Simon’s Blog

Today, the creators of the BBC Micro are re-uniting at the Science Museum in London, to discuss its legacy (see the story at the BBC).   The BBC Micro, which was launched in 1981, and became widely available in 1982, was a fabulous home computer. I thought I’d take a minute to explain what I think was so great about it.

As a child in the 1980s, the BBC Micro was actually the third computer I owned.  The first was a Sinclair ZX80, and the second was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.   The only thing you could really do with a ZX80 was write software, which is where I caught the software development bug.   However, it didn’t take long, even as a novice, to run into the limitations of the ZX80.  For example, when programming the ZX80 in BASIC, even the following program wouldn’t run properly:

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

Why?  Because, the ZX80 couldn’t write to the screen while executing a line of code.  So, if you ran that program, the TV screen just went blank.  I wrote a lot of turn-based, text-based games on it;  but I didn’t think they were any good.  The littie computer felt like a toy - the fun was in writing the game, not in playing it.   The ZX Spectrum was a lot better, but it still felt like a toy.

Then came the BBC Micro. It truly seemed light years ahead of the competition. Everything I’d found limiting about the Sinclair home computers was fixed in the BBC Micro: it had a real keyboard to type on; you could plug it into a colour RGB monitor for a great quality picture;  you could plug in a 5¼” flopppy disk drive for fast, reliable storage (compared to the slow, unreliable audio cassettes that were the norm at the time);  it had amazing high-resolution graphics (640×240 was the highest it would go);  and the programming language, BBC BASIC, was a real step forward in helping people organise their code.  People didn’t need to use GOTO statements all over their programs, and so could avoid the nightmare that was “spaghetti code”.

The BBC Micro really hit a sweet spot in terms of a providing a balanced array of state-of-the-art features.  So, for the very first time in the history of home computing, children were genuinely limited only by their imaginations in terms of the software they could write - cool games, animated 2-D and 3-D graphics, sound and music etc.   At the time, it felt there wasn’t much this computer couldn’t do.

What was the impact of all this? Well, the BBC Micro probably left behind it two main legacies.  The first was that it inspired a generation of children to teach themselves computer programming and get really good at it, which has had huge knock-on effects for business and academia in the UK. The second is that the huge commercial success of the BBC Micro allowed investments to be made into a totally new generation of computer CPU, which ultimately resulted in the ARM chip that, today, powers just about every mobile phone on the planet.

It would be great to see the BBC have another push on home computing, like the one they had twenty five plus years ago.  Today’s home computers are many, many orders of magnitude more powerful than the BBC Micro was. Who knows what children growing up today could achieve, if more were inspired to spend a little less time on MSN and Bebo, and a little more time using their imaginations to write their own software…