The British Micro that Shaped a Nation - BBC Micro - Trash to Treasure (Pt1)

The BBC Micro turns 40 in 2021. Few computers can claim to be as influential as the BBC Micro. It's place at the centre of The Computer Literacy Project saw it address the political and social concerns a nation had about the rise of technology and automation. It paved the way for a new generation to take up a career in computing, and reskilled existing workers who took up the opportunity. In this series we'll get to know the machine and the history surrounding it while fixing up a nice example or two for The Cave.

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[RMCRetro]

Thank you for watching, please also see the video description for links to further viewing and reading on the story of this fascinating machine. What are your memories of the BBC Micro, did you have one at home or at school and can you remember what you did with yours? I'd love to hear your stories. Neil - RMC

[ChuckFickens]

My parents bought A BBC model B in about 1982/3 (I was 10/11) and as I got interested in it also bought pretty much every accessory for it (2nd processor, all the ROMs, Teletext adaptor, floppy disc drives (dual) ....

35 years later I now have a comfortable life working as an IT engineer for an international company and I thank my parents for that start I was given.

[Rnurgundy]

This is broadcast quality. This channel keeps getting better and better.

[faumnamara]

Recently rescued some beebs from the loft of my old school. The actual ones I used in primary all those years ago.

[HC]

What I find completely grotesque is I had more opportunities to learn how computers really work in the late 80s than schoolkids do now. School PCs are now completely locked down, and in many schools, if you attempt to write a program on one you'll get suspended. School lessons that teach wordprocessing and spreadsheets are not computer lessons, they are office skill lessons and more akin to teaching kids how to touch type in past decades than what the computer literacy project achieved.

[Dragonblaster]

My parents never had much money. We took a holiday away twice in my childhood, both times in the UK. We had a black-and-white 10" TV until I was 13, and it only had two channels, ITV and BBC1. I had to go to my best friend's house to watch _The High Chaparral, _ because it was on BBC 2. _Thunderbirds_ was my favourite childhood TV show, one of the first UK TV series in colour... but I had to take their word for it.

But after I passed all my A Levels (Maths, Add. Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology), a few months before my 19th birthday in November 1981, I was STUNNED by my 19th birthday present from my parents: A BBC Micro, Model B 32k. My father, who worked in British Aerospace, had asked a friend in the computer department what the best home computer was for a technically-minded boy. The sacrifices my parents must have made to afford this... it still brings tears to my eyes. I learnt to write programs and games in BBC BASIC, but this showed its limitations when you had large iterative subroutines, so I learnt 6502 assembly language so I could talk directly to the silicon.

Later, at college, I did a unit on coding. We had these machines called EMMA (I never found out what that stood for). At they were was a hex keyboard and some I/O, and a 6502 processor. I remember the first week we had to do a program to simulate the UK traffic light sequence (Red, Red & Amber, Green, Amber, Red). The lecturer came round after about quarter of an hour and asked me what I was doing, and I said I was doing the flowchart. He said, "You need to get a move on, some of the other students have started to write the code." I said, "I've already written the program, and it works, " and I showed him. Baffled, the lecturer said, "But you're supposed to use the flowchart to help you write the program, " and I said, "I didn't need one."

As it was, instead of coming into the lesson and writing a program each week, I made a deal that I would come by every three weeks and write three programs. I ended up with a distinction. This was all thanks to the marvellous BBC Micro that my parents so generously bought me.

[Stuart-AJC]

" ... which Tangerine could only Dream about" - I see what you did there

[cassiel]

I never had one of these in my school. I was in the first year of secondary school when they came out. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it on TV. It just looked such better quality than any other home computer in the market. I was desperate to get one for Christmas, but we didn’t have much money and my mum told me they couldn’t get me one. Maybe next year if they could save up. Imagine my shock when I unwrapped my one Christmas present to find it was a BBC Micro Model B!! To this day, best present I ever had. Anyone remember the Welcome tape? That was brilliant! It had a teletext game at the end called Twin Kingdom Valley. After I played that all I wanted to do was learn to program. That machine didn’t just teach my BBC Basic, it taught me how to code and set me up for a future career as a software developer and consultant. Brilliant, brilliant computer!

