Games - BBC Micro

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The BBC Micro, affectionately known as the Beeb, was an early home computer. It was designed and built by Acorn Computers Ltd for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

In the early 1980s, the BBC started what became known as the BBC Computer Literacy Project. The project was initiated largely in response to an extremely influential BBC documentary The Mighty Micro, in which Dr. Christopher Evans from the National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming (micro)computer revolution and its impact on the economy, industry and lifestyle of the United Kingdom.

Background

The BBC wanted to base its project on a microcomputer capable of performing various tasks which they could then demonstrate in their TV series The Computer Programme (1981). The list of topics included programming, graphics, sound and music, Teletext, controlling external hardware, artificial intelligence etc. It decided to badge a micro, then drew up a fairly ambitious (for its time) specification and asked for takers.

The BBC discussed the issue with Sir Clive Sinclair, who tried to offer the unsuccessful Grundy NewBrain micro to them, but it came nowhere near the specification the BBC had drawn up, and was rejected. The BBC made appointments to see several other British computer manufacturers, including Dragon and Acorn.

The Acorn team had been working on an upgrade to their existing Atom
microcomputer. Known as the Proton it included better graphics and a faster 2 MHz MOS Technology 6502 CPU. The machine was only in prototype form at the time, but the Acorn team, which relied largely on Cambridge students (such as the legendary Roger Wilson and Steve Furber) worked through the night to get a working Proton together to show the BBC. The Acorn Proton was not only the only machine that came up to the BBC's specification, it also exceeded it in nearly every field. It was a clear winner.

It is rumoured that the BBC originally rejected the Proton, claiming that it did not portray the modern computer age correctly. Acorn countered this by submitting the Proton again, this time with the function keys painted a bright orange, and no other changes. It was accepted.

Market impact

The machine was released as the BBC Microcomputer in late 1981. The machine was wildly popular in the UK; as with Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, also released around that time, demand greatly exceeded supply and for some months there were long delays before customers received the machines they had ordered. A brief attempt to market the machine in the United States failed, due largely to the dominance of the Apple II family. The success of the machine in the UK was largely due to its acceptance as an "educational" computer – the vast majority of UK schools used BBC Micros to teach computer literacy and information technology skills. Research Machines had, until this time, been one of the leaders in UK educational computer market. The BBC Micro was also a far more reliable and durable machine than Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, being able to cope with all the abuse that schoolchildren could throw at it.

The "Beeb", as it soon became known by its users, initially came in two models: the Model A and the Model B, initially priced at £235 and £335 respectively but rising almost immediately to £299 and £399 due to increased costs (). Acorn anticipated the total sales to be around 12,000 units, but eventually more than 1 million BBC Micros were sold.

Description

Hardware features, Models A and B

The Model A had 16 KB of user RAM; the Model B had 32 KB of user RAM. A particularly nice feature of the hardware was that the RAM was clocked at 4 MHz with alternating accesses given to the CPU and the video display circuits, giving a fully unified memory address structure with no speed penalties. Most competing micros with memory mapped display incured CPU speed penalties depending on the actions of the video circuits (e.g. the Amstrad CPC and to a lesser extent the ZX Spectrum) or kept video memory completely separate from the CPU address pool (e.g. the MSX).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for BBC Micro ]

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