Hardware: The BBC Micro - from little acorns

Acorn worked with the British Broadcasting Corporation to help with their computer literacy program and renamed their upcoming Proton computer to the BBC Micro.

[OzRetrocomp]

I'm a simple man. I see a BBC Micro, I hit "like".

[Online-Tech-Tips]

Sweet intro!
Nice vid 👌🤓 very informative.

[MrDustpile]

I only discovered the BBC Micro at secondary school but that did mean virtually nobody wanted to use it any more... least 'til the others saw me having fun with the games disc, like Pole Position, or running the noise and colour chaos I played with in BASIC. They even had copies of Elite and Yes Prime Minister on tape, which I felt like some archaeologist to unearth as they let me bring my Acorn tape unit in to be able to even load them. Those were just sat on the shelf behind the glass doors, all forgotten until I stumbled on them.

Back when even the C64 was too long in the tooth, I also poo-poo'd the BBC for its graphics out of the ark and its stark lack of multimedia. But I also envied its 80 columns, top-notch BASIC and superior versions of some games too. My own vid on the Beeb is below, for what that's worth, and I crammed in the clips of my favourite games, observations and beautiful beautiful hardware I finally had of my own. I finally bought Beebs of my own for chiptune use - Beebsynth the killer app - but to my huge surprise, there's a whole range of sonic richness I can play and sample, even using my own keyboard program with joystick to play envelopes as presets and all kinds of magic. For someone used to the SID at minimum, I'm really blown away. A project machine at its best by early 80s standards.

[GouldFishOnGames]

Such an important and expandable machine, spent so many years at school messing around with them.

[FireballXL]

I know this is an old vid now but it does have an on board volume level control.
It was a great machine looking for a niche position, out of the box nothing came near it for expandability.
It's unfortunate about the Rifa caps but they were the Rolls Royce make during the day.

[RetroBytesUK]

The case of your BBC B is in a very nice condition, most of mine have some very yellowed patches on them.

[ezContents]

Although I never owned a physical version. It is one of my favourite cores on the MiSTer.

[WhatHoSnorkers]

With the analogue in you can perform the temperature experiment from "Experiments with your computer" by Usborne!

[PondersRetroGoodness]

The memory was the BBC's weakness where games were concerned. It could handle the graphics speed but using the higher resolution graphics mode left so little memory you couldn't write a decent game that used it. Other than that the BBC was a beast of a machine. So expandable by design and built like a brick to take the abuse schoolkids would give it.