[HN Gopher] BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of cod...
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BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [video]
Author : zeristor
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-02-24 08:38 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| I'd suggest that, in the UK, it'd be the C64 and Spectrum, not
| the BBC Model B. Cost alone restricted the BBC to wealthy
| families and schools.
|
| I'd play games on my C64 and then took an interest in cracking
| games. This lead into writing demos and, eventually, a job
| writing 68k and C with MPW in the Mac (via Amiga and Atari).
|
| The BBC Model B played no part in my career.
| zeristor wrote:
| I remember the PC World Computer Fair at the Barbican in the
| early Eighties, walking past the Acorn stand with a BBC with a
| voice synthesiser singing "I am working for the BBC".
| 72deluxe wrote:
| My dad still has many in his loft as my secondary school chucked
| them out late 90s and we took them. They were even considered old
| rubbish when I was in middle school; that school had 1 Archimedes
| that sat forlornly in the corner.
|
| I was using it in the early 90s when everyone else was playing on
| their Sega and early PCs. We were poor so had to make do with
| very last-generation tech. I enjoyed playing games on it and then
| got a programming book (Advanced Programming Techniques for the
| BBC Micro my Jim McGregor and Alan Watt - I bought a copy
| recently) from my school library as a teenager with thoughts of
| writing a game, when Pentiums IIs were appearing... the folly. I
| did my homework on its word processor and printed it out with a
| deafening Epson, which looked pretty rubbish compared to my
| contempory's Encarta-pictured-studded inkjet printouts with
| WordArt. Oh well.
|
| As it turned out, the programming book was very interesting and
| had all manner of stuff in it I didn't understand like 3D
| programming methods with maths I didn't understand, but I did
| design my own glyph and animate it walking across the screen
| after designing it on grid paper.
|
| My dad still has all the disk drives, second processor, A, B, B+
| and Master units in his loft along with a series of Cub monitors.
| And various eeproms like Speech, View etc, and an AMX mouse. Even
| had an Integrex colour inkjet which I managed to get some output
| from (very quiet), but that went to the bin some years ago. I
| think he has all the manuals too.
|
| Really fond of the Beeb as it served me well and introduced me to
| programming despite the inadequacies of the keybord. Will have to
| grab a Master from him. I certainly do miss the instant start-up
| time...
|
| I ended up doing my paper round as a teenager and spending the
| money on PC Plus and Micromart in the hope of buying a PC but had
| to do with ones school threw out again, so I was languishing on a
| 486 DX2 when PIIIs and Celerons were around, but I don't regret
| it. Introduced me to Linux RedHat 6.2 and many more exciting
| computer journeys.
| sloucher wrote:
| >inadequacies of the keyboard
|
| _cough_ ZX-Spectrum _cough_
| protomyth wrote:
| _cough_ Atari 400 _cough_
|
| At least you could buy a cool replacement keyboard.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| I used a ZX81 too and my word was that a bad keyboard!
| dboreham wrote:
| Not as bad as a MK14.
| barrkel wrote:
| Hey, I used to hang around toy shops and program on display C64
| and CPC 464 and, in one shop, an Acorn Archimedes A3000.
|
| I even wrote programs in VTech BASIC, on toy computers with
| 40x2 character (IIRC - definitely two lines, not sure about
| columns) LCD displays.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Compared to your average 8 bitter at the time the keyboard of
| the BBC was pretty good. It was also the only one that didn't
| fail after a couple of weeks of heavy use.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| It also had much nicer graphics.
|
| At my first job we used one as colour front end to a PDP
| 11/03 that was attached to a huge hydrodynamic model- It
| largest physical model in the world at the time and used 1/3
| of our entire lab space related to a nuke plant in China.
|
| When the Chinese delegation arrived they where stunned by the
| BBC micro and apparently spent the next weekend scouring the
| area for BBC micros to take back.
