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I'd like to have been present the very first time somebody realised that
'byte' and 'bite' sounded the same.
America had the Apple 2. But Britain had the BBC Micro. That was America's
loss, I suppose. Both machines were roughly the same price in the UK,
and both occupied similar market slots - the high-end. The BBC Micro was
a proper computer. The Spectrum and C64 seemed like toys in comparison,
although the C64 was actually a more powerful computer, with
more memory. It wasn't as expandable as the BBC, though.
The BBC Micro was actually made by Acorn, creators of the Atom and, latterly,
the ARM chips that go in PDAs. The BBC wanted a computer of their own,
to feature on television and sell to schools, and both Acorn and Sinclair
made a stab at creating such a machine. There wasn't really any doubt
that Acorn would win, if only because Sinclair's machines would have fallen
to bits in the hands of schoolchildren. And they would have
been stolen, because they were
tiny. The BBC Micro was not tiny. It was huge, and built to
last. It had proper disk drives, and Econet. CHAIN something
something, that's what you had to type to get it working. It had
NEW. And OLD.
Anybody between the ages of 23 and 30 will probably have grown up with
BBC Micros at school. They were much too expensive for all but the most
middle-class of kids, and there were very few games. Having said that,
Elite, Sentinel and Exile originated on the BBC,
and Acornsoft's version of Defender was as good as any on a home
computer.
As the advert indicates, the BBC had space for extra processors - a Z80
and a 6502. I'm not entirely sure what this would achieve (CP/M compatibility,
I think), but it sounds wicked cool. The BBC's only
Achilles heel
was a lack of memory, something solved with the BBC Master 128 a few years
later. By the time it came out, 16-bit machines were in the ascendancy,
and the £399.99 asking price was extravagant.
Econet, by the way, was the BBC's own brand of local area network, something
similar to AppleTalk or the Spectrum's Interface 2.
And on what better note to finish? Except, perhaps, a better note.
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