Comment by chrisjsmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisjsmith | Hacker News Reader

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A history lesson for those either too young to know, or not from the UK. This will explain a few gaps.

Back in the day (i.e. around the late 80's) we used to have PROPER computers in schools in the UK that everyone had free access to. My particular school had a large network of BBC Master[1] and Acorn Archimedes[2] machines - all proprietary platforms but OPEN with respect to documentation and doing what the hell you liked with them. In fact, Acorn, the manufacturer would tend to shove all the hardware reference and programmers guides in the box with the machines (you could not break the software on them). They ALL had BBC BASIC (very advanced variant of structured BASIC) with an inline 6502 or ARM assembler and most of the earlier machines had analogue and digital IO you could just stuff things into. They were all networked together as well and could talk to each other.

We were ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED to build stuff that plugged into these (rather than the recent policies and AUPs that students have to live with) and write software to control things and even modify the operating system at will. We built a massive transit shuttle system based on Lego, we build automated cranes, we build light sequencers, we built anything we damn wanted and were applauded for it.

Most of the software devs I know in the UK (other than the young and really old ones) tend to have cut their teeth on this kit.

Then there was the introduction of the PC which destroyed all this in favour of "security", "acceptable use policies", "black boxes", "no documentation" and "vendor lock in".

Mr Braben was a pioneer of these machines [3] [4] and is held close to the heart of many people. He wants the education sector to go back to these days (rather than the utter corruption that Research Machines, BECTA and Microsoft have destroyed everything with recently) because he truly KNOWS what is good for the industry i.e. people who know how stuff works and are free to understand.

Ironically, on a slight tangent, my children have Linux machines in their school these days rather than Windows, which is used for administrative functions only. It'll only be a few years before my eldest discovers gcc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Master

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)

The BBC micros were one side of the coin, perhaps the more respectable and middle-class side.

Round my way, it was Sinclair all the way, because they were cheap. The ZX81 is perhaps the archetype - they sold 1.5 million units, mainly to people who had no idea what they would do with a computer. At £69.95, it was cheap enough to be an impulse buy for most people, cheap enough that kids saved up their paper-round money.

A lot of early buyers ended up building their ZX81s from a kit (because it was £20 cheaper) and learned a lot. Even for those that bought it pre-assembled, there wasn't much to do but learn. The unexpanded ZX81 came with just 1kb of RAM and no bundled software, but it did come with a spiral-bound "Teach Yourself BASIC" book. The keyboard was covered in markings for BASIC shortcuts.

At the time, several magazines consisted of little more than printed source code, mainly for games, that you could type in yourself. These programs were invariably rubbish, but a mag was at least a quid cheaper than the cheapest of games on cassette so they sold shedloads. You'd spend an hour typing it all in and fixing all your typos, only to realise that it was a hopelessly boring game. Fiddling about with the source code was the most interesting thing to do.

The more enterprising kids realised that they could do better and earned a bit of pocket money selling programs to the magazines. The really enterprising kids knuckled down and wrote a retail-quality game, which in the mid-eighties you could do during the summer holidays. The origins of a large proportion of the British video games industry can be traced directly to a teenager, a Speccy, a blank tape and a particularly gloomy August.

> At £69.95, it was cheap enough to be an impulse buy for most people

Not to detract from the rest of what you say, but I think you might have a skewed idea about how much spare cash "most people" had in 1981.

We could argue endlessly over that, so I won't. The point stands that relative to other micros, Sinclairs were really cheap. The BBC model B launched at £335 but was sold at £399. The 'cheap' Acorn Electron launched in 1983 at £199, by which time you could get a ZX81 for under £40 or a 16k spectrum for £99.

And they sucked.

Which is why we did all our playing at school on the BBC's :)

Oh those magazine type-in games were utter turds - many did I type in that didn't work properly (partially due to my abysmal typing accuracy at the time).

A very good point you make is those reference manuals.

I still remember being about 11 years old entering the poke commands to makes sounds on the Vic-20 from the manual supplied. [1]

Without them, it would have been impossible to get such a good incentive to do something other than insert a game and click X to start (as such.)

[1] http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/commodore/VIC-20_Personal_...

It is sad that the current status quo on software development consider vendor lookup as a good thing. For example, people feel that it is good to use only one processor architecture (x86), and even think that a corporation-sponsored virtual machine (JVM) is a "good thing". No wonder why systems research is basically dead, only trying to improve over the clumsiness of existing architectures.

Agreed entirely. It's one of the things that has been annoying me for years. The x86 ISA is an utter mess - totally non-orthogonal. Why we keep worshipping it I don't know.

The last innovation was Forth on a Chip if you ask me.

I was reading another day about the PDP 11, and it is incredible how it looked much easier to program than an x86. Maybe we should go back in time and try to learn some of the forgotten tricks.

PDP-11 architecture is nice to implement in microcode, it's probably a little bit difficult to make it a RISC given that its power and simplicity comes from the elegant addressing modes encoding. The VAX was nice too, and the Tahoe/cci (kind of 3 address extension of the VAX IIRC).

ARM is like that now (which was ironically invented by Acorn in the UK for the UK education market).

In fact this explains a lot. Thanks for pointing it.

People are worshiping x86 ISA?

US equivalent of the ZX81: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000

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