the technology a bit—you know, we ran the memory a bit faster, we made an early use of semi-custom chips, we had these two ULAs that gave us quite a lot of excitement—all pushed the price of the machine up a bit. It was an expensive machine, but despite that, a much broader market was comfortable with it because it had the BBC name.

The machine itself was low level. If you connected something to the back, like a joy stick, it was easy to communicate with it because you weren’t, as you would be with today’s PC, so high up in the software stack. The BBC Micro was easy and anybody could read the user guide; if they had a little bit of technical know-how they could build their own electronics to go into the one megahertz bus and program it. It was easy. I’m quite sad we’ve lost some of that. I think it’s much tougher now for teenagers with technical interest to say, “I want to build one of these things, plug it into my computer and make it do stuff.”

 

yes, I had a BBC Micro and connected up various different bits of equipment to it and had to program this thing down to the metal, talking directly to the chips; you’re talking to the very pins that you just wired up something to. Like you say, that’s completely gone. you have to go through layers and talk through Windows, etc. how does one get into hardware programming now? We’re running so fast that you can’t even make circuit boards to connect to it because the frequency just won’t have it.

You’re right; the problem isn’t simply the stacks of software. The problem is the hardware now...the signal-level hardware is very difficult to work with and requires a lot of skill and knowledge. But of course, you could still build a slow interface. If you want an interface at a megahertz, then connecting to a megahertz is no harder now than it was in 1980. Actually, a megahertz means you can do a million things a second, which is quite a lot for many purposes. So how would people access that? I guess they get some of it through the Lego robotic systems and so on. But in a sense, a bit too much of that is prefabricated. It’s a bit too ready-to-go. But you are talking at quite a low level to the microcontroller. There’s no reason now why we can’t make BBC- like products

the BBC imposed—
no, imposed is
the wrong word—
encouraged us
to go with a
particular spec.

using microcontroller technology. In fact, you could probably make a BBC Micro in a single chip and sell it very cheaply. I can still run BBC Micro programs on my laptop. In fact I have BBC BASIC for Windows, which is a very faithful emulation. It’s produced by Richard Russell, who is one of the people who worked for the BBC when we were negotiating with them in the 1980s. I have an Archimedes emulator that I run on the PC, and I have a BBC emulator that I run on the Archimedes emulator that runs on the PC.

emulating emulation!

And it’s still faster than the original BBC Micro because that’s how much compute power we’ve got now. So you can still run the stuff, but you can’t interface hardware to it so easily.

There’s an interest in actually building something much more basic again around today’s microcontroller technology. My guess the market for that is small but not insignificant.

I think the nearest thing you get at the moment is a PIC development kit for about £ 20; with a PC you can write PIC Assembly code, load it into the PIC, and do all sorts of stuff with it. I do know quite a few people who use PICs this way. That’s probably the nearest you get. But with a PIC, in some sense you’re going to a lower-level interface than on a BBC Micro.

 

to go back to the point about the price of the BBC, it was expensive. you had spectrums, which were under half the price. Was a big part of the negotiations trying to keep the price down?

Yes. You may remember that we
launched (I may get the numbers wrong
here) the Model A at £239 and the B
at £339, but really we couldn’t make
them at that price. So it went up to
£299, £399. We were trying hard to keep
the price down. But really, how could
you make the machine cheaper? If you
look at a Spectrum, then of course ev-
erything about it is cheaper, including
the keyboard. The BBC had by today’s
standards a stunningly high-quality
keyboard. Today’s keyboards are very
cheap elastomeric. Every switch on the
BBC Micro keyboard had a pair of gold
wires that touched when they crossed.
When you pushed the key down they
sprang together and touched, so you
weren’t making the contact with the key
press; you were removing the obstruc-
tion that was preventing the contact.
And BBC keyboards were formidably
robust. There were some manufactur-
ing problems with them. There was a
batch that were manufactured with the
key switches about half a millimeter off
the PCB; when you hammered on them
the force got transmitted through to the
solder joints on the back then the PCB
tracks broke. But when they were made
properly, they would last 10 years of kids
thrashing them. The machine took a
hammering. You know, mine still works.

they’re fantastic machines. so what
did the success of the BBC Micro do to
acorn?

Acorn grew rapidly. When the BBC contract was signed, I was still a research fellow at the University; my day job was doing aerodynamics. I guess Acorn at that stage employed maybe 30 people. I joined them full time in October 1981, and by 1983 the company had grown to 400 people, just to manage this stuff. There was no real sales activity involved because the stuff sold faster than you could make it—it just walked off the shelves. So it was really building the technical team up; and we had a strong manufacturing team. If you’re going to make millions, you want to know something about procurement. Acorn didn’t actually manufacture; it was all sub-contracted. We had to build skills in manufacturing. The BBC contract also required lots of exotic technology beyond the basic machine. The Prestel telesoftware receiver was a bit of unknown technology we had to make; the second processors including the Z80 running CPM. There were a lot of things to go around it, so we grew technical teams.