Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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I was in the UK across much of this time, and I was a person in computer science across all of that time. Somehow, I cannot identify with this as "my" story.

I think it says much more about me than the BBC btw. I think this is a fantastic "oral/social history" thing to do. Its a slice of time.

I think a lot of people (like me) who had access to sufficient mainframe power not to want to tinker at home on a PC didn't realize what they meant, for the future of computing! (I spent a brief period building a power supply for the Acorn Atom, which was a 6502 precursor to the BBC micro, and found it sufficiently painful after I managed to get some code working on it, I never really went back. I still have a C60 cassette of the basic code in kansas city standard whistles somewhere).

The moment where CeeFax sent code out in the VBI was a huge signal. Oddly, much later on I tried to get some people interested in using the VBI timing to distribute a stratum-1 clock for nTP.

> a lot of people (like me) who had access to sufficient mainframe power

Yes, that can't have been a lof of people.

The microcomputer movement was hugely influential to people who were children and teenagers at the time, since they were the ones able to spend lots of lightly supervised time trying things and learning at an impressionable age.

The BBC has a good list of "origin stories" of founders who started on the BBC micro here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15969065

I had both. At work VS/9 on a series 90 or a 4381 with a large number of people hanging off the back, at home a BBC Micro with two floppies (once I could afford them) and a 128K Solidisk.

Between those three I couldn't wait to get home to get something done.

The edit-compile-test cycle on those mainframes was so ridiculously long it would be a good day if you got three turnarounds, on a bad day you got none. Compared to seconds for my home stuff. Shortly after that I got an Atari 68K machine and that felt like unlocking God mode.

Mainframes are powerful in the same way that tractors are powerful: you can do an awful lot of work if you have an awful lot of work.

If you are just programming or learning then something smaller is far more effective, on top of that the lack of resources will teach you all you need to know about efficiency.

> you can do an awful lot of work if you have an awful lot of work.

This is a great way to put the trouble with lots of complex tooling, not just oversized computers. Thanks!

I recall at my fist job one of the engineers coming into out terminal room and logging onto an ICL mainframe at AWE and sighing when she saw 48 jobs in front of hers in the queue.

Ah yes, George OS and the ICL 29xx series, fun times.

Had great fun with the SPV command, used that to code up a keylogger. Was able to pull up a spoof login screen on all the terminals using that and able to pass off input as commands and the end user would be none the wiser.

Other great find was that back then discs were big and expensive and not as reliable, so they rotated the discs to even out the wear. They also didn't fully erase them and if you created a file, you had to specify to zero it as an option. This allowed you to create a file, dump the contents and read what was previously upon the discs. Now as the operator console would create a journal log of everything typed (including login and password - everything typed) and factoring in disc rotation, then it was possible as a user to create files upon what was a disc previously used for console journal logging and read the contents. This yielded the username and password of the system admin at college and even today recall that wonderful admin/5588 username and password.

Fun times indeed.

Yes that was hugely important. You had a machine that was entirely safe to use - no risk of exposure to questionable content or malicious code, no risk of breaking it because the OS and BASIC were in ROM - and fully documented down to the purpose of every byte in memory. Literally the only limit was your own imagination and ingenuity. That kind of experience doesn't really exist anymore, even the RPi doesn't come close.

Lessons were learned from the Raspberry Pi and were applied very effectively to the micro:bit. It's a $16 development board based around a Cortex M0 microcontroller with Bluetooth LE, an accelerometer/magnetometer, a 5x5 LED array and alligator clip compatible IO. I think it's the best platform for teaching the basics of CS - simple enough to be understandable, but powerful enough to be useful. Pupils can get started with a browser-based drag-and-drop code editor, then graduate to Scratch, Python, C or assembler.

http://microbit.org/

But both the Bit and the Pi fall between two stools.

8-bit micros like the Spectrum and BBC were powerful enough to get useful work done, but simple enough to offer simple instant gratification.

You could learn everything you needed about BASIC from a fairly small paper manual, and after that - or sometimes during - you learned the rest by example from monthly magazines.

The monthly format worked very well, providing a digestible amount of information on a regular schedule.

The Pi is a complete different experience. Command-line Linux is completely unsuited to most beginners, and desktop Linux really needs command-line skills to be usable. The Pi tries to teach Linux, basic electronics, Python (etc), and simple web tech all at the same time, and that's too much ground to cover at once.

Meanwhile the Bit is too simple to be useful. You can make LEDs flash on and off, but that's not nearly as exciting as being able to write and play a complete game.

I'm occasionally surprised no one has built an 8-bit-like neo-micro booting into the Python interpreter, which is probably the closest thing to BASIC we have today.

