The BBC Micro is around 30 years old.
Middle brother had one, which he understood and I didn't.
But we still passed many contented hours together typing in games in BASIC, playing them for a few minutes, then more hours tinkering with the program.
It was a case of travelling hopefully being more fun than arriving.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15969065
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That's a blast from the past. A friends parents had one. Can remember loading games to play on it from a cassette player.
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I had one. Even upgraded it to a 5.25 floppy.
Good machine, Elite and the fly a Spitfire simulation are happily remembered.
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My take is slightly different.
An over priced slightly flawed machine which had excellent build quality, great expansion capabilities and a great version of BASIC built into the ROM, perhaps one of the most pure versions of Microsoft BASIC found on the 8-bit machines.
These facts meant it was great for small businesses which could not afford an IBM PC and it was great for schools as they could take the abuse.
It was flawed because the C64 was half the price, had the same CPU, in some cases more RAM, had better graphics and much better sound. The C64 did not have the same build quality or expansion capabilities and the built in BASIC was extremely flawed as to save money Commodore had to fit a smaller ROM chip, which meant only earlier versions of MS/Commodore BASIC would fit in it.
As a young kid had lots of fun with BBC BASIC though it was far easier and enjoyable to program.
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>> The C64 did not
>> have the same build quality or expansion capabilities and the built in BASIC was extremely
>> flawed as to save money Commodore had to fit a smaller ROM chip, which meant
>> only earlier versions of MS/Commodore BASIC would fit in it.
>>
>> As a young kid had lots of fun with BBC BASIC though it was far
>> easier and enjoyable to program.
BBC ROM was 32k, only leaving 32k for RAM (without special tricks), of which up to 20k was for graphics. Don't know the C64, but the Spectrum's BASIC fitted into 16k, and it wasn't bad.
It wasn't just that the BBC BASIC had more features - small size was sacrificed for speed.
For example, the 20k graphics mode consisted of 80 'pages' of 256 bytes. To clear the screen they could have used a single 6502 indirect addressing instruction within a loop (20k iterations) to write to every byte in turn. However, for speed they used 80 separate page addressing instructions (256 iterations), which was slightly faster.
Last edited by: Focus on Thu 1 Dec 11 at 11:41
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The C64 had 20kb of ROM, so all graphics and sound functions were left out. Lots of fun with peak and pokes not understanding any of it. Where as the BBC you could use the sound and graphics command and make lots of nice graphics without using as reference book.
Pretty sure with the C64 you could not change the display resolution in BASIC either, where in the BBC it was one simple command, screen.
I really do miss this old world of computers, where the general public didn't understand them.
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Probably said before I used to work for an Acorn dealer at the time, and the machines used to fly off the shelves. One Saturday morning we took my annual salary in cash.
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>> Where as the
>> BBC you could use the sound and graphics command and make lots of nice graphics
>> without using as reference book.
I used to go into W H Smiths on a Saturday morning and enter a few lines of BASIC (<10 IIRC) which turned the BBC on display into a (somewhat limited) piano. Nice machine.
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We used on occasion to write a tiny basic program for the BBC display machines we had that made them look exactly like a C64, an Atari and a Vic20 after power up.
Oh the amusement.
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>> We used on occasion to write a tiny basic program for the BBC display machines
>> we had that made them look exactly like a C64, an Atari and a Vic20
>> after power up.
A sort of cloaking device? Wow, that BASIC was powerful :)
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Well, the punters had set faces to stunned.
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And BBC Basic was not based on Microsoft BASIC. For starters it had IF-THEN-ELSE, REPEAT UNTIL, PROCEDURES, etc.
The BBC wanted a version of BASIC that encouraged good programming practice. Hence not going with Microsoft BASIC. It was written by Roger Wilson (now Sophie).
I had a BBC Master 128 at one point. In the school holidays I used to borrow a BBC Model B for use at home.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 1 Dec 11 at 16:03
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Wasn't it based on Microsofts though?
Pretty sure I remember an easter egg in it which had the (C) Microsoft in it.
Seems I must have been getting mixed up.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC
Some of the syntax is very similar though, I know moving from BBC Basic to MS BASIC 4.0 wasn't that hard.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Thu 1 Dec 11 at 16:45
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>> Some of the syntax is very similar though
BBC BASIC is BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). But there are programming features in BBC BASIC that were not in Microsoft BASIC at the time. Like long variable names, IF-THEN-ELSE, REPEAT-UNTIL, PROCEDURES, etc.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Thu 1 Dec 11 at 18:47
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I had the cut down version, the Electron.
I never could get my head round BBC BASIC, I was more comfortable with what they had on the Spectrum or C64. My favourite was Locomotive BASIC on the Amstrad PCW.
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It was (about) 30 years ago - VxFan
