The British Micro that Shaped a Nation - BBC Micro - Trash to Treasure (Pt1)

[Music] our MC is supported by monster joysticks calm level up your retro gaming with their joysticks feature in genuine San where arcade paths and one click print calm for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsman and global delivery hello cave dwellers it's time to learn about and give some TLC to yet another veteran micro and this time it's one this particularly interesting released it is to me because I like many other people of my age from the UK were very much a part of the whole story this is the BBC micro from the very same British Broadcasting Corporation who grace our TV and radios and it's best remembered as the Machine we had in our school classrooms in the 80s whether it be a posh girl with lots of them or less affluent one with one machine per year that you had to fight over with your friends or at least that was my experience of it at the time today our goal is to get familiar with what's inside it learn about its origins and consider basic maintenance and upgrades that you might want to do should you want to add one to your own collection throughout the series we will then perform that maintenance and any repairs that we come across that need doing and by the end of it I hope we'll all have learnt a little bit more and we'll have a nice example to add to the cave as this is a machine that's so very steeped in history I think we should start by hearing about just why the BBC put their name to a micro computer in 1981 every machine has an origin story and this one is particularly interesting [Music] on the first of December 1981 the British Broadcasting Corporation microcomputer system or BBC micro was launched mine computer models where the BBC badge were produced over a 13 year period through to 1994 but when we say BBC microwave we're talking about the first for BBC branded models and those are the model a model B B+ 64 and VB plus one to eight the subsequent BBC branded master and master compact with the successor to the micro and for the BBC branded machines fall under the later Archimedes computer range the initial models then on the model a and model B and that's the focus of our attention through this series it was designed and produced by British computer outfit acorn computers and it was the result of a bidding process to produce a computer to support what was called the computer literacy project this project consisted of over 100 TV and radio programs books software and of course a computer and peripheral with which to try out these lessons which were relayed across all of those formats and it was hugely successful key to its success was the adoption of the project by schools particularly primary schools of which 85% in the UK got involved helped largely by government subsidies when purchasing them and over one and a half million BBC micros would be sold in total the story though is much larger than the machine itself it wasn't just primary school kids who were set to benefit from the project at the end of the 1970s a national conversation needed to be had on the future of technology and the place of everyone in that future the conversation which feels as relevant today as it was in this 1978 episode of BBC's horizon you know not only are we behind in Britain I think in in many areas in in the technology itself but also we're very far behind in government response to the technology and the changes that was really my government so the government the US Japan Germany to some extent France have been a little bit more timely unless we develop a strategy not just for an industry or a sector but for Britain worked out by an extra governmental body with a lot longer viewpoint than most governments have I think we're going to have a lot of problems and fall in the middle to add weight to this feeling a six-part ITV documentary series named the mighty micro aired in 1979 in which dr. Christopher Evans of the UK National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming micro revolution so influential was the series the questions were raised in Parliament about it we've embarked on a wild adventure we really have and nobody knows where all of this is going to lead an incensed nobody's in control and in a sense that technology is is leading us and we don't know where it's leading us all that we can sensibly speculate about today is what's going to happen in the next 10 or 15 years but for goodness sake weren't wearing earth is it going to be by the time we are old or by the time our children are old I got a three-year-old daughter and I think you know what it can be like when she's my age and I really believe we've got the capability today to build a much better world for her than people are living in today it was in this climate then that the British government decided action was needed to equip the nation's current and future workforce with relevant and competitive skills the 1970s were far from our country's finest hour it was a decade of economic and political difficulty in the UK which comprised of an energy crisis a financial crash and an international monetary fund bailout as inflation soared to 30 percent during this turmoil other nations were leaving us behind in the technological revolution the government knew they needed to do something but they just weren't sure what the questions raised in Parliament indicated that they needed to continue to raise awareness of technology and help was forthcoming from the Department of Industry Department of Education and science and the manpower Services Commission or MSC and it was here in the MSC where we find David Allen and Robert Oberon these gentlemen went on a fact-finding tour of the world meeting with industry trade unions and academic Institute's before submitting of report back to the government which unsurprisingly it reinforced the view that raising awareness and understanding of computing should be made a top priority for the country David Robert were very well placed for the task and there were certainly no strangers to the debate early in 1979 the BBC's continuing education television Department produced three documentaries exploring the social impact of the microchip and this was called the silicon factor Germany now has the world's most sophisticated police computer network at demonstrations faces of photograph computers are now able to put a name to the picture by measuring the distance between the nose the ear and the mouth all state agencies will become linked by computers this was made with the help of David and Robert from the MSC for the public it raised as many questions as it answered about a field we were largely ignorant of the new questions now being raised were in fact quite positive education is empowering and the series encouraged people to progress from asking questions like how will this affect or take away my job and start asking things like what exactly is a micro and how can I be the one to control it this line of questioning would form the very basis of the computer literacy project the computer literacy project then was to raise an army of technically astute workers who would drive the nation's factories warehouses infrastructure services and beyond into a future of automation and technological power to inform educate and entertain as the BBC motto goes with an emphasis on doing this in a hands-on fashion the principles of computing are after all exactly the same on these new home micros as it would be on a multi-million pound supercomputer so learning the foundations on a home computer could very well take you all the way to being in charge of the computer you once feared would take your job a literacy project though well that wasn't new to the BBC in the early 70s the adult literacy campaign helped to get over 2 million adults reading through a similar scheme of TV programs to inspire and supporting materials it was this combination of stimulating media and hands-on exercises where they wanted to replicate with the computer literacy project all I want is a proper cup of coffee in a proper copper coffee pot coffee since on the move began 70,000 people have come forward for help with their reading or writing Dilys is one of them what I wanted to read to me to read your support I want you to spread