Although given that everyone has a phone now, and most people have tablets and desktops, the ideal modern environment would probably be something like a more accessible version of Swift playgrounds - if only because that "You too can access incredible technology at home" thing is an historic relic now.

The kind of software you can write on an 8-bit micro just looks pathetic to kids who were raised on iPhones. Teaching kids to write application software is a long and painful slog, because of the huge gulf between expectation and reality. Removing the screen is the essential concept that makes the micro:bit such a great teaching tool. Moving the turtle in Logo is deathly boring, but blinking an LED or turning a motor with code is weirdly magical.

Micro:bit is remarkably similar to the programmable badges you get at conferences like Defcon, which is no accident. It's tremendous fun to have a little gadget that you can tinker with and show off to your friends. Kids are natural hackers. Every time they grok a basic concept, they have twenty different ideas about what they could do with it. The micro:bit isn't a primitive computer - it's the brain of a robot, it's a burglar alarm, it's a fitness tracker, it's a million different things just waiting to be built.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35824446

Perhaps someone should write an "8 bit shell" for the Pi, something curses-based, with a selection of programs available to run, a limited view of the filesystem, and with a programming REPL built in.

You can get close to that though using the RPi + a read-only mounted SD. It's still not going to be 'instant on' but it can be reasonably quick.

It still would have dozens of extra layers of abstraction and complexity to it. The 8-bit micro era was great because everything was simple. It wasn't necessarily easy in the sense that Linux Desktop users seem to think everyone wants things, but it was understandable.

That's what's sadly missing from modern computing. Everyone involved with making anything new seems to have a complexity-fetish. Consequently, it is now 2018 and applications are still perceptably non-responsive even when performing the same tasks we used to do with technology several orders of magnitude less performant.

It was not just about the speed, back then, it was also that a parent who didn't know much about this stuff could give it to their kid and just not worry about it. The RPi is closer to a modern PC than it is to an 80s 8-bit, even tho' it can run BBC BASIC.

Only for Timmy to get something naughty handed over via the sneakernet....

I was thinking that, a lot of my generation were constrained by the hardware and software we had access to. In some ways that was quite useful, it forced us to be resourceful.

Personally for me, the home computer came at just the right time. As a teenager I was a hopeless student and really had no direction other than an interest in computers. I didn't really know what that meant until I got unsupervised access to a Commodore PET in 1980 - that was the start of the software engineering adventure for me. It continues today working as a freelancer and avoiding being a "manager" :)

Even so when I worked at a world leading RnD organisation we used apples, pets etc.

One of the most interesting ones was using a BBC micro to front end a huge model of the terminal outfall for a nuke plant in china - allegedly one time some Chinese visitors where so impressed they sent the weekend buying up BBC micros to take back with them.

>who were children and teenagers at the time //

Only those of richer families though, home computers were very expensive.

The UK market had a lot of "cheap" machines, perhaps compared to the US. They were of course more expensive than today's cheap machines, but you could get a ZX81 for under £50 if you were prepared to assemble it yourself - £70 for a ready-built one.

As did the US market. In fact the ZX81 was available in the US as the Timex/Sinclair 1000 for under $100. It was briefly quite popular, although not useful for much other than learning BASIC. Later on, Commodore had a promotion where you could send in your TS 1000's in for a discount on the C64. Rumor has it that the people at Commodore's HQ used the sent machines as doorstops as their wedge design worked well for that.

8-bit guy just posted a video in his Commodore history series that involved the Timex Sinclair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICiZbUypMlQ

The ZX81 was available in the US - I have one we bought as a kit way back then. I believe we bought by responding to this Sinclair ad in Byte magazine:

https://imgur.com/a/lejUoz5

The Timex branded version came out the next year.

So I looked back £175 launch price for Acorn Electron, which matched the previous years ZX Spectrum (which was £130 by then). That was about 25% of teachers salary, so about £500 now ... I rate that as pretty rich.

I still have my ZX81. I fondly remember writing BASIC code in a notebook, on a bus, on the way to school.

We had an Acorn Electron and a Model B later and they really were not expensive.

Perhaps I was poorer than I thought! Will research and post back a correction if necessary.

Yeah i have the impression That until the 386 or so happened, most mainframe people scoffed at "micros" as toys that could never be used for much more than beeps and all caps text.

This, sadly, seems to have resulted in the "micro" people reinventing much of what was already being done on mainframes and hailing it as grand discoveries.

And i worry that we are seeing something similar going on now with smartphones (never mind that i feel the introduction of the iPhone basically rolled back the development of smartphones by a decade, as companies dropped what they were already doing to scramble after the "shiny").

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