[gorebrush]

Ah, here is my childhood, and the start of my lifelong obsession with computing. 33 years later, still going strong in IT. I owe it all to the BBC Micro. I should get myself one.

[michaelkaercher]

I lived in Germamy at the time and never recognized the BBC micro. I did know the sinclair maschines which I perceived as inadequate. In the last couple of month I am looking at a lot of emulators of machines from the time and I recognized how much better the BBC micro was, compared to Commodore and even Apple or Sinclair. That is a cool piece of kit.

[kcgeil]

I was part of the Domesday BBC/laser disk project back in the 80's, and love the Beeb like it was a family pet. I also just want to say RIP Gareth.

[russellhale]

I must have gone to an affluent school as we had a couple of rooms full of Model B's, they were all connected to ECONET and we also had a Watford Electronics 30MB Winchester hard drive - I also really enjoyed the drama 'Micro Men'.

[Zerbey]

My primary school had a total of 4 BBC Micros, when I started secondary school they had about 20 of them. I owe my entire career to the lessons I learned on this wonderful machine.

[sunilgaur]

This humble little computer is how I started my lifelong career in computing and software. When I bought it, I had no idea what I could do but I knew it was the future. Once I got started I never looked back and what an amazing career it’s been!

[mickaka]

My folks couldn’t afford a full fledged BBC Micro at the time so I got an Electron.
Finally got my hands on a BBC when my Middle School threw them all in to a skip in the early 90’s and a friend who lived near by let me know about it.
I already had an Amiga by then but finally having my own BBC was still special.

[smiths]

When I first got to secondary school, there was a room of Acorn Atoms, very forward looking school I think in hindsight. They got the upgrade to BBC Basic (rather than the more limited Atom Basic). Because of this we were late getting BBC Micros, but got them about half way through my school life. Did not matter, Computer Science teacher took the 380Z home, added Econet to it, and wrote some software to share the 2nd floppy disk over the Econet port. We had a floppy disk for each class. Amazing stuff for early 80s, even more amazing was the Computer Science teacher. He sold the solution to a couple of other schools for the school coffers. The 380Z ended up being replaced by a BBC Micro with Acron Winchester Drive (10GB Harddrive I think that was the size -why were the call this?). when I left in 1988 the school had just got their first Archimedes.


All the success I have today I owe to that school, and that very clever Computer Science teacher.

[terrybullock]

I somehow managed to get a free place at a 'posh' high school in Cambridge which got about 12 of these in 1983. The school year below me was the first to be offered 'computer studies' as an o-level, so our year had no actual education on them. They were networked together though, and I remember lunchbreaks where one boy would be at the door keeping lookout while some early game like pac-man loaded on all machines at once from a single tape drive. Ah, the amount of detentions we got, lol.
One of my closest friends was rich enough to have one at home, though, and he showed me how to get started programming in BASIC - something that would prove to be a life-long hobby for me.

[TheLambLive]

I have one I've recently refurbished (those old RIFA caps blew, of course)... it's absolutely the best machine of the 80's.... The expandability, the open nature of the hardware and it's adaptability, the various I/O that offered so many options, and a BASIC interpreter that included an in-line assembler... A real triumph of British computing.

[TechTimeWithEric]

A few years ago someone on YouTube was talking about their favorite computer movies and, mentioned Micro Men. I went ahead and watched it, being here in the states, we hear about the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs story all the time, it was cool to see a similar thing going on over there.

[_yadokari]

A freak accident put me out of PE for several months. Off-PE class was in the same room that housed the school's Beebs. That was the first time I sat in front of a computer and typed things. I probably wouldn't have had the same friends or my career if it wasn't for that moment.