Spectrum vs BBC Micro. It's Serious!

[PretoriaSillyperson]

Well, I've got my uniform ready and my protractor in its box for school tomorrow so I have nothing to do. I do however remember an argument at school in 1982 and I never did get the definitive answer. So:

Was the BBC B really better than the Speccie? I mean, come on! Stands to wossname. Also, the C64 wasn't bad but no use for Jet Set Willy. The Vic 20 was pants and the Acorn Atom and Oracle were worse. Oh, and I was the kid with the Dragon 32 and I even had a thing called an Aquarius. So - which was the best? Please tell me and let me relive my overpriviledged adolesence. Mind you, you couldn't get them naked women on the BBC Micro, not without a lot of Pokes.

Now that I remember it, the argument ended in a fight so let's be nice - I'm not as fit as I used to be (No Class A medical for me this year). However, if it turns out that the Speccie really is the best then I'll look up Timothy Warren in the phone book and kick him in the goolies during lunch tomorrow.

PSP

[Keef]

It's all a question of timing. When I bought the Commodore PET (still got it!), it was the best machine on the block. In fact, it was probably the only viable machine on the block.

When I bought the BBC B, ditto. And so on, all the way to the last computer I bought...

[timmcat]

Aah the PET.. dad borrowed one from work circa 1980 and bought a 'housefinder' program at great expense. Relied on one inputting all houses on the market from the local paper and offering a search function to narrow the list down for potential buyers. Never did catch on. I think I've still got the cassette... whats that worth then?

Speccy.. fond memories. Bought the 16k version then found that most software (including Flight Simulator) needed 48k.. bought the chips on mail order, hey presto, the thing did years of sterling service till I sold it at a car boot sale a few years ago for a tenner, including all the software I had collected.

BBC Micro.. niche market IMHO

[Memetic]

A chip design company I worked at used PETs, even when I was there about 5 yrs ago, to run a couple of bits of custom test equipment that got used about once a year. It was just not worth rebuilding it to update it.

The engineers claimed to run some of the code on the floppy drive controlers and to use the floppy drive buffers as memory to get the performance they needed.

Now that's programming!

[Keef]

Oh, the nostalgia! I built an interface box to connect to the user port on my PET, and wrote a load of machine code software to send and receive radio teletype. Even used it on HF to do that.

I had the top-of-the-range dual floppy disk drive - £650 new! A wondrous machine. I've still got the PET, but the floppy drive I sold to the Royal Air Force some years ago - something they had still used them and they were finding it hard to locate spares.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

I do remember the old Pet. I taught myself to program on the old 2k version of the Pet with Cassette Tapes for loading and saving your programs. (I had to sneak in to the computer lab at school to use them, since I was not old enough to get to sign up for the class. At the time only 12th and 11th graders could and I was in 7th grade.)

Then the school bought new Pets with 4k RAM and the Dual Floppy Drives. We were like, why did you get 4k RAM, we thought no one would ever fill that.

Boy how the world has changed! :eek:

Richard

[P.Pilcher]

Well - let's see..... Spectrum, this was Uncle Clive's third attempt after the ZX80 and the ZX 81 at marketing a computer for the home user and it was third time lucky for him!
For the home user it was state of the art - remember those rubbery keys on the keyboard and eventually the microdrives?
The BBC "B" was I think in a different league because it was sold in the education market to which Acorn clung for many years. The Beeb had a much higher quality keyboard, used a dedicated monitor and could be interfaced to disc drives. I may be wrong, but I think it used two processors: a 6502 as its CPU and another for running screen graphics

IMHO as the machines were really designed for two different markets, comparison is difficult - the Beeb was probably of higher quality, but the Speccie undoubtedly did its job very well. I can't rermember which computer was announced first but Uncle Clive always had a reputation for mass marketing something at a much lower price than anybody else, sometimes by using pioneering engineering shortcuts, sometimes by cutting quality to the bone. He only really came unstuck with the C5!

