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.