The BBC Microcomputer User Guide | Hacker News Reader

The BBC Microcomputer User Guide

central.kaserver5.org

77 pointslsllc31 comments

The BBC made a drama, "Micro Men" (2009), about some of the behind-the-scenes drama behind the BBC Micro. As I recall, it doesn't explain the whole Fred, Jim and Sheila thing though.

Martin "Bilbo Baggins" Freeman is in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Just watched it last night, it's pretty good. Though does anyone have any context for the scene with Sinclair and the 3 women in the convention? It seemed a bit out of place in the whole doc.

BTW, Silicon Cowboys is another film I'd recommend. It's about the history of Compaq.

It's a reference to the fact that Sinclair was a notorious womanizer, and his exploits often ended up in the press of the time. He was also chairman of MENSA from 1980 to 1997.

A film with the best working title: "Syntax Era"

The closing scene is priceless. Clive Sinclair defiantly drives into the future on his C5, without helmet or neck support, overtaken by lorries/juggernauts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM#t=1h21m38s

Now you've read the manual, time to start coding:

https://bbc.godbolt.org/

Awesome web based emulator. You can load various games too. Loads of them are still really playable. Try: Starport, Commando, Alien8, Inertia...

That's amazing. Even forces me to use the proper UK keymap on my US keyboard!

Trying to remember where * lived!

If you fancy a modern take on this environment, RISC OS Pico is the 32-bit ARM version of BBC BASIC on top of the 32-bit ARM version of Acorn MOS:

https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Software%...

Same language, editor, commands, etc. but about 2000x faster.

Runs great on a Raspberry Pi Zero, which is $5 and accepts USB peripherals & an HDMI screen.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/

The same code will work but without fighting the weird restrictions of early-1980s hardware. (Even when emulated.)

Only eclipsed by:

"The Advanced User Guide for the BBC Microcomputer"

http://stardot.org.uk/mirrors/www.bbcdocs.com/filebase/essen...

Only itself eclipsed by:

"The Advanced User Guide for the BBC Microcomputer" (remastered)

https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=17242

Oh man, it even has the front cover! Thank you!

It's a big improvement! There were a few errors I noticed in the original, all now fixed, and the diagrams are a lot cleaner-looking in this version too.

While an amazing manual, nothing beats the original ZX Spectrum manual covers (and the manuals themselves are great too). Retro8bitcomputers [1] has an amazing selection of manuals to peruse. It's almost like we've forgotten the art of the user manual since the 80's.

[1] http://www.retro8bitcomputers.co.uk/Downloads

Edit: typo

I literally read my real-world version of this to pieces.

I'm not sure where it is now, but last I saw it it was a mess of sellotape and ring-binder-repair stickers kept in a separate box with lost pages in the bottom.

I don't recall any other book that got quite that much mileage.

(Some detail) Acorn manuals always had a good reputation. They usually contained a tutorial section, a reference section, clear appendices with all sorts of examples and details, and a very solid index. I haven't quite seen other manuals that were quite as good.

As a really neat example: the Acorn Midi Card manual for the Archimedes went all the way from high level "what is midi" down to bits and bytes and assembler-level API calls. As a kid, it allowed me to understand midi. Compare that to the manual for my synthesizer at the time, which really didn't explain anything at all.

I found it quite interesting that a document aimed at a musician could be so technical and obtuse while the document for the computer person was so clear and enlightening!

I understand (from a friend who was at the school at the time) that at least one of the authors for one of the manuals was a teacher at Netherhall, the school round the corner from Acorn.

The BBC Micro was the reference point for the Computer Literacy Project, so developing understanding was a key goal.

Memory protection in the old days:

There are three memory mapped input/output areas and these are named FRED, JIM and SHEILA. SHEILA contains all the machine's internal memory mapped devices, such as the analogue to digital converter, and should be treated with considerable respect.

It's why I now run a software company. Reading this (and the Advanced User Guide) at 10 years old gave me a career.

Same here. The manual was an incredibly readable on-ramp from total basics (hah) all the way through to the FX & OSBYTE & 6502 references at the end. (And I was distraught when my ringbinding started to unravel on the Advanced User Guide)

Same :)

Mine got me through uni! Earned enough to run a car, not to mention my studies

And then there's the guy who communicated with an individual from the 16th century through his BBC Micro:

https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15271

Lamentably, I don't see anything in the user guide about that feature ;-)

That's amazing.

> "At the time, Webster was living with his girlfriend."

Might shed some light on where his messages came from. She was probably a real joker, haha!

Coming from the Apple II world as a kid I love chapter 43 where you can mix in 6502 code!

http://central.kaserver5.org/Kasoft/Typeset/BBC/Ch43.html

BBC Basic is a work of art. It exposes its underlying API for you to use in assembly so you can, for instance, use its floating point routines and data areas. And it's a very well thought out API.

Does it? My recollection is that the entry points were undocumented, and changed in every revision, of which there were at least 6! - BASIC 1, BASIC 2, HIBASIC, BASIC 4, BASIC 4.32, HIBASIC 4.32...

The inbuilt assembler was super useful, and an excellent feature, but not obviously designed for calling BASIC itself. The expected use case seemed to be that you'd use BASIC by writing BASIC code, and any machine code routines (probably created using the inbuilt assembler) would be self-contained.

(Modern readers unfamiliar with this system should compare the BBC BASIC assembler much more to LuaJIT's dynasm, which it rather resembles, than to the average C compiler's inline assembler, which it was not really much like.)

So many memories - thanks for sharing.

ah, nostalgia! i learnt to program with that manual in hand.

Thanks for sharing, the title should be dated with (2001).

(1981), surely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com