BBC Micro - Where I started

Back in the 80's I started peeing around with computers. Today I see that one of the designers of the BBC Micro is honoured, well done to Steve Furber, of the University of Manchester, is made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).





http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7162935.stm

This machine had a massive 32k memory and a 6502 processor. These are the days when Watford Electronics were in Watford, in fact the first micro we bought was from there an Acorn Atom that came in kit form with 0.5k of memory. I remember travelling 25 miles to Watford Electronics to buy the 0.5k memory upgrades. The Atom's keyboard even had to be assembled key by key.

When the BBC Micro arrived we were presented with colour computing for the first time and we started on our first projects. With my brother doing the assemble code and me doing the graphics we launched two games through Kansas City systems, Turbo and Tomahawk.

looking around the net these can still be found for download and run on a PC using a BBC Emulator. http://www.beebgames.com/games.php?company=150&start=21

The BBC Micro was developed by Acorn for schools and also had it's own weekly TV show.

Another curious feature of the BBC Micro was a speech synthesis chip, this gave the micro a real voice and a voice that was English accent and with a clarity that outshines many of today's voice systems. I seem to remember it was the BBC's own Kenneth Kendal that had his voice digitsed for this system.

But the most aspiring point of the BBC Micro was the BBC Basic language, which was easy to program with quick results and really did give me a good start in logic and what computers had to offer.