My mum was a primary school teacher and used to bring the school beeb home at weekends and holidays. Basically I am who I am now and do what I do now thanks to that computer. Thanks to all those involved.

The story about the finger and the resistor pack...... What an amazing story. Putting a row of resistors there without understanding why but still having it work perfectly............ That is just WOW ! What happened was that you terminated the data lines with resistors and that swallows stray reflections on the line, which corrupt the signal. What you did was to terminate a transmission line.

Fantastic interview, the ‘engineer’s finger’ bit is brilliant!

By far the biggest inspiration for coders in the UK had to be the Sinclair series of computers, especially the ZX Spectrum. I know many programmers, (myself included), that started out with this machine.

The machine I used in my 2nd year of college here in Oz on the 1st year of their introduction (to our schools). Have a lot of nostalgia for this machine. One of my friends showed up a few days ago and gave me another one, but it has two working disk drives and the EPROM programmer option installed. Excellent interview series, please keep them coming.

In the early 80's I worked with a team developing code for 6502 microprocessors embedded in medical instruments. Our development system was the trusty BEEB with an attached EPROM programmer.

My first computer the BBC model B - still use a BBC emulator on my Mac today. Search for a BBC film called 'Micromen' starring Martin Freeman as Steve Fuber & Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair. Watching this video pretty much confirms the accuracy of the movie. Sir Clive was know for his mood swings and the film portrays this well. Nice to see the newbrain mentioned, at the time I lived down the road from Newbury and remember the first machine coming to our school, before of course we stocked out on the BBC Micro.

The best thing I bought was the 6502 powered Electron. I haven't been without a computer since!

"occasionally caught fire" LOFL

I love it when you fix something and you have no idea why what you did works but it does :) its an awesome feeling. Then you have the fun of working out what it is you did that fixes it .

I remember my mother bringing home the first BBC Micro, (she was a primary school teacher in the '80's) It came with it's CUB screen monitor, a big heavy CRT lump (that was expensive as well). As I had computer studies knowledge from my secondary education in the late '70's early '80 's, ie BASIC programming on the Commodore PET, she wanted me to show her how it worked and how to set it up. I remember getting mesmerised by the 'Build' program, much like 3D wireframe lego!

I love listening to these videos because I'm from the era when the BBC came to life,.... well just before. I loved the TV drama 'Micro Men' it takes me right back to the dawn of the micro. And to quote Max Boyce....." I was there".

My uncle wrote from scratch a program for the BBC micro. I used it recently on a BBC Micro emulator. It's really an amazing program.. but it's the only one he ever wrote.

10 print "Thank you for uploading, computerphile!!!" 20 goto 10 > run

10:45 More like finger-on-the-board engineering, amirite?

Great video , brings back plenty of memories

There was a marvellous music add-on to the BBC B, which included Ample, a music programming language, which could effectively synchronise words on the screen with the music, and which used a complex system of harmonic manipulation to achieve a variety of tone colours. If that music system was still around, I would be using it today.

Fascinating. My favourite 8bit micro too. Thanks.

Great upload, very interesting. Thanks

Great video. Very interesting! We’ve got 3 Beebs in our shed and we love them!

amazing insight to beeb design and construction.

Steve is the UK's Waz. What a legend! More please!

They had these machines in my primary school growing up, they were my first gaming experience.

During the early 1990's, our mixed ability Year 7 and Tear 8 Maths lessons using The BBC computer were very popular with the pupils. They each worked at their own pace on Worksheets from the I.L.E.A.'S S.M.I.LE. package. Both the the computer and the worksheets were real successes.

That was AWESOME! I love these kind of interviews. And it's funny because I've been working on a way to replace DRAM with SRAM and multiplexers and to hear him discuss this issue was exciting. :-)

I started watching this video with mild interest but when the "finger thing" came out I had to pause vid and say out loud "this is great!". The who knows why resistances in full production machines. Loved it. Also, 4 MHz RAM? wow, didnt knew that.

Just got my Zx Spectrum out, my 8 year old loves playing The Hobbit and Jetpac. Got the BBC B fired up next, Elite here we come! Now I'm happy, she wants to learn programming and how to write games etc, just like I did.

I had one of the linear power supplies. The heat created a permanent bulge in the top of the case. I swapped it for a switcher as soon as they came out.

That last bit about the fingers is amazing haha

Awesome channel and videos!

Absolutely fascinating.... 👍

Great story. Thanks!

This is a superb interview, indeed superb overview of the BBC Micro, although I'm none the wiser on physically how circuit boards and chips and a bit of electricity actually facilitate an interactive and operable computer system.

From the portrayal in the movie "Micro men" plus the observation of Professor Furber that Roger Wilson found a bug in his memory and it wasn't the last one he found, I get the feeling Roger was kind of a human computer himself.

In 50 years time somebody'll discover why 'that finger' works & it'll probably change the world! :D

More of this please!! Fascinating trip down memory lane. I remember wrestling with a Research machines 380z and a recalcitrant cassette-corder, soldering together Nascom1 kits for computer club - even typing hex codes into a National Semiconductor SC/MP. It was more than jumpers for goal posts when I was at school!!

Just noticed the 16mbit slip, the chips were 16kbit! 16 needed for the 32K Byte!

This is what you call primary research. Thanks!

