I wish I was born in that time period. Everything from arcades to ZX spectrums.

+Ollie Taylor I was an electronics hobbyist and built a Nascom 2 computer which I expanded to a massive 32k. My sons learned to program it using an op code book and a scientific calculator to get the hex codes and wrote a few simple games. Eventually it had Basic. Then the BBC computer was announced and we ordered one. Soon they were programming it in assembly language and selling simple games through Micropower of Leeds. When the AMX mouse came out we were at the PCWorld Show in Earls Court, met AMX and David undertook to write the ROM for the mouse in one week and a week later we demonstrated the mouse running AMX art to them. The rest is history.

Douglas Elliot and my son who sexually identifies as an US attack helicopter made manic mansion

What on earth is all that about?

That is awesome!

“As you go to say no, you say yes.”

True!

circuit boards so tough your power supply dies first

I believe this 100%. I own a commodore PET which lives in the garage and had stopped working. When i opened it up, sure enough a mouse was living inside. The board was covered in bird seeds that it stole from the shelf. Poor thing jumped out at me and ran for the door never to be seen again.

In the early 2000s, I dropped my childhood Model B down not one, but two, flights of stairs. Thing still works perfectly, even though it looks like it's been through a nuclear holocaust. It's the Nokia 3310 of the Microcomputer world.

he probably peed out of fear. I remember having two rats in school (English) and they were scared shitless. Poor things.

I guess the mouse had a hard time with the heat

pmailkeey If it connects to the internet or has a touchscreen, it's probably ARM.

That's pretty tautological! :P ARM stands for Acorn RISC Microprocessor!

Advanced RISC Machines RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computer

Originally it stood for Reduced Instruction Set Complexity.

@Zak Jansen Not a flaw, a delight! :-)

o hai Mark

Cooooool your awsome

Argonisgema Hello Tommy

Me tioo

lol

Grizzly Adams

@@OneVerySadPanda I was thinking more Daniel Bryan myself.

12:25 era appropriately hair AND chair 😂

Yes we had that... also big trak... it was all to do with learning how to programme coordinates and stuff I think...

A very good choice for showing off the SN sound chip... same item as found in the Sega SG-1000 and Master System (and Megadrive) and close relation of the legendary AY8910/YM2149, on which there were several excellent cover versions of the tune.

Do you want to keep playing? No. *creepy letters* Yes you do...muahahahahaha..... *screen goes black for a few seconds, then loads a horrifyingly creepy dungeon* *commands do not work for an entire few seconds...and then the computer crashes* *Restarts computer, every time it's restarted a increasingly disturbing image is shown on the screen until the 7th time, in which the computer screams loudly as hell as you and then wipes it's own BIOS* Wow...dat creepypasta content tho XD

***** What BIOS :) BBC BASIC is in a mask R...ohh never mind :)

"FRAK"

@@MrNamegame Even though it was an educational game for kids, that game was pretty nightmare inducing anyway. It had one of the first game jumpscares ever as a game over screen

hallmark of the best Dungeon Masters

Kind of your typical CoD "Do you want to walk thru this corridor?" "No" "Yes you do!"

I actually remember playing that game in school on an Acorn Archimedes. We spent most of the time simply trying to find an action in the game that wasn't forced upon you.

Me too!!!!

The Average Retro Gamers We used these in infant/junior/and high school through the early to very late 90s. They weren't my first computer though.

.... 10 CLS 20 A = A + 1 30 PRINT A 40 IF A = 999 THEN 60 : ELSE 10 50 REM 60 CLS 70 PRINT "You've reached 1000!" 80 INPUT "Go again?" ; A$ 90 IF A$ = "Yes" or "Y" THEN 10 ELSE END 100 REM Ahhh I used to love BASIC on the BBCb at school, I have always wanted my own machine but never found one. Best of luck buddy :)

@@DailyCorvid Thanks mate. I like that little program! On my channel there is a compilation of some BASIC programmes that I have written, have a gander if you want. All the best.

@@CelticSaint That was the first thing I ever wrote in BASIC, on the BBC b at school. The teachers couldn't figure out what to do with the things lol but I was a nerdy kid I already had a computer (vic-20). What sort of stuff do you write? Games I always found too difficult but there are some really great ones by other people. Just finished building a Raspberry Pi4 so I can emulate Amiga500 etc it's gonna be amazing. Has 8GB RAM but the board is the size of a large matchbox!

@@DailyCorvid I have written a few games, but I quite like 'simulators' and making random patterns. It's hard to describe really! You'll have to see for yourself. Your build sounds great I wish I had the technical ability to do that!!

