Skip to main content

The BBC Micro - happy days!

The men responsible for the creation of the BBC Micro are meeting up at the Science Museum in London today, to celebrate its creation.

I have many happy memories of the BBC Micro - my Dad was lucky enouguh to have an employer who understood what a revolution these 'computers' were likely to cause in the future. In the mid 1980s (I think) they set up a programme to allow staff to purchase a BBC Micro to use at home and educate themselves on. The initial purchase was actually made by the company, and the (then huge) cost of the Micro was taken out of the salary in instalments. Those who took them up on this offer got a snazzy machine to play with, and I can't say that being able to programme in Basic ever harmed their career prospects!

A side effect of this is that I got to come home from school and , if Dad wasn't using it, play games on the Micro. It was connected to an old TV which was used as the monitor, sitting on a wooden plinth that my Dad had made that fitted over that large 'bum'. I don't remember there being any more colour than a black background and green text, despite the fact that it was a colour TV. Text based games could be loaded onto it (I thought at first they were cassette based, but now I remember they were the original 'floppy discs', which meant they were portable and easy to load.), and my favourite game was definitely Eliza. Me and my friends spent many hours trying to wind her up, and feeling very naughty when we used a swear word! I almost learned to touch type on there too, but was far more interested in playing than typing...

I learned how to programme in Basic on the BBC Micro, which certainly helped me out when I took Computing in secondary school and we were using BBC Micros. Unfortunately, our teacher wasn't actually a Computing teacher, but a Maths teacher who'd done a weekend course. So, when I got stuck, I was stuck for good. I think a lot of peoples terror of hitting the 'wrong' key also comes from BBC Micros - you hit the wrong thing at the wrong time and EVERYTHING went!!

Now, that BBC is up in the loft, securely packaged and insulated. It lives along with various other old computers (Commodore 64 and perhaps an Atari?), in a box sealed by my brother, and bearing the immortal words "Not to be opened until 2010".

The time for opening draws near...maybe we could open it early and take the BBC on a daytrip to next years exhibition at the Science Museum?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's in a name?

In the case of this blog, it's a name that had no particular thought or planning behind it - I had no idea whether I would actually want to keep it going, what I would blog about, or that anyone would ever read it. Well, it's almost 4 years later (17th June 2007 is blog birthday, if we're counting), and the blog's still here, so I think we can now safely assume that it's probably going to be sticking around. And the name's been getting on my nerves a bit...you have no idea the amount of people who have found this blog looking for ladies called Jennie Law or Jenny Law. Personally, I'm not actually called Jennie Law, so I'm no help to these poor searchers, although for the right fee I could maybe consider pretending to be... I also don't blog a huge amount about law: I'm not a lawyer, I just have the job of finding stuff for lawyers. Sometimes that process amuses me, sometimes it annoys me, and I blog about it. Sometimes I write about library is

The mysteries of cataloguing

Cataloguing: an arcane art, where each piece of punctuation is significant, and commas and semi colons are all-powerful. Well, they are in "proper" libraries, where in-depth research of esoteric points goes on, and the precise spelling of Christian names, and information such as when a person lived and died can be crucial in pinpointing obscure facts. Here, we have our own catalogue system. It doesn't have a name, but if it did, it would probably be something along the lines of "I need this book NOW, no I don't care about the precise spelling of the authors middle name, or their date of birth." I know, I know, it's not snappy, but it's accurate. Cataloguing demands are different in a commercial law firm: we don't care about much more than what it's about, who wrote, when, and what jurisdiction it covers. And what we really, really care about is "where the hell is it". Law books are amazing: they have the power to move themselves f

UK librarian blogs - the list so far

I’ve pulled the previous entries into one alphabetical list, with a few categories. Will be back later with more detailed discussion of what I’ve learned by doing this. And, as always, if you know of other librarian blogs, let me know and I’ll add them in! Institutional Library Blogs / Professional Group Blogs aRKive Appears to be the blog of the Reid Kerr College library, or someone related to the Library, but unable to confirm as it doesn’t have any ‘about’ section that I can find. Lots of posts about library topics, books, IT… Brit Lib Blogs Google Group There’s a Google Group for British librarian bloggers! Unfortunately it looks to be pretty much unused at the moment. CILIP Blogs CILIP has various blogs by either staff, or links to relevant blogs, available from the Communities section. Varying levels of activity on these blogs – the PTEG blog has one post from November 2007, while Lyndsay’s CILIP Blog has been going has been going for almost a year, with at le