BBC Micro

~ the obituary ~

The BBC decided around 1980 that a television series about computers needed a computer to go with it. Richard Russell at the corporation wrote a specification for the machine, which was demanding for the money, and the BBC had spent months following the development of Newbury Laboratories' NewBrain as the likely candidate. The NewBrain was late. Chris Curry, who had co-founded Acorn Computers with Hermann Hauser, pushed the BBC into opening the thing up to a tender.

Acorn got the meeting on a Monday for the following Friday, with nothing to show but an unfinished design called the Proton. Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson built it into something that would run in the days between, and the last fault was traced at seven in the morning on the Friday to a timing difference between the prototype and the development kit. The contract was awarded in april 1981, with a requirement for 12,000 machines ready to mail order by the spring of 1982.

It went on sale on 1 december 1981. The Model A was £235 with 16K, the Model B £335 with 32K, and both ran a 6502 at 2 MHz. Demand ran so far ahead of Acorn's ability to build them that the waiting list became its own news story. What made it worth the money was BBC BASIC, which had named procedures and local variables at a time when most home BASIC dialects had neither, and an assembler you could drop into the middle of a BASIC program. Around the back was a row of connectors, including the Tube interface, which let a second processor take over while the 6502 handled the screen and the keyboard.

Nobody commissioned a machine for me. Turkish schools in the early 1990s did not have a computer specified by a broadcaster, and the first machines I sat in front of were PCs assembled out of parts by whoever ran the shop. So the Beeb is not a memory here, and pretending otherwise would be theatre. What connects it to my desk is the instruction set. Acorn needed something faster than the 6502 for whatever came after the BBC Micro, could not buy a chip it liked, and designed one. That design is inside the board I am running computer vision on in ankara in 2026, forty five years after a television company went looking for a computer to point a camera at.

~ the case file ~

~ what the contract actually bought ~

The Computer Literacy Project was not only a machine. A television series and a book pointed at the same piece of hardware, with a correspondence course running alongside them, all of it funded on the theory that a country which did not understand computers was going to be sold them by somebody else. The Department of Industry then ran a Micros in Schools scheme that paid half the cost of a machine for any school that asked, and since the BBC brand was on one of the approved options, the decision made itself in thousands of staff rooms.

By 1985 about 80 percent of British schools had one. Acorn shipped Econet, a cheap local network, so a room of them could share a disk drive and a printer, which is a mundane detail that decided the purchase in more places than the graphics did. A generation of British programmers learned on a machine chosen by a committee at a broadcaster, which is either an accident of policy or the single most effective piece of industrial strategy in the history of British computing, depending on who is telling it.

~ the software ~

Acornsoft published for it and so did everyone else, but the title that outlived the machine is Elite, written by David Braben and Ian Bell and released on the BBC Micro in september 1984. The galaxy was generated procedurally because there was no room to store one, and the game had no win condition at all. It sold in numbers that made no sense for the size of the install base and it has been rewritten for every platform since.

The rest of the catalog was schools software and type-in listings from magazines, which sounds thin and was not. A machine that shipped with a good BASIC and a manual that explained the memory map produced people who wrote their own things badly for years before writing them well.

~ what came after ~

Furber prototyped the replacement processor as a reference model written in 808 lines of BBC BASIC, running on the machine it was meant to replace, and the first silicon was tested as a second processor hanging off a BBC Micro's Tube port. Acorn shipped it in the Archimedes in 1987 and later spun the design out into a separate company. That company is ARM, and its instruction set is now in most of the processors manufactured on earth.

Acorn itself did not survive the PC. Production of the last Master models ended in 1994 and the company was broken up at the end of the decade, its most valuable asset already sold off. In 2015 the BBC did the whole thing again at a smaller scale with the micro:bit, a bare board given to a million eleven year olds, which is the same argument made thirty four years later with an ARM chip on it.

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