my modded name because I just got my Regis nothing started naming them but now I don't to be hands-on though the project needed a machine that you could lay your hands on a standard machine for everyone so that no matter who was in putting the code taken in the program they would get the same hopefully gratifying results that would encourage them to continue the hardware on the UK micro scene was at a turning point in 1980 until now there were the expensive trinity of first home computers from the US the trs-80 Apple 2 and the Commodore pet which well they didn't really take hold in the UK and there were the self-assembly kits or instruction guides in amateur electronics magazines which they required more skills really than the average man or woman on the street had but they were there as an option but a homegrown microcomputer scene was rising up in the UK companies like Sinclair research and acorn computers were starting to produce fully assembled computers sold on the high street at an affordable price machines like the Acorn adam and sinclair zx80 released in 1984 170 and 99 and 95 respectively that's UK pounds although these were also available still in component form for those who have the skills at a lower price it was conceivable then that a homegrown microbe already existed to offer the affordable hands-on element of the computer literacy project but which one should be used which machine would the BBC be prepared to put it's very reputation on the line for [Music] which machine indeed while the very one on the desk here of course so let's take a break from the history lesson to just actually look at it something I haven't done since I was a primary school so it's really interesting for me to look at it now through adult eyes and get a different perspective on it so here it is and it's certainly a machine with presence a sizable thing indeed which has been built to the specification required of it by the BBC and it also goes above and beyond that the model a and B looked identical they sold for two hundred and thirty five pounds for the Model A three hundred and thirty five for the model B and as we heard if you were a school you got a big discount on that price I believe it was a 50% subsidy or there abouts that you got from the government and the main difference was that the Model A had 16 K of ram is standard and the model B and 32 K of RAM has standard the model B as far as I remember being the more popular choice now unlike the sinclair zx80 or 81 here which looks like it might snap in half if you dropped your pan to pop on it the BBC micro was designed to withstand the most challenging environment known to computers the school classroom it's chunky with thick plastic similar to the later acorn electron which acorn claimed was made from the same plastic as police riot shields the BBC does feel very similar in its build quality and something you'll notice as you look around the machine is that there are no sliders knobs or dowels to be touched you're just presented with the keyboard and that's so nothing could really be fiddled with in that classroom environment the last thing the teacher wanted was 20 of these turned up to full volume because there was audio there's a speaker grille here for the built-in speaker but there's no volume dial for that on the outside you could adjust it on the inside and while we're on the subject of audio I'll just show you this very quickly this is another BBC micro and this is a common modification that you might done have done at home because as I said you didn't want to be able to adjust the volume in the classroom but here is a volume knob fitted retrospectively to the this is the user Rampal you would slot in additional roms to load programs there and also three and a half mil speaker jacks that have been fitted to both sides so that was a common modification for the home user and later on in the series we will pop the lid off see how that's been done but as standard the volume was set inside and the kids couldn't change it so yes as you sat to use the BBC micro well you were presented with was this big satisfying keyboard and I've heard Chris Curie of Akon say in an interview in recent years the cost price of that keyboard was something in the region of 25 pounds it was a little above that I believe that's a sizeable portion of the overall cost of the machine I think is money very well spent it's lovely type one you could type on that all day with no problems the row of red keys along the top there were designed to be software definable so you could put a piece of paper under the plastic flap at the top here to remind you what each key does for the particular piece of software you were running and various ports exist around the machine if I just turn this around here most interestingly to me of the three not one but three video ports on the back here so you've got UHF so you could tune your low-cost of television into it and use it at home you've got a bayonet style adapter there that's a composite video out and most interestingly you've got an RGB video output port there which not only gives you a lovely crisp image on something like this the cub branded monitor this is the very monitor that I would have had in my school back in the day and they're lovely monitor is too but also that was really important for the BBC themselves to capture the output to make these supporting BBC programmes for the computer literacy project so they would capture the video output in a nice crisp clear way from there for their own TV shows as we work our way along the ports we've also got various other things here an RS 43 port a cassette port to load from cassettes an analog joystick port and then interesting me over here was called an eco net port this machine doesn't actually have an eco net adaptor it's just that the blanking plate has been pushed through by a curious school child's finger I expect but if you had one fitted that was a corn zone answer to a a local area network for small businesses or for schools so you could actually push programs into the computer's memory over a network if you were at one of those affluent schools that had 20 machines all hooked up on an eco net and the teacher could press a button and make the program's pop up you will never got to experience that but we did have disk drives in my school because the cassettes were obviously a little bit too slow loading for the amount of time we had in a lesson so we had five and a quarter inch floppy disk and they worked just great and that in fact plugged in to some more ports which are on the bottom and let's have a look at those here is that destroyed port and also a supporting auxiliary power port to power the disk drive so that was really useful that reduced the number of plug sockets you needed in the classroom or the office to run the machine at with a disk drive now the most interesting part for me is the tube port over here the reason being the machine that the BBC micro evolved from her acorn was called the acorn proton that was a prototype to follow up the acorn atom it never went to market because it became the BBC micro but that was a jewel CPU based machine so they stripped that back to create the BBC micro to a single 6502 based CPU in the BBC micro but they have the two port here so you can add a secondary processor and that didn't have to be 6502 based you could add a z80 module and then run things like the cp/m operating system there was even an IBM pc module so that you could load say ms-dos software using this as your main PC with that secondary processor to gain a compatibility with that software and it would reach it all through the video port through your main monitor here it was a really really flexible machine more recently people have created adapters to add a Raspberry Pi to the two port so you can actually use the raspberry PI's processor to make this thing fly it's ridiculous how fast you can run let's say elite using a Raspberry Pi as the processor on this thing and historically that tube port has a really interesting story to tell it's a story for another time the Acorn developed a RISC processor which they tested and around through the two port on the BBC micro and that RISC processor we know as armed yes the very same arm CPU lateen our tablets and our