B is for BBC

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Күн бұрын

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@archibaldbuttle7 Ай бұрын

Engage pedant mode: Acorn didn't really have a working prototype of the Proton when the BBC put out the call for a machine for the computer literacy project, only working examples of its predecessor machines like the Atom and the System 3. As alluded to, they weren't even really in the running, as the Proton didn't match the BBC's spec (it couldn't run CP/M, for instance), but persuaded the BBC to consider them. They rushed to make a working prototype of the Proton for their meeting with the BBC to demonstrate the machine - and fortunately managed to do it just in time, and the rest is history. (This is dramatised in the excellent BBC TV movie Micro Men) The Beeb's Tube interface was specifically designed to connect a second processor (the Proton was designed as a multi-processor machine). It is other inbuilt interfaces, such as the 1MHz Bus and the User Port, that were used for connecting hard discs and MIDI interfaces. The UMI-2B MIDI interface connected to both the 1MHz Bus and the User Port.

@inzyster Ай бұрын

I recommend the one-off BBC docudrama "Micro Men" from 2009 as supplementary material for this.

@JaccovanSchaik Ай бұрын

Now there's a hoopy frood if ever I saw one.

@mikes333 Ай бұрын

How much time do you actually spend trying to determine which acronym should be discussed for a specific letter? I propose that after this first cycle is ended, a 'second' cycle needs to be started over from A again with a whole new set of acronyms that didn't make the first cut. And then of course followed by a third cycle and a fourth...etc. To quote from Deadpool, "You'll be doing this series until you're 90!" ;-)

@capability-snob Ай бұрын

Honourable mentions!

@marcobrod796 Ай бұрын

honorable mention por favor

@DylanBeattie Ай бұрын

Most of the acronyms are from a talk I wrote which tried to fit the alphabetical history of software in TLAs into an hour... doing them one by one gives a bit more time, but honestly, I just picked the ones I thought had interesting stories behind them. But I like the idea of honourable mentions. :)

@straylightc4b Ай бұрын

Recursive processes ....

@DavidKerr-Munslow Ай бұрын

Thanks for mentioning ARM and Sophie Wilson. A BBC Micro was used to simulate the instruction set ... and later there was an ARM second processor.

@andyhall7032 Ай бұрын

Sophie Wilson also created BBC BASIC !!

@stefanlagrange188 Ай бұрын

The BBC Micro made it all the way to my primary school in South Africa where I've written my first program in Logo! We later had one at home as well where I've started coding in Basic. I can safely say that the BBC Micro is the single reason I pursued a career in IT! Respect.

@sigstackfault Ай бұрын

EVE has an item called "Chronologically Curious Blue Diary" > This item appears to be a journal of some sort, inscribed on paper and bound with a sturdy blue cover. The journal’s contents seem to be written with flagrant disregard for the chronological nature of time. One of the primary figures featured in the journal’s many confounding stories is a woman named after a musical reference and a body of water.

@neolad Ай бұрын

Just as you said, My eyes lit up when I came across this video, all about the BBC Micro computer. It was where I learnt to code. Couldn't have been much older than 8 or 9 and I coded a traffic light system! What a computer and great memories.

@JamesRedekop Ай бұрын

Also, Douglas Adams wrote for Monty Python, though only a little. He wrote the "Patient Abuse" sketch from the final episode of the Flying Circus: Doctor (Cleese): Ah, yes you must be Mr. Williams. Williams (Jones): (obviously fatally wounded) Y... yes... Doctor: Well, do take a seat. What seems to be the trouble? Williams: I've... I've just been stabbed by your nurse... Doctor: Oh dear.... well I'd probably better have a look at you then. Could you fill in this form first? (he hands him a form) Williams: She just stabbed me... Doctor: Yes, she's an unpredictable sort. Look, you seem to be bleeding rather badly. I think you'd better hurry up and fill in that form. [etc] It definitely has a Douglas Adams feel.

@soupwizard Ай бұрын

I watched "The Computer Programme" on PBS in the US in 1982 (or 82) when I was 16 years old during summer vacation. It was a huge influence on me, leading me to get a Computer Science degree in college.

@-_James_- Ай бұрын

I was 10 in 1983 when I first learned to program on a BBC model B in computer club after school. Still doing it today. There's a story I heard many years ago about the first ARM processor. When the first samples came back from the fab, they were plugged into the test setup and, amazingly, worked first time. It wasn't until afterwards someone noticed their test board was faulty and didn't actually have the power lines connected. The processor was running just fine with power leaked from the support chips.

@redoktopus3047 Ай бұрын

LowSpecGamer has a great animatic documentary about the creation of ARM that talks about Acorn and the BBC Micro. (They don't mention it not having a division instruction tho haha) Sorry for so many comments but this video touched as so many things I love.

@gustavohman5811 Ай бұрын

Dylan: "...the second most powerful computer ever built..:" Me: "Hey, the second most powerful computer ever built is Deep Thought. (second to Earth)! You can't miss out on a HHGTTG reference in a clip about the BB..." Dylan: "Don't panic, I've got this."