| julian55 wrote:
| Interesting, my first job was also in hydrodynamic
| modelling using PDP-11/03 for data capture! I wonder if it
| was the same place? I left there in 1982 and I don't think
| they had any BBC Micros at that time.
| zeristor wrote:
| I remember Chris Serle learning about email from Ian McNaughton
| in 1982, I just couldn't understand how fax was a thing for the
| next couple of decades.
| [deleted]
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Fax is _still_ a thing. Not long ago did some work for a
| publisher, who take orders from their stockists via forms
| submitted either via ftp as EDIs, or fax as either EDI or a
| hand-filled form for transcription to EDI - the majority still
| fax in handwritten forms.
|
| I also had to send a fax of documentation to a government a few
| weeks ago - their rationale was that fax was secure, and email
| wasn't - the irony of course being that I used some random web
| to fax service, which is likely much less secure than either
| email or fax!
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Fax is absolutely still out there. Before he retired, someone
| I know who ran a machine shop got drawings by fax right up to
| the very end.
|
| Put your drawing in the fax machine, key in the number (or
| speed dial), hit Send. No mucking about with apps or
| websites.
|
| Of course, drawings are a rather special case, and it's not
| like we're using fax for general business communications now.
| Back when a few people still did, I actually put together a
| HylaFax setup that allowed the office to print directly to
| fax. I think it got used for non-testing purposes maybe
| twice.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| It was expensive you where charged by the email and data on top
| of that - I used to work on billing for Telecom Gold (Dialcom)
| and Prestel.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "... fax was a thing for the next couple of decades."
|
| Inertia. I accidentally dropped my company's fax machine in the
| skip when we moved a few years back. I also forgot to move the
| phone line or even order one for it.
| jameshart wrote:
| One of my weirdest development experiences was in what must
| have been about 2005, on a call with the team at another
| company who were to provide us with a web service API (I think
| given the era it was probably an ad hoc XMLRPC implementation
| of some sort). I asked them to send me over a sample of the
| request xml.
|
| They faxed it.
| nickmain wrote:
| "Chuckie Egg" was my introduction to hacking.
|
| I wrote an assembler program to load the game from tape,
| disassemble the code and overwrite the instruction that
| decremented the life count.
|
| The inline assembler in BBC Basic was an incredible feature. I
| wish more systems today had the same mix of high-level and bare-
| metal.
| tomxor wrote:
| <slight rant> I remember these mysterious computers from primary
| school... I never got to even touch one, only the "cleverest"
| kids seemed to be blessed with the chance to use it and merely to
| learn typing - remember when that was considered a skill? Later
| on in the mid 90s my dad got me an old Atari ST where my first
| exposure to programming and fun with computers began, It might
| seem dated by that point but I am still extremely grateful for it
| to this day.
|
| I will never know how useful the BBC would have been. My memory
| of schools back then were not the most inclusive, they seem to
| arbitrarily decide who should and shouldn't get a chance to do
| something based on their perception of who is the cleverest.
| conjectures wrote:
| > remember when that was considered a skill?
|
| Yeah ;) That era was like being given a car and pretending it's
| a horse. Skills for the future was mostly typing on a word
| processor, not programming the thing.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| The ST was a good machine. GEM worked well though the API was
| poor.
|
| Source: Mac Plus C/68K developer.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| It used the MOS 6502 CPU, which was also used for the Apple I,
| Apple II, the Commodores and Atari and Nintendo (NES, SNES) game
| consoles!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWqBmmPQP40
|
| http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html
|
| https://eater.net/6502
| elvis70 wrote:
| And clocked at 2 MHz! Twice the frequency of the Apple II or
| the C64.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Luxury! Though I did have a VIC 2 and SID to solve many
| problems.
|
| Elite was very slow on the C64 because of the CPU speed. Line
| drawing and hidden surface removal were expensive.
| the-dude wrote:
| You are not wrong, but at least the C64 used the 6510 ( a
| variant ).