phones in the modern day so this plays a huge part in the development of the ARM processor as I said that's a story for another day I'm sure we'll cover it at some point it's a sturdy machine man and we've got a lot more to learn about it when we get the lid off later in the series on the face of it you can see why it was built the way it was built you can understand that it's perfect for the classroom environment and it was a really nice introduction to compute him for people who for many this would be their first machine and it didn't confuse him too much just presented with them with a keyboard and said okay here's the manual here's the keyboard see what you can do with it the question is why was it chosen was the competition any good was there a better option out there to be the BBC micro then we should learn a little bit more about that final bidding process and how acorn won and the proton became the BBC micro let's find out [Music] the akon made BBC micro then would be the machine for the job and it came about as a result of a tender process based on the specifications drawn up by the BBC we've touched on a lot of them just by looking at the machine itself so above and beyond those requirements of a proper keyboard and RGB video output and sound capabilities the machines Jocelin to be chosen also needed to offer color graphics which could be easily programmed and perhaps most importantly a built-in basic programming language if you could program you've considered literate in computers you spoke the very language that they used and basic was the best entry to learning that skill quite the contrast to the point of entry today where perhaps word processing or spreadsheet skills are considered to be a computer literacy but these were very different times anyway if you combine that basic language with commands to easily manipulate sound and graphics then the student sat at the machine should get some quite pleasing feedback and affirmation that they're making progress and once they progressed from those early lessons they can really get stuck into the meat of the mechanics of programming and continue their computer literacy journey so how do you find a machine that ticks all of these boxes building a new machine from scratch would take years so the BBC decided to approach companies to see if existing computer prototypes might fit the bill and six of them responded one who was new Barry the creators of the new brain-computer the bbc's early specifications actually closely matched that of the new brain and some say this was in the expectation that Newberry would tender for and win the contract a very quick and easy turnaround in a limited timeframe very convenient and slightly suspicious but that's not how it played out in the end British computer boffins Sir Clive Sinclair enters our story at this point yet to be knighted so he's not a sir yet but at this point he was involved in the new brain project new brain had started life as a Sinclair radionics project which was then transferred to Newbury laboratories when Sinclair radionics closed by this point Sinclair had decided that he wouldn't actually be able to hit his goal of a sub 100 pound price point computer his focus instead then turned to a z80 CPU based machine over at Sinclair research where he would achieve that ambitious goal in 1980 Clive Sinclair then would also put forward a machine from Sinclair research for consideration by the project in a speech given at the National Museum of computing by David Allen the man from the MSC who at this stage had become the computer literacy project editor he said that by February 1981 the whole process had been whittled down to just three tenders Newbery tangerine and acorn and it's a great talk by the way I've included a link in the description where you can hear his insights into the project and I do encourage you to go and watch that at a con it was the prototype machine named the proton which I mentioned earlier the successor to their earlier atom machine which was in development and they managed to quickly turn the proton around to demonstrate it to the BBC who were suitably impressed when they visited in the film micro men which I'm sure many of you are familiar with that's a dramatization of the battle to create the BBC micro we see the Acorn team sniffing a wire at the last minute to make the prototype work Chris Carrillo Vacon stated in a recent interview that yes time was tight but it wasn't really the bomb defusal style cutting of a wire that has entered urban legend again thanks to those sources are in the description and do amount conversely newberry enthusiastically told the BBC that their prototype was ready to be demonstrated when they went to see it simply didn't work disaster the new brain would eventually come to market in 1982 by the stage the design was a outdated it had no sound it had no color graphics it didn't trouble the competition and it was in no way ready for the BBC in 1981 let alone the public in 82 everett tangerine details are scarce on their offering but in an interview later that year in your computer magazine when the winner had been selected paul johnston the co-founder of tangerine said the following the BBC approached us and describes the kind of computer the series required we said to them that there was no way they were going to make 12,000 computers to sit on the shelves for january based on their predictions of the market that figure 12,000 being the initial run of machines the BBC needed manufacturing by the winning company based on this estimated demand for this all-new singing dance in BBC micro in the end then the Acorn prototype was selected as the winner and the BBC micro design was finalized and put into production clive sinclair who hadn't even made the final cut was extremely unhappy not to have got the contract not least because acorn co-founder Chris curry and worked as Sinclair for 13 years before leaving to set up a company of his own and that company would become ACORN and Sinclair was so prominent in bringing low-cost microwaves to our homes that um I imagine it would have been quite a high-profile embarrassment for the man not to have one Akon then had picked them all to the post and despite Paul's protestations at tangerine about the need for a whole 12,000 units the a comprar deuced BBC micro would go on to sell over 1.5 million units in its lifetime and capture a segment of the UK's education market that a tangerine could only dream of Levin is only the beginning of learning all about the BBC microcomputer and this great big thing called the computer literacy project at the center of which was the computer and school kids like me you had to use them in our primary school I say had to use them it wasn't a teacher at all I loved when you turn this on it makes her boo beep noise and as soon as I heard that I would rush to the back of the class where the computer was to be the first on it now you may be wondering why you haven't heard that yet why I haven't turned it on that's because there's some essential maintenance that must be done on every BBC micro in this day and age before you switch it on particularly in the PSU area if you don't do it there will be a big bang and that will be the end of that the monitor over here thankfully that's in good working order so in part to the soldiering iron will come out the lid will come off and we'll learn exactly what's inside this machine will do our maintenance and then we'll continue learning about that computer literacy project and I'd love to show you some of the programs that I remember from school not only the computer programs but also the supporting TV programs from the project very interesting when I remember involved racing pigeons and had a really catchy theme tune so no doubt the more I use it the more memories will come back to me and I'm looking forward to sharing them with you so I hope you join me then in part two and beyond because this will be I expect a three part series you never know we'll see what we unearth along the way and until then thank you for watching and take care if you enjoy my content and would like to toss a coin into the hat to support the cave then check out patreon.com/crashcourse you can see on the screen now thank you for your support [Music] [Music]

