As we were chatting about the BBC Micro range in the Sentinel thread I thought I'd start a new topic just for BBC talk.

For those of you who managed to miss out on the BBC here's the Wiki page...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc_micro

Built by Acorn as part of the British Broadcasting Corporation's "BBC Computer Literacy Project" the (very expensive!) BBC Micro (and its successors) were incredibly popular in UK schools.

I actually did my GCSE computer studies project using computers in one of several BBC suites we had in school. As the original machine was released in 1981 and this was about 1990, it shows you how heavily invested schools were in the computer.

Mind you, when I did my teaching training, in 1996/7, the University teaching courses "computer room" had absolutely loads of the things and I was still stumbling across the beasts in use in schools for the next few years. They really were incredibly well-built and highly durable.

I did my teaching assistant placement in 1995, and I had a whole room full of Acorn Archimedes (A3000) and a handful BBC Bs still.

The Archimedes was another interesting computer, popular in education but pretty much doomed to failure from the start. At my first teaching job they had a whole stack of old Achimedes just sitting in a cupboard so I nicked them for my class and used them as word processors. Six computers in a class room!

I loved my BBC Micro, was my 2nd computer. Was so nice to have floppy discs instead of keying line after line of basic or waiting an age for screeching tape noises to stop.

And they really were "floppier" disks back then... even the plastic casing was nice and bendy!

Makes me feel young

We used these at school when I was doing my Computer Studies GCSE exam. I remember getting sent out of class for playing Green Beret during one of the lessons.

I learned to program on that thing. In comal.

Ah, the BBC Micro... *sighs wistfully*

Many, many memories of these. Had them at my secondary school, where my fellow IT prefects and I would programme a bunch of games, starting with Bugblaster 2 (there was no original Bugblaster - I think we just understood intuitively, even back in the early 90s, that sequels sell...), that we made available on the school network. Seeing fellow students enjoying themselves playing games that I'd helped to create gave me the bug that, sadly, didn't quite turn into a game development career. Part of that came from not having a PC I could use until after I'd graduated from uni, and the other part was down to the whole "EA Spouse" thing flaring up when I was at uni and trying to decide exactly what I was going to go on and do with my life...

On a similar note, I wanted to be a teacher at one point too. Again, early 90s, and my mind was changed by how many strikes our teachers were going on at the time - I figured they couldn't be too happy with their jobs if they were always striking...

Must've been mid-1980s I think that one. 1985/1987 perhaps? Unless there was some region-specific action in the 90s. Teachers actually don't go on strike very often. I think it was another 20 years until there was any significant industrial action.

I had an Acorn Electron with the "turbo" boost switch addon All 64K's worth of speed increase...

I'd love to see a modern take on Exile, or dare I say, a proper version of Elite for consoles. How awesome would that be??

Braben is promising Elite III will be made within the next 3 years. I'll believe it when I see it.

If they get it right, that would indeed be pretty awesome. Sadly, I don't think either of us is still small enough to fit into a spaceship fashioned from cushions off the sofa ( ), so it's always going to lack something compared to the original...