| royjacobs wrote:
| That CPU is still going strong. In fact, I'm currently building
| an assembler for the 6502 in Rust.
|
| https://mos.datatra.sh
| timthorn wrote:
| The clip doesn't mention the importance of the BBC Micro in the
| history of Arm - but without the success of the BBC, Acorn surely
| wouldn't have been in a position to create the Archimedes with
| its novel processor.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Mine still works: https://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/my-bbc-micro-
| model-b-and-plume-... https://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/back-from-
| dead-with-power-suppl...
| codeulike wrote:
| Had one when I was 8, learnt programming on it, everything else
| comes from that.
| ggambetta wrote:
| Never had the pleasure of having (or even seeing) a BBC Micro,
| but I grew up with the contemporary ZX Spectrum (and the
| predecessor ZX81) and I have the fondest memories of that time
| [0].
|
| There was something magical about its simplicity and immediacy.
| From OFF to a BASIC interpreter in about one second. No
| boilerplate, you could be drawing stuff on the screen in one
| line.
|
| I've wondered many times if there's anything equivalent for the
| current generations. Teaching CG in university showed me just how
| many abstractions there are between a person and the computer
| these days. Some of my students didn't have a clear understanding
| of the difference between RAM and disk; I suppose SSDs make this
| difference even more tenuous. For me growing up it was pretty
| obvious what was in the computer and what was in the tape.
|
| [0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-
| scratch/d...
| klelatti wrote:
| The colour Maximite [1] is a good approximation to this for the
| modern era. Arm Cortex M7 at 480MHz so quite powerful but not
| many abstraction layers between user code and the hardware.
|
| More coverage here from the 8-bit guy here. [2]
|
| [1] https://geoffg.net/maximite.html
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA7REQxohV4
| swiley wrote:
| There's not much boilerplate for drawing in JS which every
| computer has installed.
| the_af wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but microcomputers of that era felt
| more like appliances. It was like switching on a radio. You
| plugged it in, switched it on, and there it was the prompt
| greeting you, ready for typing your program.
|
| And -- get this -- there was no shutdown procedure either.
| You just switched it off!
|
| For javascript in the browser you still have a complex stack,
| including a pretty complex operating system, which must have
| been booted up first.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I was a Micro kid - I guess it would have been '89 when I
| started at a new school, and they had an old bomb shelter with
| half a dozen micros and amigas in it. The amigas were off
| limits, for seniors only, but the micros were free to use in
| breaks, evenings after prep, sundays. None had any storage -
| nor was there any software - but there were heaps and heaps of
| BBC Micro magazines.
|
| We all taught ourselves to code, following tutorial series in
| magazines, swapping tips with each other, and copying games
| line by line from listings in magazines, modifying them or
| fixing (and creating) bugs as we went. Then of course the power
| would go off, and we'd lose everything - stuff we cared about
| keeping got written out with pencil on graph paper.
|
| By the time I was ten, I found basic trivial, assembler
| natural, the idea of everything just being a set of simple
| operations and reading and writing memory addresses intuitive.
|
| The same applies for all of us - our little clique of half a
| dozen kids who accidentally learned computer science in a bomb
| shelter because they wanted to play games. We made a half
| decent little dungeon crawler, which got us into no end of
| trouble when one of the masters discovered us poring over the
| notebook we were writing it in, as they thought we were
| plotting to blow up the school. Which we were - just in the
| game, which was about escaping school.
|
| I feel like because the computers were less accessible as
| utility devices, they were more accessible as computers. You
| _had_ to grok the thing to do anything with it - necessity,
| invention, mothers and all that.
| simonh wrote:
| To be fair to the the master in question, violent rebellions
| in British schools do have a history, although it's been a
| while.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1797_Rugby_School_rebellion#Ru.
| ..
| the-dude wrote:
| NL/The Netherlands :
|
| Around 1984 I got really interested and there was an Acorn
| Electron at our local library for everybody to use.