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 54,750

Rating: 4.953433 out of 5

Keywords: bbc micro, the computer literacy project, micro live, social history, british history, arm processor, british computers

Id: 4rgEzG7F5d8

Length: 26min 22sec (1582 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RetroManCave]

I hope you enjoy this one guys, this is a really important machine for our country and the history is fascinating

[u/Malor]

As an American, I'm kind of jealous of those machines. They had such amazing ROMs for a 6502 system. The US computers were utterly spartan in comparison, and quite a lot slower.

If it weren't for PAL and NTSC being different resolutions, and messing up the British software, I think those machines might have done very well over here.

I've had a lot of fun playing with them through emulation. If I'd grown up in Europe, I'd have definitely wanted one.

[u/SpaceFlightOrange]

Ooh! My all time favourite computer (I have 2, one from my childhood) I shall look forward to this once the little one is asleep. Thanks! 👍

[u/palordrolap]

I always wanted one, and at one point got my hands on a very sickly Acorn Electron, but we never had enough money to get a proper BBC.

(I did get a C64 eventually though.)

[u/invokes]

My first computer in 1981!

[u/tso]

Some serious production value in this video!

[u/tso]

On the one hand the modern memory managed hardware and related multitasking OS allows for so much capability, but on the other i can't help marvel at the hardware flexibility those directly mapped systems allowed (the tube port on the Micro being a perfect example).

That said, i guess one could argue that a GPU is a modern equivalent. And as more recent consumer CPUs have added virtualized IO, things can get "interesting".