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BBC Micro Bot

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173 pointsfermigier35 comments

There is a really good online emulator as well.

https://bbc.godbolt.org/

I had one of these when I was young and it pretty sport on with how I remember it.

Interesting - this comment was marked as 'dead' until I upvoted it - some sort of over-zealous spam filter misinterpreting "bbc"?

I was a Spectrum guy myself, but I did write my first C program on an Acorn Workstation clone.

An “Acorn Workstation clone”? That sounds interesting.

Do you mean one of their Unix workstations (basically an ARM based Archimedes running a clone of Unix) or a third party clone of some other Acorn kit?

Using either would be unusual and interesting to hear more about. Thanks.

One of these: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/33101/Acorn-Cambridge... with a TI 32016 processor & using a BBC Micro for UI - except that my housemate Colin thought it was a bit expensive, so reverse engineered the board, redesigned it to be a little smaller (this was in the mid-80s & chip specs were changing rapidly), wire-wrapped a prototype for testing, then etched five proper PCBs, of which only a couple were populated.

An article about that board in some computer magazine of the time (probably PC World) was the first time I had heard of Unix and C - I was amazed at the same of C code they gave - no line numbers!

Edit: This was probably 1983 when I was 17 and my programming experience was based on Apple II and Sinclair machines.

Rather than Unix, our Workstation ran Panos, the only operating system that I know of named after a Greek restaurant.

I never got nearer than a magazine review to one of those beasties so I am probably getting the OS part wrong - but I do vividly remember wondering what #include did.... :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panos_%28operating_system%29

And this is the (now defunct) Panos restaurant, on Hills Road:

https://i2-prod.cambridge-news.co.uk/incoming/article1345494...

That's fantastic. 4Mb of RAM in 1983 was pretty cool.

So the end product was somewhat like a homebrew second processor unit for a BBC?

e.g. http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/8bit_Upgrades/Aco...

There were things I could read about in magazines as a kid but never got to see in the flesh. That Cambridge Workstation is still a mythical beast to me.

Note to self: go and visit the http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/897/Acorn-Computers/

The Centre for Computing History is a great place to visit - lots of machines up and running you can actually use (mainly from the 8-bit era, but other interesting things too).

Still have any of the PCBs? It would be interesting to make one up now, or duplicate one to make up.

I don't (it wasn't my project) but I've emailed my housemate (seemed polite, since we are talking about him).

To your first point, it's a new account that signed up and posted a comment straight away.. so it probably makes sense to "quarantine" it in a way.

That was probably a factor - does HN do this for all newbie comments though? Most of the 'dead' comments I see are more obviously dodgy.

First ever comment including a link is probably a fairly reliable indicator of spam.

That emulator is from the very talented Matthew Godbolt of "Compiler Explorer" fame, by the way.

Here's a JSBeeb talk by Godbolt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WuRq-Wmw5o .

My Beeb got me through uni - Fast Fourier transforms in BBC Basic for my studies, and 6502 assembler for money :-)

This is indeed the emulator that the BBC Micro Bot uses, I believe. JSBeeb. It's fantastic.

There are some BBC BASIC programs broadcast on TV (literally!) by the BBC on their Computer Literacy Project website,[0] saved from the original floppy disks stored in one of the presenter's attic!

They also have (almost?) all of the TV programmes related to computers aired in the 80's on there too. It's well worth a visit.

[0]https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk

You can use this emulator to play the original 1984 version of Elite, built to run in 32k ram.

https://bbc.godbolt.org/?&disc1=sth%3AAcornsoft%2FElite.zip&...

Instructions: http://www.elitehomepage.org/manual.htm (Very briefly: F10 to leave space station, <> S X for left right up down, space for faster, ? for slower. Press A to fire lasers, but if you do that near the space station the cops will get you. When flying, F1 for rear view, F10 back to front view)

Pasting the "source code" tweets into the emulator does nothing.

because you have to write RUN

just like real

Very cool. For bonus points, try to escape from the emulator!

Wonder what would happen if one were to tweet it a fork bomb. I'd hope they have a mitigation for that.

I don't think it's possible to fork a process? At any rate the example code is basically an infinite loop... So I think you get to do pretty much whatever for you 50 seconds of runtime..

Yup, that machine had literally no notion of a process. You could say it was strictly single-process: whatever is in memory is what gets run...a fork bomb would require breaking out of the VM.

That's a good point, its security lies in simplicity.

had a bit too much fun with this the last few days, but had an idea and trying to get it into a tweet (without minifying) was fun - wanted more of a typing effect but lack of way to delay/wait/slow BBC BASIC flow or get timing right with GIF maker (should've read doc note! it generates the gif after 18 seconds and then for only 2 seconds long). Still very neat, takes me back to my <ahem> youth.

BASICTwitter

Example code on the website:

  10 MODE 2
  20 COLOUR RND(7)
  30 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
  40 GOTO 20

Happy to see "colour" spelled the English way. :-)

You should have use "spelt" then :-)

"Spelled" is more common now even in British English. E.g. compare a Google search of 'site:bbc.co.uk "spelt"' with 'site:bbc.co.uk "spelled"'. Most recent usage of "spelt" is referring to the grain, or a direct quote of somebody who prefers the old-fashioned spelling.

Dr. Johnson gives both spellings in his Dictionary, along with relevant quotes from Milton and Dryden, which are all spelled "spelled" or "spell'd".

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