What a wonderful interview. These people are all superstars. Thank you all. You changed my life. Many, many others’ too. You will never know how much I loved my BBC B and Cumana disk drive and how much I learned from it. It was like magic. Still is. ❤
Great stuff! I knew most of it already before Micro Men. My first computer was an imported Acorn Atom, the BBC well it or its rumors didn't seem to spread outside the UK border. Later I bought an imported A3000, and a RISC PC. I loved programming early ARM CPUs in Assembler, it was such a logical design compared to the wish-list CISC CPUs. I still bring both of them out from time to time.
I did a short stint, working for hp in 86/87 and the only place you couldn't smoke was in the operation room where the hp3000's were sited. Working in a technical role, I had access to every room in the very large building.
I thought it was the Archimedes that was supposedly ‘made from riot shield material’? Or the Master? (I know I had to buy a ‘bridge’ to support my monitor for my Series 4 model B.)
I wonder what the BBC MODEL B would have been like if it had a TMS99105A for it's CPU with an on chip FPU and 128KB of RAM would most likely made for a much more able BBC MODEL B.
I worked for a company which used a lot of Model Bs and found them to be super reliable, they were running 24x7 and the only issues we ever had was with the switch mode power supplies, the same capacitor would fail in all of them after a while, but pop a new one in and it was as good as new. I'd already gone with the Apple ][ which predated the Model B by a couple of years, absolutely loved it and I still have it today, but I'd have gone with the Model B if I'd waited, it was a great machine for it's time.
How come no contribution from the BBC itself? I would have been happy to join in, and I could have shed light on some of the BBC-related issues discussed such as the linear PSU, the PAL encoder and the BBC BASIC language specification (I am mentioned a few times in the video!).
Hi Richard. We did have a video of a talk presented by David Allen for the recent anniversary. We would be greatly interested in speaking to you to get your perspective on the BBC Micro. I will drop you an email (Dave - video production for TNMOC). Best wishes.
Thank you TNMOC and Gavin, I was delighted to be able to attend this event last year. It has peeked my interest in the BBC Micro again. I've got my boyhood machine out of the attic and have had it restored by a friend. I will be back in the UK for Easter and have planned to make a visit to the TNMOC whilst I am there.
ARM is one of the most extremely profitable and dominant companies in the industry. Manufacturing effectively ended up having to compete with countries where the workers don't get paid well and need to work 60 hours a week.