|
| Around 1986 I went to a new school which had a fully equipped
| classroom with BBC B's, server with co-processor, networked(!).
| We all had our own floppy disks ( not drives ), which we could
| save to at the end of the hour. This class was opened up during
| lunch-breaks.
|
| Late 1986 : Acorn dumped their Electron stock on the marktet and
| a national furniture chain ( Quantum ) carried them, and I
| acquired my first computer for a very modest price. I still
| remember that day and place.
|
| Thank you Acorn for the wonderful products and the BBC/UK for the
| foresight.
|
| And here we are.
| englishrookie wrote:
| Wow, where was this? What library was that?
|
| I was 12 at the time and had to take turns on my friend's BBC
| Micro (his parents' really). Of course, he was at the computer
| for 75% of the time, because "I know how to operate it".
| sshagent wrote:
| My friends all got ZX Spectrums and had a larger pool of people
| to swap games with. My parents got me an Acorn Electron, which
| has a child i was disappointed. I loved the hell out of that
| thing and the lack of friends with the same system, meant i
| learn basic and things spiraled from there. So in a way,
| something i thought as a mistake turned out to be perfect.
| pm215 wrote:
| Mmm, our first computer was a TI99/4A, which my Dad picked up
| cheap when they were on sale as part of TI getting out of the
| home-computer business in the early 80s. Having very few
| commercial games for it was part of what nudged me into
| trying typing in games programs from books and user group
| magazines, which acted as a pretty good gradual introduction
| to programming as I had to figure out why things weren't
| working or try to adapt programs written for other BASIC
| dialects.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I started reading the manual of our ZX Spectrum because when
| the kit arrived the tape-deck didn't work. We had a bunch of
| free games with the computer, but we couldn't load any of
| them!
|
| No doubt I'd have gotten around to it eventually anyway, but
| that was the direct source of my programming career:
|
| https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| 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.
| Joeboy wrote:
| 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.
| stevekemp wrote:
| 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.)
| crumbshot wrote:
| > _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?
| stevekemp wrote:
| 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.
| crumbshot wrote:
| Could it be Great Britain Ltd?
|
| https://youtu.be/vnojOGjz578
| stevekemp wrote:
| Definitely!
|
| Thank you so much, that game has been lurking at the back
| of my mind for the better part of 30 years!
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| You can play it here:
|
| http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=1537
| someperson wrote:
| Almost certainly SimCity: https://www.mobygames.com/game/bbc-
| micro_/simcity
| stevekemp wrote:
| I hadn't realized that was available for the BBC!
|
| One of the later replies successfully identified it as
| "Great Britain Ltd".
| gadders wrote:
| The BBC B was for the posh kids. It cost about PS400 against (I
| think) PS100 or so for a Spectrum (or PS80 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 PS200.
| Joeboy wrote:
| To be fair, having a home computer at all was for posh kids.
| Having a BBC B at home was for _really_ posh kids.
| gadders wrote:
| It's all relative, but I managed to get a Dragon 32 after
| they went bust despite growing up on and off benefits.
| pwinwood wrote:
| I don't think we could afford anything, but I could over
| a period of time build my own.
| gadders wrote:
| Nice! I wish I had been smart enough to do that.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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 PS1500 to PS2500 (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.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| 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_Compu
| ter...
| teh_klev wrote:
| 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.
| adwww wrote:
| My primary school in the early 90s had one Apple, several BBC
| and mostly Acorn computers.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| 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.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| And came with its own CRT so you wouldn't have to fight over
| the family TV.
| youngtaff wrote:
| 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
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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).
