

Put your drawing in the fax machine, key in the number (or speed dial), hit Send. No mucking about with apps or websites.

Of course, drawings are a rather special case, and it's not like we're using fax for general business communications now. Back when a few people still did, I actually put together a HylaFax setup that allowed the office to print directly to fax. I think it got used for non-testing purposes maybe twice.

It was expensive you where charged by the email and data on top of that - I used to work on billing for Telecom Gold (Dialcom) and Prestel.

One of my weirdest development experiences was in what must have been about 2005, on a call with the team at another company who were to provide us with a web service API (I think given the era it was probably an ad hoc XMLRPC implementation of some sort). I asked them to send me over a sample of the request xml.

They faxed it.

Had one when I was 8, learnt programming on it, everything else comes from that.

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