CommunityNews

CommunityNews

BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders

During the 1980s the BBC ran the Computer Literacy Project exploring the world of computing.

A series of home computers known as BBC Micros were created and viewers were taught how to program them.

The project helped inspire a generation of coders.

The BBC’s Alex Humphrey’s visits the National Computing Museum to find out more.

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Most Liked

herbert

herbert

Author of Hands-on Rust

The BBC Micro has a special place in my heart. My father was teaching computer skills evening classes at the local library, and one day he came home with a Model B. 32k of memory, cassette-storage, and a flickering green monitor. He plugged it in, fired up the Acorn demo tape, and I was hooked. This magical box could show pictures and games! He eased me into BASIC (the BBC BASIC language is a thing of beauty, with proper functions and procedures) and I was the happiest 7-year-old on the block. There’s nothing too impressive about:

10 PRINT "HELLO WHAT IS YOUR NAME"
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "HELLO ";A$

But for me, it was pure magic. I could make it talk! I gradually worked up to writing games, some of which were even fun to play. My parents dutifully admired my creations and gave encouragement.

Years later, I’ve worked with everything from C to Rust, Pascal to Visual Basic for Applications. My wrist-watch is more powerful than the old Beeb. Yet, I don’t think I’d have achieved any of this without a good grounding on the BBC Micro and parental encouragement. :slight_smile:

AstonJ

AstonJ

Ah that’s awesome Herbert - thanks for sharing your story :smiley:

What’s been your favourite language/s so far? Actually don’t answer that - I’ll ask it in your AMA when/if you do a PragProg Author Spotlight :nerd_face:

herbert

herbert

Author of Hands-on Rust

I’m hoping to do an author spotlight about the time Hands-On Rust goes into final release.

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

New
First poster: bot
FUZIX FUZIX is a fusion of various elements from the assorted UZI forks and branches beaten together into some kind of semi-coherent pla...
New
First poster: dimitarvp
On Wednesday last week, Google’s Fiona Cicconi wrote to company employees. She announced that Google was bringing forward its timetable ...
New
First poster: OvermindDL1
You can now buy a 100W USB-C cable with a built-in power meter. They’re just $20 on Amazon, and they work!
New
First poster: bot
How a piece of advice became a lifestyle TABLE OF CONTENTS WHERE TO BEGIN… FIRST CONTACT PICKING EMACS FOR LIFE CHEATING ON EMACS SERE...
New
First poster: bot
Raspberry Pi security alarm — the basics. In November last year — I started building a DIY security alarm system, using a Raspberry Pi a...
New
CommunityNews
9 fintech engineering mistakes. Read this list unless you want to build a money dissappearing system
New
First poster: fullstackplus
Why Python is terrible… Nice language, but unsuitable for most professional purposes
New
First poster: jkdiaz
Dark mode isn’t as good for your eyes as you believe. The shadowy display mode has leagues of fans claiming it helps reduce eye strain, ...
New
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Reading something? Working on something? Planning something? Changing jobs even!? If you’re up for sharing, please let us know what you’...
1032 17402 381
New
AstonJ
A thread that every forum needs! Simply post a link to a track on YouTube (or SoundCloud or Vimeo amongst others!) on a separate line an...
New
malloryerik
Any thoughts on Svelte? Svelte is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue...
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
I have seen the keycaps I want - they are due for a group-buy this week but won’t be delivered until October next year!!! :rofl: The Ser...
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rails 7 completely redefines what it means to produce fantastic user experiences and provides a way to achieve all the benefits of single...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: Sophie DeBenedetto @SophieDeBenedetto The days of the traditional request-response web application are long gone, b...
New
AnfaengerAlex
Hello, I’m a beginner in Android development and I’m facing an issue with my project setup. In my build.gradle.kts file, I have the foll...
New
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New