BBC Basic Editor
bbcmic.ro
bbcmic.ro
I haven’t coded since then and am about to start again, I wish learning now was as easy as control break to start again.
We squeezed everything out of basic then started learning assembly.
We fucking owned our school econet making a port scanner that polled station 100 (the teacher admin station) to eventually get his password for *I AM SYS.
Password was paramecium!!! It took days to poll.
Then we got a copy of the advanced user guide for BBC Master and became gods.
My best mate and hacking buddy went by Bruteus, I was Apollo!
Bruteus ? You on hacker news?!
We then used to change our station number to 100 whenever we logged in to do naughtiness. (?&d22=100) It drove the admin crazy reading logs or the printer spool we’d randomly trigger.
Our opsec was poor though and we boasted to the wrong person who snitched.
Suspended from school and banned from all networked machines.
Still think they should have brought us in to volunteer instead.
A physics teacher actually let us use his non networked computer because he saw we had talent and interest and he tried to harness it. He was awesome. He put us in charge of downloading the NOAA data to do weather maps via cassette tape!
Then when the admins car had left we had a sneaky super long eco net cable we made that we hung out of a window to the floor below to a network socket and resumed our pwnage.
Man we were little arseholes!
> ...let us use his non networked computer...
> ...put us in charge of downloading the NOAA data...
EDIT: The predecessor of BCPL was CPL, the Cambridge Programming Language.
The UNIX world is built on a language whose original purpose was to bootstrap a compiler and move on.
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BBC is the British broadcasting channel in the UK for me, and their 80/90's graphics were pretty much the same!?
You should have heard of them: Acorn is the original "A" in ARM.
The BBC wanted to promote computer literacy in the UK, so intended to run TV and radio series, magazines, etc. It wanted a high-end user-programmable home computer that would be very expandable, with the priorities being a good BASIC, fairly fast, and a wide range of ports... rather than affordable (cf. ZX Spectrum) or a videogames machine (cf. Commodore VIC20 & C64, Atari 8-bits).
It got it. For a while UK schools and universities ran almost entirely on BBC Micros. They weren't so common in the home as they were about 3-4x the price of a ZX Spectrum or C64.
Acorn evaluated various chips for its planned next-gen machine, and discarded all of them as being too expensive, not powerful enough, etc. This included the Motorola 680000, the Intel 80186, the WDC 65C816, the NatSemi 32016 and others.
So it designed its own: the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM for short.
It's now the best-selling CPU in the world by about 2 orders of magnitude, so I reckon you've probably heard of it.
Micro men, story of the zx spectrum vs the bbc
No conditional execution, and the program counter is no longer directly addressable.
This does increase performance, at the cost of code density (no thumb instructions either).
Fujitsu's ARM supercomputer was the first that I'd heard of removing all 32-bit support, but mainline designs are about to do the same with phones.
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