Old Skool BBC
Here we have the bastion of many a school in the education system circa 1980.
This entry on wikipedia gives an outline of its history and specification. I wanted to post my own pictures of this computing legend. An old machine in amazing condition was found at work and before it was sent to the big computer scrap heap in the sky, I got my hands on it.
As you can see the marvelous expandability options offered by these serial ROM cartridge slots on the right of this case allowed for easy and quick loading of third party applications, much faster than the cassette. Although programs distributed on tapes were cheaper they were less reliable, all before even the 5.25" disk drives.
This shot offers a view of the 1 MHz expandable bus for users to add their own peripherals. One could hook up an external hard disk for astounding data transfer, from a disk that will probably never need upgrading with enough room for all your data and programs. (The kind of disk that probably wouldn't even hold the OS X logo now)
Yes that is correct, the original USB interface was designed on the BBC, you can see the original design for the port connector in this picture...
Above the fabulous connectivity options on the Beeb machine, room for cassettes input, composite inputs, the lightening fast econet port lets you harness the power of sharing computational prowess - the proprietary econet port easily and quickly will let you work with your BBC not on it.
Here you can see the famed "Designed by Acorn" label much aped by a later popular computer company, Apple who had "Designed in California" on all their own products and apparel.
Finally an original box, still the epitome of design chic 20 years after conception. The Clear proportionally spaced font, the reassuring "British Broadcasting Corporation"
I was caressing the sleek lines, of one of the earliest consumer computers for the mass market. Whilst the BBC wasn't my first computer, I had Commodore 64. I always loved the keyboard, coding on that in BBC Basic was a labor of love. The sweet reward was the gorgeous clunk of the micro switch keyboard. The old keyboard that ever came close to that precision tactile feedback was a Dell Laptop keyboard I had the pleasure of using some years back.
I dared to depress one of the delicious mechanisms and was rewarded even now by that click and the warm feeling inside that I was once again sat on a hard plastic chair in elementary School writing a story or in my own break making the computer do exactly as I wanted, be that programatically painting a picture, making a balloon float on the screen or simply display my name over and over... simpler times.
Relive a glimpse of your own youth with this video I took and have posted to the famed YouTube...
10 Print "I am a great programmer and will go on to great things"
20 GOTO 10
Run
Although with a sentence that long you'd get some horrid line break I bet.
This entry on wikipedia gives an outline of its history and specification. I wanted to post my own pictures of this computing legend. An old machine in amazing condition was found at work and before it was sent to the big computer scrap heap in the sky, I got my hands on it.
As you can see the marvelous expandability options offered by these serial ROM cartridge slots on the right of this case allowed for easy and quick loading of third party applications, much faster than the cassette. Although programs distributed on tapes were cheaper they were less reliable, all before even the 5.25" disk drives.
This shot offers a view of the 1 MHz expandable bus for users to add their own peripherals. One could hook up an external hard disk for astounding data transfer, from a disk that will probably never need upgrading with enough room for all your data and programs. (The kind of disk that probably wouldn't even hold the OS X logo now)
Yes that is correct, the original USB interface was designed on the BBC, you can see the original design for the port connector in this picture...
Above the fabulous connectivity options on the Beeb machine, room for cassettes input, composite inputs, the lightening fast econet port lets you harness the power of sharing computational prowess - the proprietary econet port easily and quickly will let you work with your BBC not on it.
Here you can see the famed "Designed by Acorn" label much aped by a later popular computer company, Apple who had "Designed in California" on all their own products and apparel.
Finally an original box, still the epitome of design chic 20 years after conception. The Clear proportionally spaced font, the reassuring "British Broadcasting Corporation"
I was caressing the sleek lines, of one of the earliest consumer computers for the mass market. Whilst the BBC wasn't my first computer, I had Commodore 64. I always loved the keyboard, coding on that in BBC Basic was a labor of love. The sweet reward was the gorgeous clunk of the micro switch keyboard. The old keyboard that ever came close to that precision tactile feedback was a Dell Laptop keyboard I had the pleasure of using some years back.
I dared to depress one of the delicious mechanisms and was rewarded even now by that click and the warm feeling inside that I was once again sat on a hard plastic chair in elementary School writing a story or in my own break making the computer do exactly as I wanted, be that programatically painting a picture, making a balloon float on the screen or simply display my name over and over... simpler times.
Relive a glimpse of your own youth with this video I took and have posted to the famed YouTube...
10 Print "I am a great programmer and will go on to great things"
20 GOTO 10
Run
Although with a sentence that long you'd get some horrid line break I bet.
posted by M at 12:47 AM
1 Comments:
damn. thats some ancient shit right there.
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