Thank heavens he was never tempted to design an aeroplane for the masses. Knowing him it would probably have been the first man carrying flying machine to be powered by .... wait for it ..... a rubber band!!

P.P.

[SimJock]

No one mentioned the Amstrad CPC464 yet then.. a natural progression from the ZX80 81's..

Ahh yes Jet Set Willy and Tankbusters with vector graphics, Defender to name but a few.. those elusive infinite lives pokes.. and having to load data into screen memory before shifting it down in memory to address zero, just so you can put in your own little hacks :-)

Then the 8086 came out and all the fun went out of life..

And this is where some have ended their days..

http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/


Enjoy

[Blacksheep]

Stumbled across my old Speccie in the loft a few months back. Brought it down and played Pterodactyl with the girls once again, which brought a few laughs. It can still run a small business accounting program that even works out your VAT and looks after the payroll. Quite sophisticated for what it is. Its back in the loft again now.

Until the next time....

Aaaah memories.....

[Evo]

I was the kid with the Dragon 32


... so I wasn't the only one then? :) :)

But the BBC was best. Why?

http://www.galileo-projects.org/images/about/elite_bbcscrnshot.gif

:ok:

[BOAC]

I've still got a Sinclair Cambridge hand-held (64 step!!!) programmable computer.

Flew with someone the other day who STILL has a 48k Speccy AND a BBC. Sad - or commercially aware?:D

[DeepC]

My introduction to the computer revolution was the Amstad CPC6128. This had a 3" disk drive in place of the tape drive on the 464. Many hours spent waggling joysticks and shooting anything that moves in games such as Supertest, Ikari Warriors, etc.....

DeepC

[Saab Dastard]

AAAAHHHHH,

I feel a dedicated thread coming on about Elite! One of the all time greats - until someone mucked it around with Elite+, Elite II etc. I used to spend hours (actually all-night vodka and Elite sessions) at a friend's house 'cos he had an Acorn. I can't hear the Blue Danube waltz without thinking about buying a docking computer.

I used to write programs for my civil engineering course on a 16k Spectrum, but I used it to play games on rather more :O - Knight Lore, SaberWulf and Nightshade were my favorites. How did programers cram so much game into 16K?

But saving to / loading from cassettes was SUCH a bore:bored:

And then using IBM PC and clones - no hard disks, just dual 360K 5.25 floppy drives and 640K RAM, green screens etc. But at least if you were sitting at one it had your undivided attention, unlike the DEC VAX terminals - God I hated those!

I remember a friend winning one of the first Apple Macs in a competion and being amazed at the power, the mouse and the floppy disk drive! It might even have had a hard disk!

[Tone]

Well of course the BBC was the best, I have 2 and they both still work. The nostalgia of the start up sound, the feel of the keyboard, the hundreds of 'serious' programs and the thousands (?) of games. All employees of Marconi were offered one at a knock down price, that's were I got my first. Using the readily available test equipment we soon had it down to basics and managed to get around the (fairly crude) protection that much of the available software had.
Happy days, thanks for triggering the memory banks.

[Keef]

Goodness me!

I remember the "sideways ROM" in the B. I had an expansion board that allowed me to have about a dozen of them. Then I got a "rewriteable RAM" that went into one of those slots so I could change my mind about what was always "available" at the press of an F-key.

Looking back, that was pretty clever stuff for its time.

[ramsrc]

Aaaah - I have fond memories of both machines. I spent more hours hunched over the keyboards of both than I care to remember. I had two dream jobs while I was at school - Software Engineer or Flight Engineer, it was these hours that made me choose the former. :eek:

As has been already stated you are not really comparing like with like. The Beeb was designed for the education market and the speccy for the home market.

Assuming that we are talking bog standard BBC model B against bog standard Spectrum 48k

The speccy was cheap - the beeb wasn't.

The Beeb had a decent keyboard - the Speccy didn't.

