Wed, Nov 30, 2011 | 09:59 GMT
BBC Micro turns 30 tomorrow, drops nostalgia bomb
The BBC Micro, the computer some of you may remember as the first you ever used, celebrates its 30th birthday tomorrow. The Register has a detailed overview of the machine, its birth at Acorn and its part of a UK Government drive to promote computer literacy. Definitely take a look at this. My primary school bought one of these at great expense when I was ten years old thanks to the enthusiam of Mr Griffiths, my phenomenally religious teacher. I learned how to move a sprite across a screen, but never worked out how to make it jump. Rubbish. Key games were Elite, et al. Windmills of my mind, and all that. Thanks, Blerk.
14 comments
#1
Blerk
30/11/11, 9:59 am
/tips hat
Great days, sneaking into the school computer labs at lunch to play Revs and Killer Gorilla.
#2
Patrick Garratt
30/11/11, 10:02 am
We weren’t allowed to play games on ours at all. He bought one about exploring tombs in Egypt, but could never work out how to play it. I learnt a bit of BASIC on it. When my parents saw how enthusiastic I was they bought me a Spectrum. And that was that, really.
#3
Blerk
30/11/11, 10:04 am
We weren’t allowed to play games either, but it didn’t stop us. Our IT teacher used to go fucking mental when he caught us, not least because all the games we had were pirate copies.
#4
Patrick Garratt
30/11/11, 10:10 am
Heh. We weren’t that sophisticated. Fairly amazing there was such a drive to even have a computer in a classroom then. I went to a tiny school in North Wales. We pretty much turned up on a horse and cart.
#5
Stardog
30/11/11, 10:14 am
I remember playing some number games on these every so often. 2 at a time would get to go down to the area next to the corridor to play them.
#6
Shubb9
30/11/11, 10:43 am
Step-dad was a teacher so I had one at home, fortunately he didn’t mind copied games. This article has sent me on a mission to find a walk through for Castle Quest, man that game was hard, because I couldn’t finish it at the time. Any one remember a game called Imogen about a wizard who could change into 3 different forms? Kind of prefigured Trine.
#7
Psychotext
30/11/11, 11:01 am
Welp, now I feel fucking old.
#8
Blerk
30/11/11, 11:10 am
Don’t worry Psycho, it’s just because you are fucking old!
#9
Goffee
30/11/11, 11:42 am
Yay, my school had one linked to a massive-cased Winchester hard drive and I had to enter all the year’s exam grades in one day.
While saving the file in some early database type thing, I found another file called “TITS” or similar that, when printed out, ran to three pages of ASCII characters which if you squinted a bit was a page three lady – my first computer porn.
Thanks, teachers!
#10
Psychotext
30/11/11, 11:48 am
Shut up Blerk.
#11
barchetta
30/11/11, 12:54 pm
Hoping they get the rights to include a form of BASIC with the Raspberry PI gizmo in the works. Think I still have my bindered up set of INPUT week by week mags somewhere and want to give my 8 yr old an idea of the graft involved!
#12
Blerk
30/11/11, 12:59 pm
I showed my kids some old Sinclair Programs magazines a while back and they just couldn’t grasp the concept. They thought that typing the listings in WAS the game, somehow.
My eldest is 9 now, I think it’s time he learned some Speccy BASIC. I have a new mission!
#13
Len
30/11/11, 7:26 pm
Was Frogger to begin with then finally Elite on teh beeb for me. Progressed to a Spectrum after hassling my folks for one and promising I would use it for school work/programming and not just games…yeh right!
Happy Days…
#14
Len
30/11/11, 7:28 pm
@Blerk – I remember those from Sinclair User, would take hours, even days to type in and then woudl never bloody work due to a misprint etc.
Upsettign at the time…