I'm not surprised that the BBC wanted a linear power supply. Getting a SMPS quiet is no mean feat, especially down into the longwave range and with the design methods of the time, and back in the '80s the AM bands obviously were very important still - shortwave was the closest thing to the internet that the general public had. Maybe they even kept ham radio use in mind. These days you can be happy if your fancy new LED lights don't keep wiping out the entire FM band nearby (along with DAB). I bet a lot of them are far from CE compliant regardless of what the label says. The only thing potentially even worse than SMPS is plasma screens, pure evil. Eventually Panasonic switched to shielded panels in about 2009, which reduced emissions dramatically, but LCDs took over the market soon after. I didn't know Astec were around in those days already. I used to have an early 2000 (Klamath) Pentium III system with an Astec 110 watter - these were good supplies and could take quite a beating. I would later use it to run an Asus P2B-D with two undervolted and underclocked 667 MHz Coppermine PIIIs with passive cooling, a Radeon 9000 and two harddrives. Eventually the system would develop stability issues though, I guess the electrolytics weren't so happy any more. Had to squeeze in a much bigger Fortron at this point.

"Well, if Roger thinks we can..." I think this is going to be a new saying of mine.

The resistor network pulling up the data bus woks because it charges the stray capacitance making it easier for the processor to set the bits. I would guess resetting the bits is much more simple for the 6502 because the N channels it was using to do that have a lot smaller ON resistance than the P ones on top...

Wonderful story.

Fantastic video!!! =D

Solid gold

Wow, great insight into a lost part of computer history.

"No idea why, but it's still working" .... sounds like not a lot has changed in the world of IT 🤣💖

Could you please turn on auto captions for this or upload some subtitles? Many thanks!

A revolutionary device that helped set humanity on its technological journey.

"... and occasionally caught fire..." Good ol' 8 bit days, they'll never be back! ...wait, why is my smartphone so hot?

Great info. That was very strange for the reason they wanted a linear PSU.

Today, multi channel bus logic analysers and hi speed storage oscilloscopes could easily find the gremlins in bus timing and impedance issues. Even the PCB layout software takes this into account. Although the 1970-80 HP bus logic analysis stuff was pretty good but boy, you needed really deep pockets.

feels nice to sit on a 4ghz video rendering beast

Acorn BBC... Did a looooot of programming on it. Was pretty sophisticated for its time, I remember.

Bletchley park in Milton Keynes have a room full of them, interesting place.

I am shocked... Minute 9:30 and on.. "If you put your fingers one the board (certain place) it would start to work. No idea how it worked, it just did". I am pretty sure that this miracle and many many more just like this, brought us into the information age. ( The gift of human touch.) Makes one wonder... Just exactly who did the designing...

I still need somebody to explain to me why the IBM PC was such a crock of sh** at this time, compared with the Beeb. My employers waltzed into my lab one day, in late '83, I think, took my model B, and left me with a twice as expensive brand new 640k IBM PC, thinking they were doing me a favour. I'd just written a mockup of a signal processing algorithm in lovely BBC Basic, and so I had to translate it into GW Basic. In spite of the much faster clock speed, and twice the data width, the GW version on the IBM was almost 3 times slower, it turned out, as I showed when I got my beeb back.

@Uterr It's an optional chip.

I remember them from primary school, 1984 roughly?

I would love a video on the Commodore64. I've got one sitting in the backseat of my car awaiting repairs and replacement parts, haha

Sounds like I came in at about the right time with my Issue 4. If I were to buy and run a Beeb now would the transmissions interfere with other devices?

I learned something about keeping my beebs runnin' and no it wasn't about the psu. Thankyou!

Why BBC micro needed what speech generation chip? if target was to make a accessible computer, why adding expensive part to it?

Maybe you need to do a series on MSX as well...

@smalltime0 time to give Daikin a call?

lol 35C? Australian desert? Try my room in one of the major cities at any time for 4 months of the year.

Everything goes over my head, I am not specialist. can someone explain what is this all about. Thanks!

I always thought the BBC Micro was a *real* machine... now I know it was!

I wonder if anyone's ever tried to figure out why the quirks mentioned at the end of the video worked as they did...

At 8:00 he said "16 Megabit"... Haha good to see that not only me gets these little details wrong. Of course it must be Kilobit.

Om the acorn atom what is 'Ø' doing there?

Don't know if you folks were told, but that's not CP/M you displayed. Other than that, thanks for the video - was always curious about the BBC Micro.

The final proof that finger-in-the-air engineering can get you very far.

Really wish I lived in that time to be able to more easily build architectures. But oh well, programming will suffice for now :)

I have a Spectrum that only boots up if I open it up and put my hand inside.

wow... it was like alchemy back in the days :)

It's kind of ironic when the BBC went with Acorn's 6502 based machine while insisting on CP/M compatibility when Sinclair had a Z80 based machine and Amstrad's CPC was just a colourised PCW, the PCW being a Z80 machine that actually ran on CP/M (that I'd love to see Lazy Game Reviews review, but as it's an all-in-one that includes a CRT monitor, getting one of those over to America is going to be costly so it might never happen, sadly)

As a teen I discovered my mum had given away our BBC Micro since me and my sister hadn't used it in years. Honestly I'd have sooner let her away my stuffed animal.

the BBC micro is kind of a distant ancestor of the Pi because of ARM architecture?

video on when computers started structurally resembling what we have today?

The Engineer's Finger. LOL.

The BBC had a much better keyboard than a modern machine .

Couldn't put his finger on why it wouldn't work, but his finger did.

Damn, that dude aged!

chuckie egg

BBC micro? Is that not a contradiction?

0x0001

Wholly cockroach!

Zzzzz... Zzzzz... Zzzzz...