The BBC news website has some pieces relating to the 1981 launch of the BBC home computer, which was designed and made by Acorn Computers. News article here about the meeting at the London Science Museum, organised by the Computer Conservation Society, and interview article here. The interview article relates one of my favourite stories from the time that an American visitor to Acorn didn’t quite know what to make of their computer networking system:
I remember Bill Gates marvelling at our networking because he didn’t know about networking at the time.
As an aside, this is an opportunity for me to ask if anyone has a 100K single-sided 40 track 5.25 inch disk drive and cable for the BBC model B going spare – while I still have my model B and a handful of disks, I loaned out the drive quite some time ago, and haven’t seen it since! I promise that if someone can find one for me that I will then spend at least 10 minutes playing Elite again, like it was originally intended.
March 25, 2008 at 1:15 pm
“As an aside, this is an opportunity for me to ask if anyone has a 100K single-sided 40 track 5.25 inch disk drive and cable for the BBC model B going spare – while I still have my model B and a handful of disks, I loaned out the drive quite some time ago, and haven’t seen it since!”
I think we’ve got one in the attic at my parents’ house in Essex – I’ll ask my parents to take a look.
While we’re on the subject, you’d have thought someone would have written a Flash version of Elite by now, but I can’t seem to find one. Don’t you have any students you could gently steer towards a worthwhile project like this?
March 26, 2008 at 8:07 am
whatever happened to the BBC Micro?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
I still am rather keen to it. Apparently it is “out of date.” Anyways, cheers.
http://scarletraven.wordpress.com/
March 26, 2008 at 11:36 am
Mmm thanks Edmund, that would be great!
Just need to figure out how to get it from Essex to Glasgow…