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| _joel wrote:
| They were just about becoming obsolete when I was in
| infant/junior school but even so, playing Chuckie Egg and using
| that drawing turtle (when available) really left an impression.
| Played around with BASIC (as much as an 8 year old can) and then
| got a bug for it. Few years later got a 286 donated by my mum and
| dad (yay qbasic), then a few years later some thing called linux
| came out which opened up a new horizon all together.
|
| I then had the pleasure of working in R&D at the beeb for a few
| years where I got briefly involved testing the microbit for
| thermal dissipation and usage with different USB cable lengths
| (it was a colleague how kicked off the project, amongst several
| others, who also pushed the idea).
|
| Here's to the Micro! Who knows what computing will look like in
| 40 years but I can guarantee they'll be an emulator running BBC
| Micro code ;)
| 83457 wrote:
| Video series I enjoyed a while back on history and repair. (I
| would post the playlist but it is out of order)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rgEzG7F5d8
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQCgzIWZo0o
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKDMZCEeBd4
| bernardv wrote:
| Loved my BBC Micro model B. 32Kb RAM was a luxury back then. It
| was attached to a huge black and white 1970's TV as real computer
| monitors were very expensive back then.
|
| Planetoid was my go-to game. Got me into BASIC programming and
| 6502 assembly.
| walshemj wrote:
| Actually the BBC color monitor was very cheap - at the time a
| color Vt100 clone cost over PS2k the BBC one was PS800 approx.
|
| The basic Tektronix graphics display was a lot! more
| major505 wrote:
| My first contact with computers was with an unlicensed clone of
| the Zx81.Too bad the acorns never catched in south america. They
| seen far more capable computers. At least they have better
| keyboards.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Gave away my Beeb decades ago. It was awesome. I wrote a
| timekeeping system for my Dad's firm on it that got me through my
| Computer Studies A-level :)
|
| Also played a shit-ton of Elite on it. I suspect Elite was the
| driver behind 90% of the floppy drive sales for the Beeb.
|
| Still got my Acorn Atom, though 12Kb of memory (including the
| expansion pack), and that includes roughly 1Kb of system memory,
| a BASIC interpreter and Assembler. Now all I need is to find some
| way of connecting it to a PAL-compatible TV again, and finding a
| cassette recorder to act as the storage device... I suspect I'll
| be giving this one away soon too.
| zeristor wrote:
| The BBC made an effort in establishing web literacy, but that
| never quite seemed to take off. I seem to remember something
| called Auntie, which makes the success of this all the more
| interesting.
|
| There was a Barry Norman programme on Saturdays where they played
| programmes over the radiowaves for people to record and play. Or
| did I dream that?
|
| Edit: It would seem not, it was called Chip Shop:
|
| https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/58aae80bd5844a729097ca16998c6c02
|
| Weirdly they have the address to write to in the programme
| listing with the post code removed, I don't know if it is defunct
| or for GDPR.
| rolivercoffee wrote:
| There was a show called The Net:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(British_TV_series)
| isthisnametaken wrote:
| It appears the postcode was W12 8QT
|
| http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/downloads/14545
|
| It's the old postcode for BBC Television Centre, so it's
| defunct (and the Royal Mail address search doesn't list it any
| more)
| codeulike wrote:
| There was also Micro Live which was pretty successful and well
| remembered I think. BBC Micros were in lots of schools
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc5vFmedE1c
| Wildgoose wrote:
| I remember (aged about 17) going to see Chris Curry demonstrate
| the BBC computer at the South Yorkshire Personal Computer Group
| which met in a Sheffield University lecture theatre.
|
| He was just nonchalantly smoking at the front of the lecture
| theatre, demonstating what it was capable of.
|
| There was a mass stampede down to the front when he ended his
| demonstration, with nearly everybody wanting to place pre-orders.
| marcusr wrote:
| My school had a classroom of BBC Micros which were connected over
| a primitive network to a "server" which I guess must have had a
| hard drive for saving files too. I can't take the credit but a
| school friend worked out how to view the memory of another
| machine over the network, from which we made the first remote
| keystroke capture I had ever seen, which got us the teachers'
| passwords.
