Mac and the Micro – memories of Ian McNaught-Davis | Hacker News Reader

Mac and the Micro – memories of Ian McNaught-Davis

bbc.co.uk

35 pointsdraegtun26 comments

Amen buddy. For those not around at the time the BBC Micro and the ecosystem around it (including this programme) wasn't unlike the Raspberry Pi movement today.

I got my Beeb at the age of 10 and because of it (and without any formal CS education) my entire professional life has been in software.

That said, am I right in remembering the programme was cast away to BBC2, because it just wasn't quite mainstream enough?

I loved that programme and I loved my Model B. Serle & Mac were so easy to watch.

It was on BBC2 (then so were a bunch of great early morning Open University programmes on subjects that were way over my young head).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtMWEiCdsfc

Wasn't there also a weekly Radio 4 computer programme where they'd transmit a program that you could record on tape and then load onto your computer?

Have you seen Micro Men? Whimsical sort of film about the early days of Sinclair and Acorn, with some focus given to the race to manufacture the BBC's computer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIcAyFVK0gE

> I got my Beeb at the age of 10 and because of it (and without any formal CS education) my entire professional life has been in software.

Exact same story and age here. I always thought there were two reasons why the BBC Micro created so many developers. One is the TV programme, the second is the manual. Pretty much the first page introduces programming, and within a dozen pages you're making a rocket fly up the screen. As a kid that was enough to make me think "I can make a game", and I was hooked.

EDIT Found a PDF of the manual: http://bbc.nvg.org/doc/BBCUserGuide-1.00.pdf

524 pages! With chapters on assembly language towards the end. That's what I call getting your money's worth.

I had a Spectrum myself. The pack-in manual for that wasn't quite as hefty at about half the number of pages but it was pretty hard to overlook the possibility of programming when the keyboard itself was festooned with BASIC keywords.

While messing around with a Raspberry Pi recently and fidgeting with the board which by default does not come with a case I noted that - while not quite the same because just looking at a board isn't going to make you an electronic engineer - having such internals right there in your face does stoke some curiosity, even now that I'm an adult.

Snap!

However, as an ex-beeb user now with children who have a Raspberry Pi, the beeb was considerably more reliable, better documented, flexible and easier to get off the ground.

I'd argue it's still a better platform than the Pi today.

Pi with RISCOS is pretty nice though.

Although I could actually purchase an 8-bit micro (Atari 400 in my case) at a retail store. I think the Raspberry Pi is rather beyond most parents ability to acquire or even learn of.

All well and good - but can you buy a Beeb from a vending machine? You can buy a rPi from a vending machine:

http://www.hackerspaceshop.com/automat/

(In case anyone is in Vienna, Austria, this vending machine is in Metalab: - http://metalab.at/)

A Beeb came assembled in a case that you didn't have to assemble. Not being available in an actual store assembled limits the ability of the Pi to train a new generation.

Being able to buy a rPi at any time from a vending machine located in one of the worlds greatest hackerspaces means that - at any time - a kid can learn new things, for cheap.

"worlds greatest hackerspaces"

To which I would point out any child that makes it to a hackerspace probably has parents of tech interest. If it isn't available at Target, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart in the US (not sure EU equivalent) then it isn't going to train many new programmers.

Why on earth would you expect Target, Best Buy, or Wal-Mart to be interested - in the slightest - in an educational computer product that encourages experimentation and investigation, while costing less than the cost of a night at the movies? They'd rather sell shiny crap to teenagers.

Because they do it all the time with other educational toys since it makes them money.

And thus: uneducated youth. So, the rPi is a good thing since it allows us to continue to educate youth on the value of reprogrammable computers in spite of the best efforts of your wholesale heroes to make everyone stupid.

No real clue what you mean. The rPi is a neat toy but not in a position to be the gateway to programming that the 8-bit computers were in the late 70's and early 80's. It is a toy for the elite not the mass market.

Well, a lot of people have them, and a lot of people are hacking on them who might not have hacked on anything like it before .. so I consider it at least a solution to the problem, until someone releases a new-school micro with everything built in ..

The problem is "a lot of people have them" is a very small amount compared to the number of 8-bit computers that sold. I am still at a loss how we lost a whole price range of computers. I wish for a modern day Sinclair to rescue us.

I still have every 8-bit machine I ever used to educate myself, and they still work. In fact my children are using them to learn programming, too.

I think what happened was that people got lazy and decided to just buy games instead of developing themselves. And this lead to the game console, and .. developer greed economy .. and the rest is history.

There are still great machines out there that can encourage youth to develop software - take the Open Pandora, for example (http://openpandora.org/) - it comes with everything you need to develop great software, and is complete. It is expensive - the economies of scale dictate this alas - but until someone rises up and demonstrates to 'the majors' that there is viability in teaching someone to program software again, we won't get compilers back onboard.

Imagine if the Nintendo had a compiler cartridge .. Imagine the same thing for the PS3/XBoxen of today. All it takes is a little less consumerism and a little more developerism.

Encourage a developer ethos on all fronts!

Just how many telephone directories is that then?

It's hard to overstate how important this all was. Without it Acorn would have probably gone under and ARM would never have happened.

And that's aside from the massive amounts of development going on with Spectrums and then later Amigas leading to the UK punching well above its weight in the games industry to the present day.

One reason I'm so happy to have stayed doing mobile dev for 10+ years is that it has had the same sort of enthusiastic chaos that existed then. Yes, some things about not having a homogeneous ecosystem are a pain, but the benefits that arise from actual competition lead to a far better rate of progress all round. The incessant whining of developers is a leading cause of inertia.

The pre 90s exuberance for computing in general keeps me going to this day.

I tremendously enjoyed Ian McNaught-Davis appearances on "The Computer Programme" - the "Computer Chronicles" are also very much worth watching by the way:

https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles

https://archive.org/details/computer-programme

Douglas Crockford often says that most of us don't have a sense of history really, that's a shame if you ask me.

https://archive.org/donate/index.php (they take bitcoin as well)

Quite true. Sometimes you see someone just telling how great technology X is, when something similar was already done in the 70 - 90's time frame.

They just weren't born or too young to ever know it.

As seen in Micro Men - BBC Dramatisation of the business end of (some of) the 80s home computer scene in the 80s in the UK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Cool, I didn't know about that documentary! Perfect Saturday evening cinema, thanks!

Slightly interesting fact: The barmaid at the end is Sophie (was Roger) Wilson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson

Ugh, don't read the comments, people arguing Mac vs Windows. It would be better for the universe if the BBC just disallowed commenting and all the discussion takes place on 3rd party sites like HN.

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