Subj : BBC Micros
To   : all
From : JoE DooM
Date : Wed Dec 15 2021 13:41:13

I grew up with Commodore computers, and after the Amiga I bought an Acorn
Archimemdes A4000. 

I remember how cool it was that you could mix assembly inline with BASIC
and not need an assembler, but by that time I wasn't much into
programming any more.

Fast forward a couple years later, I got rid of all my retro computers a
few years back and stuck to an emulator running on a Pi3 to get my Amiga
fix.

But recently I've had a fascination for 8bit BBC micros. I don't recall
ever seeing them out in the wild, except for the guy who introduced me
to them and his friend, who were both programmers for those systems.

I've been playing around with BeebEm and those machines are awesome. From
an OS and BASIC programming perspective, they were miles ahead of other
8bit machines I've used (really only C=64's, VIC 20s, Atari 600/800s).

And I just watched a video where someone identified the keys they used on
the keyboard as Cherry MY(?) keys.. Predecessors of the current Cherry MX
keys, so that was really surprising. 

That's another thing I've found on most 8bits, and even 16bit machines,
their keyboards weren't as good as those in the later IBM/PC world. But
Acorn/BBC micros were.

I'd love to get my hands on actual hardware to see how good they really
were, but as I don't think they were that common around these parts,
they'd be even harder to come by now.

Hyjinx, maybe you've got more insight into our local retro scene than I
do.. Any ideas of how to get hold of one?

Either way, it's a lot of fun playing with it on the emulator. I think I
missed out on something really good growing up and am surprised they
weren't more common.


--- Talisman v0.35-dev (Linux/x86_64)
 * Origin: Lost Underground BBS (21:1/230)

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