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Comment by UncleSlacky | Hacker News Reader

I'd say the Spectrums and to a lesser extent (in the UK) C64s inspired more coders - the Spectrum in particular was much cheaper and more popular (and thus a bigger potential market for games), the Beeb was seen as a boring school PC by many kids, by dint of its presence in virtually every school in the UK - Apple didn't have a foothold in the UK education market like it did in the US.

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Fair comment; I was regularly hacking games, programming, and playing on the Spectrum as were most of my friends.

Nobody I knew had a BBC - they were a "school computer", not a "fun computer". Though the games still stuck in my memory, "Granny's Garden" and some kind of economy game (where you raised taxes, and did similar things. You had to get elected again and keep your population happy. I wish I knew what that was called.)

> some kind of economy game (where you raised taxes, and did similar things. You had to get elected again and keep your population happy. I wish I knew what that was called.)

Yellow River Kingdom?

Thanks for the suggestion, from the video it doesn't match my memories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSE1NVaUs8s

I remember text-only, and being shown unemployment-rates, and similar. I think it was based on UK political parties, but my memory is so vague I can't remember any significant details.

Could it be Great Britain Ltd?

https://youtu.be/vnojOGjz578

Definitely!

Thank you so much, that game has been lurking at the back of my mind for the better part of 30 years!

You can play it here:

http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=1537

Almost certainly SimCity: https://www.mobygames.com/game/bbc-micro_/simcity

I hadn't realized that was available for the BBC!

One of the later replies successfully identified it as "Great Britain Ltd".

Yes - and the UK's third micro, the Amstrad CPC, which unlike the Spectrum and C64 had a decent BASIC, and unlike the BBC Micro was affordable.

And came with its own CRT so you wouldn't have to fight over the family TV.

Yeah, the BBC B was normally the thing your school had, and despite being a "boring school PC" your mates were probably too busy playing Elite on it too much for you to spend much time using it. BBCs were about twice the price of a C64 or three times the price of a ZX Spectrum, so not many people had them at home.

The BBC B was for the posh kids. It cost about £400 against (I think) £100 or so for a Spectrum (or £80 for my Dragon 32 that I got cheap after Dragon went bust). The only good thing about the BBC B at first was Elite.

There was the Acorn Electron, but that didn't come out until later and was still £200.

To be fair, having a home computer at all was for posh kids. Having a BBC B at home was for really posh kids.

It's all relative, but I managed to get a Dragon 32 after they went bust despite growing up on and off benefits.

I don't think we could afford anything, but I could over a period of time build my own.

Nice! I wish I had been smart enough to do that.

I'd disagree, my folks who were both working class saved for about two years to get me a BBC Micro B. My dad wouldn't let me have anything less after seeing Spectrums, C64's etc in the shops at the time, he figured they were (in his words, not mine :) ) cheap toys.

I in the meantime pleaded for them to let me get a Spectrum, or basically anything; I ended up going to friends houses for my computer fix :)

But I'm very glad they patiently scrimped and saved for the BBC and made me wait. The built-in 6502 assembler was one of the first things I learned, it was a joy to use. That machine kicked off my career in software development, it was well worth the wait.

The Spectrum and ZX81 were super-affordable, so a lot of working class families bought them, often as games machines at Christmas.

Some of those kids made a career out of them. If you programmed a game you could set up a business for the price of some cheap print ads and cassette labels.

The BBC was for (mostly) posh parents who could afford the inflation adjusted equivalent of £1500 to £2500 (with disk drives) on something more serious. It was really the UK's Apple II.

But they were still cheap computers. An S-100 business system would cost between two and five times as much as a BBC, and a low-end minicomputer like a PDP-8 or low-spec PDP-11 would be more like five to ten times as much.

IMO Acorn lost out by selling to education. If they'd sold a rebadged version as a business machine with support they'd have stormed the market.

I think the business market was the target of the Torch/Acorn joint venture, which never really got off the ground:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torch_Computers#Acorn_Computer...

Yeh I think the role of the BBC Micro is overstated

We had a ZX81, then a ZX Spectrum then a Dragon 32

Other mates had Vic 20s or C64s

I can think of only one friend who had a BBC Micro at home - the were 3 or 4 times the price of a Spectrum

The role of the BBC Micro wasn't just about what the kids had at home. It was about providing kids access to a machine -- many kids wouldn't have had computers at home. It was also about providing a framework, lessons, course materials, TV shows, etc all centred around development on a standard system. It's what encouraged other home computers to run BASIC (for example the Locomotive Basic, which is what the Amstrad CPC ran, was heavily influenced by BBC Basic).

The BBC Micro was a massive influence to the education of IT, to the home computing industry and to 80s kids (even if sometimes indirectly).

Locomotive BASIC was indeed influenced by BBC Basic, but I think you'd have a hard time arguing that the Spectrum (direct descendant of the ZX81) or the C64 (developed in America) were, and they were by far the two most popular micros in the UK.

I didn't say the C64 and Spectrum were directly influenced by the BBC (though I can see why you read my comment that way) but that the wider industry was. eg Parents bought kids BASIC systems because schools had BBCs so the C64, whilst often just used as a games system, was bought because it was also "educational".

If it weren't for the BBC, I'd wager far fewer homes would have had BASIC-based micro computers and thus that industry would have been much smaller.

Yeh but we could have just easily as put ZX Spectrums into schools and had twice as many

As far as I can remember my school didn't have BBC Micro's we had Commodore Pets when I was doing O levels

Not sure why we didn't have any BBCs though

Sinclair wasn’t interesting in targeting that demographic, which is part of the reason Chris Curry left Sinclair to found Acorn. And you can see the difference in the build quality of machines like the ZX vs the BBC Micro. I’m really not convinced ZX Spectrums would have lasted long with a school of, often unmonitored, children banging away at the computer.

Not to mention that the BBC Micro came with a proper monitor. Granted home users could get away with plugging their computer into the TV but buying a TV for their computer would have been an extra cost for schools.

Commodore PET is a few years older than the BBC Micro so that might be why your school has then instead?

I'd definitely agree. BBC Micro - total sales 1 million. CBM-64 between 10 and 17 million. Meanwhile Raspberry Pis are well over 30 million.

My primary school in the early 90s had one Apple, several BBC and mostly Acorn computers.

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