@@CelticSaint Highly recommend Pi4 8GB it's like £80, then I spent £60 on a plastic case and a fan, plus a keyboard/mouse and a few SD cards. So £150 basically gets you a full kit computer, that requires use of only the included screw driver to build :D Technical ability? Well that's why I bought it, so I can learn some lol! Honestly mate you'd be more advanced than I am, you'd be able to do something useful with it right now! I am learning how to connect all my IP cameras to the Pi and control them without the need for a PC / phone combo. So far crashed it 3 times lol but it's my own fault trying to run all kinds of stuff on there. Great fun, definitely would recommend either Pi4 8GB or if you want it all built ready to go - get the Pi400 4GB (all in one unit, built into a tiny keyboard). If you can code a wee bit then it's already a very useful SBC to own, with zero code wisdom I have so far managed an emulation console (Atari2600 all the way up to PS1, including Amiga500 and C64). Simulators huh? Well the only game I really play with my ridiculous graphics card is...... wait for it ....... No Mans Sky from 2016 :D Great game, it's like classic Elite but in 3D with tonnes of other stuff to do. If you've not played it now's a great time, it's my second favourite game of all time. First love in gaming is Gran Turismo 4 (PS2)! Classic.

Oh, man, DMPs are sooo noisy! I have one I use occasionally, it's awful.

even i played on this at school, and a horrible accorn computer, thank god for the sega and nintendo days.

When I was in elementary school, we had a C64, where we would often play games like Hangman or Battleship. The only few times we had computer class at my old high school in Germany, before moving to Costa Rica, we were working with old Mac Classics running the At Ease environment. The only year I had computer class in my new school in Costa Rica, the computers ran either Windows NT 3.51 or Windows NT 4.0 (so for the time period, they were boring systems).

That Headband Guy Lol, yeah. They were everywhere, as was Granny's Garden!!

An entire generation of British kids know Granny's Garden.

except Clint here doesn't eat toe fungus, I hope.

Still here. Only discovered it some months ago.

J.K. Benedict Thanks, glad you're enjoying! And you may want to check here, they're always selling them off: 68kmla.org/forums/

wow - thanks, LGR!

I actually owned an LC III growing up. For a budget computer, it was a pretty dependable little thing. Sadly, I lost it with all my other vintage computers in a house fire. :/

keep looking ... like many games that promise limitless freedom. They actually just offer the illusion of choice. Just like life does...

I think that game is essentially just a tree database where a lot of the branches ultimately lead back to the same place. Could swear I used a program at some point in my schooldays where you could produce a remarkably similar, though non-graphical game (or just very basic 20-questions style information retrieval system) just by typing a bunch of questions along with answer choices that then led to certain other questions, and some answers could lead to the same place as an answer to a different question...

We had to start somewhere, Eldorado Gold was the first tet program they wrote :)

Hell, yeah, my school had all the kit on loan once and I got to play with it. It felt like we were seriously looking at the future.

+Steven Whiting You were lucky, our school only had one machine.

+Steven Whiting Now I'm thinking how spoiled schools where here in the states when Apple was their go-to.

+Steven Whiting In our school it was one class to one BBC... on the other hand, we learned to write "must have been" instead of "must of been", so I guess it was a good school?

+Steven Whiting Here in the states, my school had a single room with about 35 Apple IIe's. Each class got an hour or so a week in there.

The Garden of Eatin This would've been standard at the schools I've been to.

Wasn't there something called betsy too, it was a long time ago I left school lol

Shoulda tried to get one when they finally got rid of them...unless they kept them for the hell of it or for a computer history class.

JamieBarnes11 You still find them in use in factories to this day.

Nevets If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Certain subjects (mainly science) in my school were still using them in 2000 as the school had invested in accessories they couldn't use on windows

Justin L Well, at least it's a bit more straightforward for that person to print timetables. They would have a hard time using it with any modern printers without custom adapters and software, but you'd be making use of something that isn't broken and doesn't need to be fixed.

Did you ever play the magic telephone? Both are quite odd games

Also, getting a movie and then having my dvd player just not play it is a pain in the ass

128MB would have been unthinkably huge in the early 80s. The PC XT shipped with a 10 or 20MB HDD in 1984

SPARTA

Taxi Cabbie Same!!

I had a Mark from the UK once... Took a few weeks and a special cream to get it off...

Depends... where do you live?

Schools and colleges could negotiate discounts (buying in bulk), but to individuals, the BBC model B cost £400 ( initially it had been £350). In 2017 money, about 1600 USD. A lot of cash for a 32K machine. The price didn't fall until the machine was quite dated... and then only to £300. The lack of RAM could be handled if you had a disc drive ( as is evident in the disc based game Elite). A floppy disc drive was another £300 - £400 though it made for a much more useful system, something that could be employed to do serious tasks. In the UK at least, in the early 1980s, it was more commonplace for people to rely on cassette tape storage (we were just playing games). People with BBC micros tended to have more money and usually could afford the 5.25" disc drive too. I think the best feature of the BBC model B, was the 16K ROM BASIC. It had some nice commands for controlling flow and making code modular / procedural. It was also a very fast BASIC (for the time), and even included an in-line 6502 assembler, so you could easily mix BASIC and 6502 code. I had a ZX Spectrum, which had loads of fun machine code games, but came with a slow BASIC. I did learn to code in Z80 assembly language on the Spectrum... but it involved looking up the op codes in a book, calculating 16 bit addresses, calculating, and recalculating jump offsets, converting to decimal from hexadecimal... storing the code in DATA statements, and using POKE to load it into RAM. The Beeb's ROM based in-line assembler, was luxurious in comparison.

