

18 year old BBC Micros used in retro programming class - bensummers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10951040

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forinti
At university I had to code an emulator in assembly and I thought how much
more fun it would have been to use some old 8-bit micros.

I've got a BBC B+128KB and the coolest thing about them is that you can mix
BASIC and assembly.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah, the '[' trick, I remember when I first found out about that and thought it
the neatest trick ever, no need to have a separate assembler. That said, it
was mostly useful to speed up basic programs, if you wanted to write a program
completely in assembler there were better options (the 'ade' rom for
instance).

I still have a 'mostly functional' bbc emulator that I wrote for the ST laying
around, there are much better ones available now so there is no point
releasing the thing, but it was lots of fun to code that up, the 6502 part is
about 1600 loc, the rest of the project another 1600 lines or so.

I never did implement mode 7 (teletext) or sound, but most of the other stuff
worked.

Can you still read your old media?

~~~
forinti
All of my cassettes and most of my 5,25" floppies don't work. My drives are
also starting to fail, so I recently got some new 3,5" drives installed and
wrote about it here (portuguese only, I'm afraid):

[http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/upgrade-
historico.htm...](http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/2010/07/upgrade-
historico.html)

The only floppies that still work are those that came in those nice black
folders from Acornsoft.

~~~
jacquesm
With cassettes the problem is usually copy-through, with one layer influencing
the next on the wound up spools so you get pre and post echos of the signal.
You can possibly fix that using a bunch of processing.

The disks is a harder problem, surprising though, that they've already
degraded that much, I would have expected the 5 1/4" to be readable a bit
longer than this.

~~~
forinti
Well, this is Brazil (hot and humid) and they did have to endure about 10
years in my dad's shed, so I didn't really expect them to still work. The BBC,
on the other hand, only requires maintenance on the power source's capacitors
every 10 years or so (I've changed them twice so far). It's quite a sturdy
machine!

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, electrolytic caps tend to dry out over time. There are special ones that
are mil-spec that don't have that problem, or you could try your luck with
Tantalum.

The Sprague brand used to have fairly affordable long life electrolytic caps,
maybe you can find those where you live or order them online. That way it's a
one time affair.

On another note, if you open up the power supply you'll find a bunch of coils
in there, some of them are fairly loosely wound, eventually the windings will
rub their way through the insulation and short out. It's not a bad idea to put
some hotmelt on those windings to dampen the vibration. Just a little line on
either side will do wonders.

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jacquesm
I disagree with that most of these oldies are 'cast aside', they actually
fetch good money (if you can find them, they're collectors items) and are
still some of the easiest machines to learn with and to teach with.

We should really revive that somehow and make a teaching course around a
simulated 8 bit computer that you run as a VM on top of your regular OS.

I'd contribute to an effort like that, both financially and with work.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
>I disagree with that most of these oldies are 'cast aside', they actually
fetch good money (if you can find them, they're collectors items)

They're collectors items that fetch good money _because_ most of them were
cast aside. :)

~~~
jacquesm
That's possible but quite unlikely, especially in the case of the machine
we're talking about here. The ones that I know about that were bought almost 3
decades ago are either still around or have died in terrible ways, but none
were 'cast aside'.

MSX and such, yes, I'd agree with you there.

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wallfly
Does anyone know of an "online shell" and tutorial combo that would give a
similar kind of learning experience for understanding how computers work at
the lower levels, as mentioned at the end of the article:

"The day of study had begun with what must be the ultimate hands-on technology
experience: Mr Abrams got the students to be a computer.

They each took on the role of a different part of the machine - CPU,
accumulator, RAM and program counter - and simulated the passage of
instructions through the hardware.

The five shuffled data around, wrote it to memory, carried out computations
and inserted them into the right places in the store."

Through self-study of CS texts and good code that others have written I've
been gaining a lot more depth to my OOP programming skills.

I'd love though to get a more ground up, "live action" education on what's
happening at the machine level, albeit it would probably need to be based on
the simulation of a tiny computer by modern standards, maybe something like
Knuth's MixMaster.

~~~
indy
I recommend The Element of Computing Systems (<http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/>).
It's has no "online shell" but the book is accompanied with hardware
simulators

~~~
wallfly
Perfect! Thanks a bunch.

~~~
wallfly
Ordered on Amazon! Really, I feel very excited, just wanted to say thank you
again. I had not stumbled across this resource when googling around for such
an intro/guide, or maybe it just didn't catch my eye.

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EamonLeonard
I remember a brand of washing detergent running a "Computers for Schools"
marketing campaign, here in Ireland around about 1986. Myself and my
classmates had to cut out tokens from the packaging and bring them into
school. After a year, all the tokens were counted up, and we finally had
enough to get one "free" BBC Micro.

All we were missing was a teacher who knew what to do with it.

/doh

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camperman
28 year old I think you'll find.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, that was a funny mistake there. 18 years ago we were almost a decade in
to 'ARM' (Acorn Risc Machine) territory already.

Anybody here remember 'lander'?

edit: maybe they meant the 18 years relative to the date the computer was
officially discontinued? But it had already been out of the regular trade for
many years at that point.

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gaius
Some interesting points there about education in the UK

1) using Visual Basic by default (which is obsolete in industry and was never
even intended to be a pedagogical language anyway)

2) The reference to "ICT" which is a term that doesn't exist outside of
schools.

~~~
peterstjohn
Depends what A-Level subject they're taking and school; at my school, they're
taught Pascal and C (possibly moving into Objective-C this term if I finish
installing the Macs into my department before the end of next week!)

~~~
gaius
At secondary school we had BBC Basic running in an emulator on the RM Nimbus,
which had the mysterious 80186 processor. You could run Turbo Pascal if you
first ran the 8086 emulator.

If I were designing the curriculum kids would be taught Forth or ML.

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iuguy
I'm amazed they're using BBC Micros for game programming, an awful choice.
They should be using ZX Spectrums or C64s.

~~~
gaius
BBC Basic was easily the best on the 8-bit micros. You can go straight to
procedures and functions without ever using GOSUB or GOTO. Plus the OS
provided an interface to its internals (e.g. *FX, the OS... routines like
OSWRCH, the in-line 2-pass assembler) and vector tables, no need to peek and
poke.

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Tichy
I for one would be intrigued to program a punch card computer. They were
before my time and sound like fun.

~~~
balding_n_tired
If you are excellent typist, perhaps. Otherwise, they were a pain.

