At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form
- Reference: 1705575611
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/01/18/bbc_micro_bot/
- Source link:
The [1]BBC Micro Bot is an excellent service for anyone who remembers the beige box delights of the 1980s Acorn computer. We spotted it a few years ago on Twitter (now called X) before it moved to alternative social media platforms, including Mastodon. Pop some BASIC into a toot, include the hashtag #bbcmicrobot, and the bot will run your program.
The resulting output will then turn up in the [2]bot's gallery and likely appear as a post containing a photo or video of the output. It's rather addictive, although it's also hard not to be awestruck at what some clever folk can achieve in a few lines of – admittedly quite hard to read – BASIC.
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BBC BASIC appeared in 1981 and was written mainly by Sophie Wilson. With its origins in Atom BASIC for the Acorn Atom, the language was a pillar of the UK computer literacy project pushed by the BBC. For its time, it was a speedy thing and featured some neat extensions to permit the definition of procedures and functions. It also gave access to the computer's high and low-resolution displays, which is where the BBC Micro Bot comes in.
At its heart, the BBC Micro Bot is an emulator of the Acorn hardware. Credit is given to JSBeeb and beebjit, but the implementation of the emulator as a social media account means one's BASIC creations stand a chance of being shared outside the Acorn community.
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The scene dates back to 2021 and the bot's Twitter days, and it remains an impressive demonstration of what can be achieved with just a few bytes of code.
[7]Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi
[8]Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come
[9]Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT
[10]Original Acorn Arthur project lead explains RISC OS genesis
We took the code and ran it up in an emulator – JSBeeb – which handily demonstrated two things. First, the code does indeed work. Second, this particular example takes an age to run. Think more frames per day rather than frames per second.
Still, it is Retro Week here at The Register , and if you're of a certain age, were brought up in the UK, and remember trying to get in a sneaky game of Elite while the teacher wasn't looking, checking out the BBC Micro Bot before tumbling into a JSBeeb and Owlet BBC BASIC click-hole is a delightful way to spend a lunch break. 10 PRINT "Those were the days ";
20 GOTO 10
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Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://mastodon.me.uk/@bbcmicrobot
[2] https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZalZQEQwggdJBRC2hUDoiQAAAFY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZalZQEQwggdJBRC2hUDoiQAAAFY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZalZQEQwggdJBRC2hUDoiQAAAFY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZalZQEQwggdJBRC2hUDoiQAAAFY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/15/eben_upton_on_sinclair_acorn/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/windows_nt_30_years_on/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/16/opinion_column/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: I still have the real thing
And for full marks, a Cumana disc drive?
Re: I still have the real thing
I know this makes me a total nerd but the biggest regret in my life was binning my Beeb B (my old man got it for me not long after it came out) and an early Apple Mac that I'd picked up for £5 from Uni. The Mac booted and everything worked but I had zero use for it apart from keeping part of a shelf free from dust and the Beeb booted but the keyboard was kaput.
I also still had a big box of 5.25" floppies with all my Beeb games and had acquired the classic dual 40/80 Cumana disk drive from someone but had never tested it.
I was moving house and thought 'these are worth nothing, I'll never use them, why take them with me?'.
GRRRR!!!
Re: I still have the real thing
I feel your pain.. I did the same when moving house. Threw away my BBC Model B and... my vinyl collection. Kill me.
Re: I still have the real thing
I kept my vinyl along with my dad's old Technics SL7 linear turntable. That gets regular use! It turns out my mother in law was a HUGE prog fan and we are now caretakers of the collection.
Hobby electronics was in the doldrums in the late 2000s, no PIs, no arduino, and retro computing didn't seem to be a thing. So they got binned.....
Re: I still have the real thing
I sold my BBC B with FDD to a friend of my fathers when I needed money to buy a 286 to replace my Amstrad 1512. :-(
Bought a Mac SE/30 about 9 or 10 years ago which has sat in the loft since then, although I brought it down to my study a few weeks ago.
My son was very impressed with how small it is.
Need to extract the motherboard and get it recapped now but I need to get a long Torx T-15 to get the screws out.
On a giving things away the worst offender was my mother.
She gave away all my Scalextric, and more importantly all my Lego, including early Lego spaceship, when I went to Uni.
Came back to find the cupboard bare.
She just didn't understand the concept that while I wasn't necessarily doing anything with it at the time it was being kept for my son/daughter, grandkids etc. eventually.
Planning ahead a bit I know.
Re: I still have the real thing
Still got my model B, quite early Issue 3 board. Don't have a Cumana drive, mine is a Viglen 40/80 drive.
I re-capped the power supply a few years ago, so I know that it still works.
If only there was a browser that ran BASIC in the browser.
BASIC
A cut down beginners version of ForTran.
Obsolete by the time of the BBC.
Shame on the massive promotion of such a terrible language in the 1980s.
There was no shortage of decent programming languages by 1981.
Re: BASIC
I don't disagree that there were 'better' programming languages by 1981, but the beauty of BASIC was that it appeared to the layman that you could write programs in plain English and they would (mostly) just work. Although admittedly 'Syntax error at line 30' isn't the most informative of error messages!
I'm pretty sure there were other language ROMs you could plug in to your Beeb if you wanted C, Pascal, Forth etc, but I don't think they were aimed at 'beginner' programmers.
Re: BASIC
I think there were "better" languages by the end of the 60's but how many of them would fit into a ROM based interpreter and be useful with 16k of memory? Probably only Forth (Jupiter Ace), but you can't really call that plain English!
