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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

We're about the same age. My primary school also had a BBC Micro on a trolley. We didn't get to use it much, I guess because our teacher wasn't interested in it.

When I was ~10, my parents spent £129.99 (a lot of money for them at the time) to buy me an Acorn Electron (a cut down version of the BBC Micro).

One thing that was frustrating for me at the time is that I had no one to answer questions. For example, I was writing some 6502 assembly to do something simple (I don't remember what) and the book (either the user guide that came in the box, or the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide) said I had to provide some value using two's complement. I had no idea what it was or how to find an answer. So I wrote a letter (yes, with a stamp, in the mail) to a Teletext page where these things were discussed, and a few days/weeks later they actually answered my question on one of the pages.

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The Acorn was my first programming computer at school - I didn't know it was from BBC Micro lineage! We were pretty lucky to have about 20 of them. I did NOT make enough use of this resource as a teenager, to my adult self's chagrin. This was largely because as a teenage girl, the last thing that was gonna happen was spending my lunch hours in the computer room where boys were playing adventure games. Lame. (Future me kicks teenage me).

Acorn was the manufacturer rather than the model.

So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.

This one started it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1

And this was the breakthrough Acorn Atom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom

The lessons learned there all went into the BBC Micro.

I still my have my Acorn Atom - a FANTASTIC computer.

The manual was exceptionally good as well, with the catchy title "Atomic Theory and Practise". I taught myself to program using that.

I suspect that telesilla knew that and merely missed out the word Electron by mistake (given the post it was a response to mentioning the Electron connection).

Yep that could easily be possible, I would hope my reply hasn’t come across negatively. Certainly not my intention.

I do remember from the time that referring the Electron simply as The Acorn (due the prominent Acorn logo on the top) was very common so my reading it as such in the parent post didn’t seem unusual.

I always assumed it was because the BBC Micro had such strong branding that people didn’t realise it was an Acorn product. The logo was there on the back but very small.

Writing a paper letter to Teletext and get an answer, love it. The internet and the web has som serious warts, but it is also amazing.

And if you were really into Teletext (and had enough cash) you could get an adaptor to download software OTA: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/ttx/ttxouse.html

This reminds me that I saw a TV programme once where they played the tape of a program for the BBC Micro over the air, and suggested that a viewer hold up their tape recorder to the TV speaker, to record it, for later loading onto the computer.

I never tried it. I'm not sure whether acoustic coupling would have worked well enough to load successfully.

It could be made to work, even without error correction. See for example https://www.hobbyscoop.nl/the-history-of-basicode/, which describes the Dutch way to broadcast (portable!) Basic programs over radio.

I think they broadcast every program multiple times, though.

Same issue for me on the questions. I could see from the Spectrum 48k manual that there was more that could be done than writing plain BASIC but didn’t know how to find out more. I didn’t have any idea what all those POKES I saw in others’ code (typed in from magazines) were doing.

Same issue when I got a BBC B. No reference beyond the simple user guide, and I couldn’t find anything out about other books that might be available by asking at the library, because they didn’t understand what I was asking about.

Getting onto the Internet in 1994 made a huge difference!

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