My first computer in 1983 was a BBC B. it got upgraded to twin floppies with an external powersupply, a 128k sideways board and PASCAL ROMs. Oh, and a printer. When I changed to an Olivetti M24 the BBC went on loan to another student, just for PASCAL programming. I got it back eventually and kept it in storage until 10 years ago. Then I had to get rid of it because I had no place left for it. As I could not find anybody interested here in the Netherlands, it got binned. Seeing your shows, I should have kept it.....
I remember we had one of these on a trolley that they used to wheel around the junior school so different class rooms had access to it. I don't remember anything about it but the memory of it being wheeled about was burnt into my 8 year old mind for life. Then it was blooming wall to wall Rm Nimbus at senior school
When I was at school, and it was mostly all BBC Model B's, I used to enjoy my time in the computer room and do remember it fondly, but I didn't have all that much respect for the machine - it was so expensive, only had 32K, the screen memory organisation seemed difficult to work with, it had no hardware sprites, I couldn't redefine the characters in text mode 7, the bright colours melted my eyeballs, consequently many games were seeming a bit 'rubbish' to me (although I did play Thrust a lot!). HOWEVER... Today, I absolutely get what the designers went for, my focus is less narrow, and these machines now command my total respect. Now, sorry for the long comment, but I also remember an older pupil who had hooked up an Atari 800XL to his BBC, I remember a ribbon cable and I'm pretty sure he had an edge connector jammed into the cartridge port. I believe he was accessing the floppy on the BBC from the Atari and I suspect that he was using the tube interface to do this. Having a cartridge inserted would clear an address window in the Atari memory map for the tube FIFOs, and they are both 6502 machines, so it all seems viable. I'd love to have known/know more about this, it would be fascinating to hear more from the student, but I can't even remember his first name after ~35 years.
Thanks for sharing - that is absolutely fascinating about hooking the Atari up to the Beeb! And you're right about how age can make you look at things with a new respect - I absolutely adore these machines :)
Blimey, this takes me back. I was one of those fortune souls (or jammy gits, take your pick) who managed to browbeat his father into buying a Torch Z80 Disk Pack. Cost £800-odd, IIRC. It comprised a Z80 co-processor on a PCB that I had to shoehorn into the Beeb, so it could run CP/M and the included huge office suite applications - the instruction manuals weighed a ton. However, the headline figure for this particular 14yr-old’s fevered brain was the main chassis, which housed two (count ‘em, TWO) 400k floppy disk drives. To be fair, each drive was 2x200k if memory serves, 200k per side cos, oh yeah, each drive had two heads. Have a guess how much time I spent poking about in CP/M and the office suite before consigning the whole shebang onto a dusty shelf. There I was, age 14, with not just one pisspot BBC 100K floppy drive, but two Torch drives! The amount of ‘work’ I was going to be able to do with them! The amount of game floppies I ‘backed up’ for and from friends! On balance, of a lot of expenditure just to play Elite and Aviator, but for a just a short while I was Cock o’ the North in my school’s computer club :) Here’s a linky to the brochure... chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Torch/Torch_Z80DiscPack.pdf Great job you’re doing on your Frankenbeeb by the way, love your channel!
Right on commander! I'd not heard of the Tube thing before. I see the whole Pi thing as an extension of those pioneering days in the 80s. I've got 3 now, very addictive for tinkering.
The fact the BBC had/has such a wealth of connectivity was its most underrated aspect. Nothing else was like it. I loved my model B so much and it allowed me to learn not only coding but also hardware control of external electronics. What else had built in d/a and a/d like it did at the time? From traffic lights to turtles and sound to light convertors and everything in between. Such a wonderful machine. Great video. Thank you for the journey down memory lane.
@@TheRetroShack I have a raspberry Pi 400 atm as 2nd 'desktop' computer. It is the closest thing you can buy today that has the same spirit of the BBC. If they were not so expensive I would be quite tempted to get a bbc case and throw it in. If you can get your hands on a RML 380/480 you should definately try. They were another really interesting thing at the time. I am guessing they are rare as hens teeth though. I had the Music 500 system on mine which was a very cool set of addons. So many regrets..........Should have kept hold of it. Ah well. Thanks again. Keep em coming.
@@ferociousmullet9287 A certain Eben Upton wanted to replicate the Beeb's educational versatility and spirit of adventure. Hence the Model A & B nomenclature in the Pi series. What he didn't replicate was the horrific price tag of the BBC micro! 😁
There also exists slightly smaller PiTube boards that fit on the underside, with a pi zero, directly into the tube connection. At the same size there are also boards that emulate, with a pi zero, the original SCSI harddisk. Some of the more advanced co-pros could use a real hard drive. It makes the x86 co-pro, for example, much more useful.
@@OzRetrocomp It's saying something that their "finger-in-the-air engineering" resulted in something that was so elegantly designed. But when you look at the credentials of lots of the folk who worked in Acorn engineering (Cambridge graduates, sometimes working on their second degree) and you get a sense that this is what really smart people can do, even if they're making it up as they go along.
"No, not the subway..." Says you; I have to leave in two hours. And the subways here get... weird. But seriously; very interesting video. Retrocomputing is bestcomputing.
Brilliant - there's something very satisfying about a BBC/Acorn machine with a modern ARM processor attached - the difference in price (£299 in 1982 is worth about £1,128 and the Pi0 is about a fiver!!). Other interesting ideas - could you use a Pi02W instead? Is there a way to make use of the WiFi somehow? Endless possibilities, would love more vids on this topic 👍
You can use any Raspberry Pi, from the Zero to the 4B, except the Pico. You can't use the WiFi or Ethernet but, with the latest version of firmware, you can use the HDMI output to attach a second monitor, which has interesting possibilities.
