Collaborate Disseminate
The BBC Micro was many peoples’ first exposure to home computing, and thanks to [Dominic Pajak], you can fire up this beloved hardware in WebXR. Is it an emulator? Yes, …read more Continue reading The BBC Micro, Lovingly Simulated in VR
The BBC has a long history of teaching the world about computers. The broadcaster’s name was proudly displayed on the BBC Micro, and BBC Basic was the programming language developed …read more Continue reading BBC Basic Is Back in a Big Way
If you work at all with British software or hardware engineers, you’ll find that there’s an entire generation perhaps now somewhere between their mid-40s and mid-50s, who stand slightly apart …read more Continue reading A Virus for the BBC Micro
There’s a lot of data on magnetic media that will soon be lost forever, as floppies weren’t really made to sit in attics and basements for decades and still work. …read more Continue reading Reading Floppies with an Oscilloscope
There was a time when visitors to London would carry an A to Z map to navigate the city’s Undergound railway system, referring to the iconic London Transport map printed on its back as they did so. Now it’s likely …read more
When floppy disks were the data storage medium of choice, software companies and in particular game developers came up with ever more inventive ways to make them difficult to copy. Tinkering at the edges of the disc format standards didn’t come cheap though, and for example the Dungeon Master game …read more
Continue reading A Lowly 8-Bit Micro Busts Copy Protection From The 16-Bit Era
If you were lucky and had well-off parents in the early 1980s, your home computer had a sound chip on board and could make music. There were a variety of chips on the market that combined in some form the tone generators and noise sources of a synthesiser, but without …read more
Continue reading How Did They Get Sampled Sounds From An SN76849 8-bit Sound Chip?
If you compare the early PC market for the US and the UK, you’ll notice one big difference. While many US schools had Apple computers, there were significant numbers of other computers in schools, as well. In the UK, pretty much every school that had a computer had an Acorn …read more
Continue reading Econet – Britain’s Early Educational Network
Git is powerful, but with great power comes the ability to really bork things up. When you find yourself looking at an inscrutable error message after an ill-advised late-night commit, it can be a maximum pucker-factor moment, and keeping a clear enough head to fix the problem can be challenging. …read more
In the early 1980s there was growing public awareness that the microcomputer revolution would have a significant effect on everybody’s lives, and there was a brief period in which anything remotely connected with a computer attracted an air of glamour and sophistication. Broadcasters wanted to get in on the act, and produced glowing documentaries on the new technology, enthusiastically crystal-ball-gazing as they did so.
In the UK, the public service BBC broadcaster produced a brace of series’ over the decade probing all corners of the subject as part of the same Computer Literacy Project that gave us Acorn’s BBC Micro, …read more
Continue reading The BBC Computer Literacy Project From The 1980s Is Yours To Browse