The Beeb was hugely over engineered - my computer studies teacher threw one across the computer room in a rage and it still worked - try doing that with a modern PC!

Not only did it have a "proper" disk drive interface, but it also had a serial port, a centronics (parallel) printer port, a hugely versatile user port, a tube port for connecting additional processors, basic networking (Econet) capabilities and made a funky sound when you turned it on. ;)

Having said that the speccy had 48k of memory to the Beebs 32k and there was a better variety of games for the Speccy. I even had a rudimentary word processor and Epson FX80 printer connected to mine before I saved enough pennies to buy my Beeb.

Later Beeb versions were seriously impressive (apart from the appauling Master Compact) the Master 128 was a fantastic machine and could even be made PC compatible (to a fashion) with a 80186 processor and a hard drive (under ADFS).

Sorry for rambling - it brought back memories :ok:

[minuteman]

Ahhhh, the memories!

I still have my c64 at home. And a Commodore +4!

The +4 was some machine, it took 30 minutes on a tape to load ACE. (what a great game btw!)

I also have a CPC464 lying around, and a Sinclair QL! Motorola 68008 processor and two inbuilt microdrives! Unfortunately the QL has seen much better days.

Also hiding a Tandy 8088XT PC with a 10Mb hard disk....some machine in its day. Finally, the Amstrad PPC640DD. 640kb RAM, twin 3.5" floppy drives and a 2400 modem! I remember the reviews called it a modem with free pc attached. It was sold as a laptop but you needed one big lap to sit it in! lol

It had a foldout LCD screen (not much use, no backlight) and was powered by a NEC V30 chip (an 8086 derivative).

Oh, the days....*sniff*

(edited for speeling)

[Mac the Knife]

Hmmm...I've still got my Speccy AND a ZX81 (which is what got me hooked) AND a Spectrum+ 128 (which I never liked much). Wrote my first couple of papers on the Speccy (there was a pretty capable word processor called TasWord 2 - it did pretty much anything anyone wants of a WP - block move, block copy, italics on screen, cut 'n paste).

Used the same Speccy for data capture in the lab - there were several neat AD/DA/relay boxes you could plug into the back of the Speccy - controlling the interface with Spectrum basic by IN<port#> and OUT<port#> - worked like a charm capturing the outputs from a laser-doppler flowmeter and putting them on the screen as a nice graphics display. Had to have a machine code ection for the display bit which I hacked out of another bit of code - those were the days...

Still have 3 Microdrives (which all worked last time I looked at them) and what a Godsend they were after pi$$ing around with tape - I still have the original el cheapo clunky Phillips original tapedeck that I used! Have to say I found the Microdrives pretty reliable, don't recall ever having any misreads or data corruption.

The control program for the LDF was my first real bit of programming - all 500 odd lines of it! Quite nice to see that although OOP was years in the future that the code is quite well structured and commented with hardly a GOTO in sight. In those days you were so near the hardware that you could do neat fudges like changing the address on the machine stack and jump into the middle of multi-statement lines...

Thanks Sir Clive for teaching me logic - I owe you!

[BEagle]

Ah - good old BBC Basic! I taught myself how to program in that - and wrote programs to calculate turn keys for fighter intercepts for any ABH, interceptor TAS and target TAS!

Later I derived equations to describe all tanker RV procedures with any input variables of roll-out range, overtake speed, TAS, tanker and receiver bank angles. I then wrote up the results; to his day they're used as the official values in the NATO Air Refuelling Document ATP-56A.

My reward from a generous air force? Nothing - not a bean nor even a single word of thanks. Yet I knew I'd saved them wasting £25000 to have a civilian software consultant do the job for them.

I'm older and wiser now! I remember hammering out the equations, checking them with my trusty Texas Instruments calculator and writing the programs late into the night at the very kitchen table where I'm tapping away right now! Never, never give your work away to such an ungrateful employer!