Don't get me wrong... I like a nice Beeb (and yours certainly is very nice) but there's still that shiver down my spine at the sight of a 380Z. My last year of school was truly halcyon days with TWO 380Zs in Computer Studies and a Beeb over in the physics lab.
Hey if you're looking to connect your beeb to a hdmi screen it or set it up for direct capture, you could look into the rgb to hdmi project, it uses a pi zero aswell and works pretty spot on.
@@TheRetroShack I've been the same there's been so many different retro projects geared around the raspberry pi I can barely keep up. I'm looking into an Amiga cpu accelerator that uses a pi at the moment (pistorm) and that looks great but if I order anymore pi's I think my family will end up arranging an intervention lol
So, I noticed a 286 emulator in the co-pros, so clearly it would be cool to see the BBC running DOS or even windows 3.1 (not sure you can get a mouse working though...)
@@TheRetroShack Absolutely...you clearly have more patience than me so once you've beaten the path, the rest of us can ride your wake :-) You're right though - the BBC was so incredibly flexible and so well thought out. As far as I know, the only official accessory for the ashtray was the Kenneth Kendall speech ROM though some people did fit a ZIF socket into the hole for ROMs. You say you use the BBC for your writing - how do you get the text back into 2021- save to USB on the Gotec and then move that back onto a PC ? Also, what is the difference between the GoTec and the SDcard interface? Is it that the gotec contains many disc images but the SD card is just one?
I've got a BBC in my parents' loft. Always fancied getting it out and restoring it. I probably won't ever get round to this, but I always had a vague idea for a project to build internet connectivity for one, e.g. a Twitter client. If I was trying to do TCP/IP and JSON parsing on the machine itself, I'm sure I'd need a Tube just to get enough system resources to get it done! (I wouldn't want to do this project by writing a script to run on a Pi that feeds data to the beeb in a simplified format. That seems a cop out to me. I'd want to be able to hook the BBC up to ethernet, and have all the software side of things written in native 6502 code.)
Don't leave it abandoned in the loft! I volunteer to look after it for you, tend to it's every need, and make sure it feels loved... all at no cost to you. I know, I'm just too generous! 😉 😁
@@TheRetroShack after lockdown I'll have a trawl through what's up there. Is a Performa 6200 too new for you? Acorn has a monitor but no mouse IIRC. I also have a pimped out PowerBook 540 with network card and PowerPC upgrade, that I used to give a conference talk a few years back. Not sure whether I want to part with it, but I guess I haven't used it since the talk…
@@TheRetroShack Yes it did and you booted up the system with a *Z80 command. There was a CP/M compatible OS on rom in the unit called OSM. I can't believe that was 35 years ago, lol, had to dig up old Acorn User articles online to remind myself :D
The x86 coprocessor can't run MS-DOS but runs DOS Plus from Digital Research. It aims to be compatible with MS-DOS 2 and it runs its own version of GEM and not MS Windows. The graphics aims to be compatible with CGA.
And it had not 256k but 512k, but that includes the screen memory and with some overhead from DOS Plus it is equivalent to a PC with about 420kb of RAM. There were third party memory expansions to "1024k", for another £99.00, that gave you more memory that the PCs 640k. The BBC Micro CoProcessor x86 emulation includes the memory expansion.
If this is the Torch Graduate (256k + twin floppy) then I think it did indeed run MS-DOS (a PCW review commented how it wasn't running PC-DOS). From memory it's the Acorn 512k 80186 coprocessor that ran DR-DOS and GEM.
Wasn't the base design of the BBC actually a front end for testing other processors and then it was grown and used for the BBC contract? I think. If memory serves........
@@TheRetroShack I am sure it is one of these videos where chaps involved with Acorn and BBC were interviewed. ru-vid.comsearch?query=BBC%20interview%20micro%20acorn
Not from this one. I didn't really gain a decent appreciation of the beeb machines until I was in high school but the school computer club only had beebs and there was always a rush to get on one of the master series machines. Physics classes invariably ended up using a beeb as well as the school had purchased various pieces of kit for experiments and I don't think they could afford to replace them even by that time. The only other machines the school had at the time were some Archimedes 300 series used in the tech dept, mostly for CAD, and some Mac Classics exclusively used by the business/secretarial courses. While my beat up old speccy was always better for games I did become envious of one of my cousins who had a BBC model B at home.
1:06 - that's so cool, i always say collecting stuff just to put it on a shelf is pointless, and regularly use my old classic macs PCs and UNIX machines to play games and do basic tasks that don't need modern levels of performance. a dusty machine is a sad machine..
Putting the Pi on top of the RAM might not be a great idea when it gets to summer. The model B is notorious for overheating RAM which manifests as graphics corruption and random program crashes.
Thanks Chris - I was wondering about heat build up in these Beebs as they do seem to get a little warm - I'm thinking of getting a nice cooling solution together... Hmmm... Thinking cap on :)
It's typically only a problem on a hot day or is you've got poor ventilation and/or a lot of mods. Some BITD ROM cards were bad because they sat over the RAM trapping in the heat.
Wasn't that solved by Issue 7? IIRC this was a significant problem in Australia, where the BBC Micro was *very* popular in schools located in Australia's hottest states (South Australia and Western Australia) and very few schools were air-conditioned in the early '80s. It also didn't help that the all but the very last Video ULAs needed a whopping great heatsink because they ran so hot...
