The BBC Micro - 30 years!

[drew]

Wow. I just checked and in my jacket pocket I have... a button.

Cheers,

Drew.

[DaddyHoggy]

(Having just checked my Keyring I have access to 10GB: 4GB IPG stick, 4GB Rhienmettal stick (very lovely chrome job - also a freebie) and the 2GB Saab Stick

Oh dear. I probably shouldn't say this but in my jacket pocket right now I have:
2x 2GB PNY sticks - one for my portable email app and one for car MP3 music
1x 4GB PNY stick, containing nothing, really
1x 8GB Learning Tree freebie stick, won on a VB.NET course in London 2 months ago
1x 16GB Sandisk Cruzer stick on which I store all of my important files (including WIP novel, 3D models, all Elite/Oolite data, artwork, various project data and some non-confidential work stuff)
1x 12GB Maxell portable mini HDD, on which I store documentation for various appliances

In the two breast pockets I have:
1x 320GB Maxtor portable HDD on which I store movies and other multimedia info
1x 250GB Seagate portable HDD on which I store my full MP3 collection and eBooks (almost full).

I win.

Without a shadow of a doubt...

[viberunner]

My friend had a Vic 20 and it inspired me to get a Commodore 64, and that got me Elite.

Eventually my dad, a working man - carpenter - ended up playing Elite in the hours after work. He'd fly around star systems, fight pirates, and got really at docking. To be honest I'd forgotten all about that until a few minutes ago, I can see him now playing with the C64 in the kitchen.

And bugs or not, once I got the hang of the physics I ended up loving Frontier on my Amiga. Moreso than the release of Elite, by then I'd played-out my vanilla Elite experience and I found the Amiga's colours garish and ugly.

[maik]

I also started out with the Commodore 64 after I had been playing games at a friends on it for quite some time and, joy!, got one for christmas. It took probably a year or two to graduate from datasette to disk drive and Elite was the first game I bought on floppy, even before I had the disk drive

[NigelJK]

Well I had a ZX81, which I saved ages for (and then saved for ages to get a wobble free 16K Ram Pak). But I couldn't resist cycling into town on a Saturday and programming the BBC B's in Debenhams (where they had a bank of about 10 of them all with the Hi-Def monitors and all showing the > prompt). I had a clunky programme I used on the ZX which drew a clock face and showed the time. I started by just converting this for the B and just walked up to the machine and started typing it in. The next week I had figure how to draw lines on the B (ZX was chars only) by using the (very good) HELP command, and adapted the programme to put proper 'hands' on the clock. From there it went on to bouncing lines across the screens drawing shapes which then animated. All of these were done in my head before I went into the shop, as I was never sure that whether or not I would get turfed out. After a while I think they looked forward to Saturdays, as they sold a lot more B's on that day for some reason.

As my first 'computer' job I was involved with the set up and programming of a Torch Unicorn network.

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


To give you some idea of the versatility of the B the spec was as follows:

12x BBC B's, all with Z80 second cpu's and extra 32K of memory (this must have been the worlds first multi-processor micro). All had Dual DD Disk drives.

Network was a specially 'upgraded' econet (with a 4 mhz clock instead of 2mhz). The server was a similar BBC B with a 20mb Winchester. Network was running CPN (network version of CPM), which could download the complete Peach Suit of software (proper DB, Spreadsheet and WP)

This was in 1983 ...

[DaddyHoggy]

Excellent story NigelJK - oddly enough I used to do a similar programming thing on the BBC Bs that Boots used to sell when I was growing up in Hartlepool (Cor, Boots selling computers, computer games and even 7" singles - those were the days!) - although my programs weren't quite as clever - I got as far as randomly generated mountain scape - which cleared and started again every 30s.

[NigelJK]

I like to think some of the bouncy line stuff inspired the 'one liners' you used to get in AcornUser (or was that BeebBug) much later.