Yeah, but bear in mind we had something approaching hyperinflation through the late 80s (something that anyone who had a mortgage then will bend your ear about at length if you get them started), on top of the global memory shortage. The price of most other computers stagnated for several years in the UK at the same time - the Spectrum didn't end up selling for £25 or the like, after all. By the time the BBC's price was reduced to £300, they were shipping with 128k onboard instead and £400 was worth quite a lot less in real terms than it had been when the Model B launched. Besides, look at how much it would have cost you to buy an IBM machine instead, it'll make your eyes water. And a close rival to the Beeb in the external expandability stakes may have been the ~£1000 (at launch) Atari ST, but as much love as I have for that machine, I have a feeling the BBC _still_ beat it at that game (hell, the ST's DMA port is essentially the BBC's 1Mhz _or_ maybe Tube port), never mind the easier internal upgrades, despite the gulf in their stock internal specs. If you were buying a computer for scientific / data capture / multiprocessing purposes it may actually have been a better option than any even vaguely comparable rival either 8 or 16 bit... the Apple II and IBM PC were more expandable and reconfigurable choices and a halfway house to a full-on rackmount backplane micro or minicomputer, but not really significantly faster in the CPU stakes, and far more expensive.

Beee-bip!

UK and USA are weird both of 'em.

australian 3 prong is stronger

fupp uh, the plugs in the US have 3 prongs as well. I think your inferiority complex is showing.

US plugs also suck because they don't have shutters or sleeved live/neutral prongs to stop you sticking your fingers onto the live prongs. I've been shocked by a US plug more than once.

The Tyttuutface were you drunk or just not paying attention to what your were doing?

Karl Slicher The RM Nimbus was a pain. I got hold of one a few years back (actually, about 12 years ago now!) and it has a semi-locked OS. It's a version of Windows but it's not entirely IBM-compatible. Never did get it working.

Duncan Taylor I don't have any further information for you on the OS I'm sorry, other than I remember it certainly was some form of Windows. The Nimbus network from my high school 20 years ago didn't like it when we tried to play Golf with a stolen admin login and would regularly have you sat for half a lesson waiting for some kind of system fault to resolve itself.

Karl Slicher Earlier ones had an IBM incompatible version of DOS

+Karl Slicher So you've basically been burning money. You could have made about 5 million pounds if you sold all of those BBC computers. The BBC monitors alone are worth a lot.

If you can tell us where those 100k+ not-yet-scrapped BBCs are lurking, I'm sure there's a lot of us who'll happily take at least a few of them off your hands. Particularly I'd like to salvage one to go in place of the model I attempted to salvage from a previous educational employer, but when I drove in by car the day after putting a post it note on it saying "don't throw out" and that I was going to take it myself (normally I didn't have enough carrying capacity for a big old Beeb and 5.25" disc drive, never mind the Cub monitor as well) I found a rubbish truck driving away and the note lying on the same desk but the computer and other parts missing... Seems like a fair exchange, like, I get the one that they blithely scrapped, you have to scrap one fewer. As for the Nimbus, part of the problem is likely the 80186 processor they used, and the custom version of PC-DOS written to take advantage of it (for better performance, and more particularly the virtualisation functions that allowed the OS you saw on-screen to be tightly locked down inside of a hypervisor preventing the usual MSDOS machine get-outs). I believe that regular MSDOS can still be ran on it to at least some limited extent, maybe just needing a few patches for that and certain programs (a bit like trying to run raw 68000 code on a 68010), but I don't know if Windows will work. It depends how much of its 286 code is also 186 compatible... anything which uses exclusively 286-or-later code will fail and you'll be limited to running 8086/8088 versions instead, because the IBM platform proper skipped straight over the 186 (and proper 8086)... RM used the interstitial processor to get full 16-bit processing and those additional protected modes on the cheap, building something with quasi-AT performance (and at least PCjr if not full Tandy graphics and sound) for less than XT money. They seemed like OK machines for the time, my primary school had one, it was definitely a cut above the Beeb other than maybe having lower vertical rez (something we didn't really notice), seeming very modern with hi-rez and also very colourful graphics, relatively dinky 3.5" floppies and an included mouse ... all taken great advantage of by an early version of PC Paintpot (which gradually morphed into MS Paint over the next ten years, with a gradual loss of the more child-wowing features as it became more serious and Windows-y) and various educational games... The restrictive platform not really being an issue in its original context, as it was an Intel-based PC for far less than IBM money, and had OK compatibility with PC programs but ran a bit faster... and pretty much everyone else had a similar sort of thing going on after all. How many different third-party systems had their own version of Workbench, MacOS or GEM/TOS?

Nah, he looks better now

They probably did, and saw that UK spec BBC Micro would not pass the FCC regulations. The US version had extra screening on the inside of the lid.