I guess Python is the new BASIC, but what's the minimum hardware for that?
Re: BASIC
I guess Python is the new BASIC, but what's the minimum hardware for that?
Casio and TI calculators have Python interpreters.
Micro Python runs on little microcontrollers like Raspberry Pico 2040 for a couple of quid.
BASIC of the time didn’t really have distinct function blocks but it did have conditional branching so was OK as a starter language.
Re: BASIC
" BASIC of the time didn’t really have distinct function blocks "
DEF PROC? DEF FN?
Admittedly, many of the books you could buy (like those Osborne ones) were GOSUB spaghetti due to having to cater to the lowest common denominator...
Re: BASIC
Never saw a C compiler for the BEEB (well, I may have seen a TinyC compiler, but I can't remember much about it). I have two Pascal systems and a Forth (but not Acornsoft Forth) in my BEEB, or at least as ROM images for Sideways RAM. Other languages I saw were Comal and Lisp, and I'm sure there were more.
There is a thriving retro community producing SD card interfaces and Sideways RAM and Flash addons, and even emulations of second processors using a Raspberry PI through the tube.
I was involved in using BBC Micros for education in higher education in the '80s, and had some really wonderful 'toys' which attached to the BBC micro. My favourite was the Bitstik with a 6502 second processor, which allowed you to play a mean game of Elite. The Bitstik put the throttle on the twist of the joystick, which made interesting things possible.
Re: BASIC
I remember COMAL on the Beebs and then we had UniCOMAL on the RM Nimbus plus for some random reason a bit of Prolog.
Re: BASIC
Never saw a C compiler for the BEEB (well, I may have seen a TinyC compiler, but I can't remember much about it).
For some reason, I thought there was a C compiler ROM for the BBC. A quick bit of sleuthing turned up BeebugSoft's [1]Micro-C . There may be others.
[1] https://acorn.huininga.nl/pub/roms/Beebugsoft/Micro-C/
Re: BASIC
For a really informative error message type ren 0,0 into a BBC micro.
Re: BASIC @Mage
I'm not sure that there really was an alternative to Basic in the '80s, especially on microcomputers.
I really don't think that you really wanted to teach the likes of Fortran or Algol to anybody other than those who needed it to support other things, and if you ever used a compiler on an early PC without a hard disk, you will probably remember it being a frustrating process that often involved swapping floppies in and out of disk drives. Basic, often in ROM, was just so much more accessible.
Yes, there were better teaching languages around, but for a microcomputer aimed at low-ish spec. PCs for home and school, you needed something quick to learn without barriers to learn like compilers, but powerful enough to do 'interesting things' to engage merely curious people.
BBC Basic was better than most, although it could have done with WHILE/(W)END in addition to REPEAT/UNTIL, and also code blocks that you could condition more easily (both rectified in later versions of BBC Basic that weren't so limited by space in the interpreter). What it didn't really teach was efficient memory management and strict data typing in programs, but then a lot of languages intended for teaching glossed over these things to make programming more accessible.
I was involved in teaching Pascal to students at around the same time as the BBC became popular, and the kids really disliked it because of it's constraints which made writing pretty much anything in strict ISO Pascal a real pain in the neck. Strict Pascal was deliberately intended as a language that enforced good programming style at the expense of ease, which really turned off a bunch of students who were presented this as a first language to learn.
I think the best teaching language I saw was PL/C, which was a teaching compiler for a cut-down version of PL/1. It explained where a syntax error was and even attempted to fix it for you (sometimes with amusing results), which was useful in a batch environment with a turn around time of hours for jobs. This is what I learned on in 1978 when I went to Uni., but this was on mainframes, not microcomputers.
CUB Monitor
Oh, how I drooled over the swanky pictures of the CUB monitor in the monthly PC rag-mag... colour !!
Too exciting for a young teen... and way too expensive to ever get my grubby paws on one.
Great fun in the old days with ROM copying* for some word processing app ... can't remember its name. Learned loads from doing that kind of thing.
* scientific research only of course.
Re: CUB Monitor
Looing at the screen of a BEEB on a 26" LG HD TV through an RGB to SCART adapter shows that the picture quality of the BEEB can be very clear. It really feels wrong to see the characters so big!
Re: CUB Monitor
We had a 'big' TV on rental from Granda back when I got my Beeb and it had an RGB socket on the back. My dad managed to find the right plugs for both ends from work and made up a cable. The quality was superb! A friend down the road had a C64 and I always thought the Beeb looked better. C64 had better games and music....
Re: CUB Monitor
" for some word processing app "
View? Wordwise? EDWORD?
Re: CUB Monitor
Probably wordwise. I put off writing my degree thesis by writing a proportional font printer driver for it (and font designer). Had to remember to switch to mode 0 so that the driver could use the frame buffer to render the current line, that was quite satisfying to see your text being processed.
The built in assembler plus all the info on how to make the 6845 do weird stuff. I also remember things like: loading code from the floppy in mode 7, move it into the space used for the disc buffer then switch into a graphics mode. A precious 512 bytes.
The browser I'm typing this into seems to be using 750MB.
c'mon, it's *BBC* BASIC:
REPEAT:PRINT "Awesome":UNTIL FALSE
And Finally
Dear Reg - When we see these reports on a Mastodon/Fediverse Reg/Vulture instance?
Just get a spare RaspberryPi out of your drawer and stick it under the desk quietly. No need to tell IT ;-)
I still have the real thing
Well, second generation - BBC Master, along with the classic Microvitec colour monitor.