|
| Our first hack was born - with their password we could get onto
| the server and print out the password file (in plain text of
| course). The teachers started to realise they'd been hacked but I
| think thought it more likely we'd observed their typing when sat
| nearby and so changed their passwords. Of course we could just
| keep watching their passwords being entered at a distance.
|
| I think we were caught in the end red handed with the password
| file printing out and unable to stop it printing when they came
| in the room. Luckily back then it was seen as experimentation not
| criminal!
| cjg wrote:
| That sounds very familiar!
|
| There was essentially no security on those Econet networks. If
| you had a copy of the executable that could read and write the
| memory of a remote computer, you were good to go.
|
| I remember I had a print-out of a hex dump of the REMOTE
| command and used it with exactly that key capture attack. I
| just typed in the executable then told the teacher I'd
| forgotten my password and needed it reset. I watched remotely
| as he logged on to his admin account.
|
| The next day, all the BBC micros in the lab played Captain
| Pugwash when they started: very beep-heavy given the ability of
| a BBC to create sound.
|
| Eventually I was caught re-entering the hex dump and my
| printout was confiscated. I didn't have another copy.
| cjg wrote:
| Must have been this:
| https://www.stairwaytohell.com/music/Frak.mp3
| bonaldi wrote:
| With the *REMOTE, *VIEW and *NOTIFY commands you could also
| have a huge amount of fun in class (much of it invisible to the
| teacher).
|
| We also found a privilege escalation endpoint, and were only
| caught when the network server was upgraded to an Archimedes
| and the special badging on admin accounts in the GUI gave our
| MRBIG account away.
| zepto wrote:
| Don't forget to change *PROT to *PR0T in the teachers !BOOT
| file.
| uncledave wrote:
| I vaguely remember editing one of the boot files so it'd
| start up and display a fake > prompt. This was then used to
| print out an insult. Also because everyone just hit break
| you could set it with a *KEY0 command to just run the
| program and insult them some more. I remember getting in
| trouble more than exactly what I did - was a long time ago
| now! :)
| signal11 wrote:
| This has been covered many times in the past[1], but for anyone
| looking to play with the BBC Micro these days:
| https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| ArtWomb wrote:
| I enjoy messing around in the Owlet browser-based BBC BASIC
| editor. 8-bit graphics still has a place in modern web design ;)
|
| https://bbcmic.ro/
|
| Related doc on youtube:
|
| "Birth of BASIC"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYPNjSoDrqw
| htfokwrm wrote:
| If only the BBC paid its staff enough to retain good developers
| for longer they'd still make contributions like this.
| seapunk wrote:
| This is one of the best Twitter bots to follow:
| https://twitter.com/bbcmicrobot
| forinti wrote:
| It was great that you could get ROMs for other languages. I
| learnt Pascal on a Beeb. There was also Lisp, Forth, and a few
| others.
|
| It also had the best resolution I ever saw on an 8 bit micro:
| mode 0 was 640x256 with one bit colour depth. This meant you
| could have 80 columns.
|
| The one thing that I missed were colours: you only really had 8.
| teh_klev wrote:
| I had the Acornsoft version of Forth, which loaded from a
| cassette tape :) But yeah, the sideways ROM feature was pretty
| amazing. I wrote up my final year college project in Wordwise
| running in a sideways ROM. Then I snagged a Torch Z80
| coprocessor and could run a port of WordStar on CP/N (Torch's
| clone of CP/M). The project (all 600 pages of it) was then
| printed on a Juki 6100 daisywheel printer :)
| nickt wrote:
| > Juki 6100 daisywheel printer
|
| Ahh, thanks, I've been trying to remember what that printer
| was for about 30 years!
| teh_klev wrote:
| The noisiest thing ever as well, clackety clack at 12cps,
| and thumpity thump as it did a carriage return :)
| Wildgoose wrote:
| I had the Acornsoft Forth as well, (for the Acorn Atom).
|
| Ah, the memories!
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