@redoktopus3047 Ай бұрын

I still pay and annual fee for my TV in Germany. Every country should have something similar just to have a reliable revenue stream for not-for-profit media creation. Imagine Ameica's PBS with full funding!

@ABaumstumpf Ай бұрын

Well - it would help if the media payed through those fees would not be as biased and corrupt as they have turned out in the UK and germany.

@ChemicalVapors Ай бұрын

In Portugal we pay a tax with our electricity bill. But RTP (our public broadcaster) still runs ads.

@Colaholiker Ай бұрын

To make matters worse, I don't have TV service, but I still have to pay the fee here in Germany. I hate that system that you can't opt out of even if you don't have TV service. I don't want to pay a lot of money to get cable, I can't put up a satellite dish as my landlord won't let me, and I live in a place where DVB might work with an external antenna (not possible for the same reason as satellite TV), but an indoor antenna won't get you anywhere. My TV set is only for DVD playback, in fact, this 32 year old tube can't handle any HD/digital formats anyway. In the olden days, there was a reduced "radio only" fee, which is not an option anymore. (Even though I don't listen to any radio programming funded by those fees either, as the options here are usually not playing my kind of music. (In fact, my favorite radio station comes halfway around the world) Sure, I could invest in a newer TV set and cable, but why? I don't watch it anyway. If I want to watch a movie, I go and buy the DVD. For any other entertainment/edutainment, there is KZbin...

@jmvr Ай бұрын

Yeah, the problem is that no one wants to be taxed, especially not for a service that they won't use, and the people that use that service tend to be much poorer and can't afford the tax anyways. So the rich need to suck it up and pay their fair share

@Rx7man Ай бұрын

Damn how did I not find your own youtube channel until now??? Always loved your talks!

@LuminousWatcher Ай бұрын

We had two computer studies classrooms. In one, the BBC micro was the king, and the word "gigabyte" was banned. We did loads of different things, among others coded pages for text-tv. in the other we had IBM PC compatibles, for which at one time the school granted money to buy a single networking card...

@stevedocherty6240 29 күн бұрын

I am in the 10% of viewers that actually owned one of the Archimedes machines. It was an incredibly efficient machine. You could run Impression, which was a very advanced word processor and desktop publishing application on a machine with 1MB of RAM and two floppy disk drives - no hard disk required. It had vector fonts which looked good scaled to any size. It ran solid 3D flight simulators at a blistering pace, and games like SWIV that played as smoothly as the arcade machines of the era.

@robjohnson2761 Ай бұрын

First computer was an Acorn Electron 16k. Had Micros at school. And later the library bought some Archimedes. I grew up in Cambridgeshire too and I'm a programmer "of a certain age". I'm in nostalgia overload. Thanks Dylan.

@dave_s_vids Ай бұрын

You just described my childhood. I am one of those developers who started on a BBC B 😊 Wonderful stuff, thank you!

@OrigamiMarie Ай бұрын

The original Hitchhikers Guide radio show is findable on the Internet! And it actually holds up, there's nothing really worth a This Was (not) Fine At The Time warning.

@MattGodbolt Ай бұрын

Love it! Such a big part of my childhood and left a lasting impact on my career! And enough to resurrect the Beeb in the browser too! I don't think I can link in KZbin without issue but if you want to play a been you can find a web based emulator pretty easily!

@benholroyd5221 Ай бұрын

Ive been attempting to get TLA to be an accepted term. Thanks for your support

@ArodWinterbornSteed Ай бұрын

Oh phew, when I thought he forgot to mention the radio play 😅

@TSteffi Ай бұрын

If you ever make a second season, B needs to be for BBS.

@SoozeC Ай бұрын

Great video - I still have my BBC Master Compact that my dad bought in the 80s and sparked my interest in programming. And games!

@mjmorganuk Ай бұрын

Thoroughly enjoyable and informative. Thanks Dylan. So long, and thanks for all.....

@GodmanchesterGoblin Ай бұрын

Got to love the BBC Micro, in its various forms. Not just great hardware, but it had the most capable OS of its 8-bit peers, supporting not only the provided hardware and programming language ROM (BBC Basic with 6502 assembly language built in) but also enabling many third-party language and application ROMs to be developed for the machine. My favourite back in the day would have been the Music 500 box on the 1MHz bus connection with the AMPLE language ROM.

@johanneswerner1140 Ай бұрын

For us geeks with geek kids: there is the BBC microbit which is a ton of fun! There's also other platforms, but that's the one we have.

@Zephirus10 Ай бұрын

We had Acorn computers at junior school in South Africa. The IT teacher used to tell is this would be the future (or words to that effect) and now 30 years later I finally see that he was right!

@dezozlesa Ай бұрын

awesome series, thank you!

@kebabdepollo Ай бұрын

Awesome series!

@capability-snob Ай бұрын

Acorn have been influential, just as my entry for today, Burroughs! Specifically the B5500 series released in 1963. It was the first machine with an operating system written in a high level language; a variant of ALGOL 60, and its Instruction Set Architecture closely resembles the ALGOL primitives, predating the Lisp Machine by many years. The ISA was the inspiration for the FORTH programming language, as well as JVM bytecode and early python bytecode. It was also one of the first commercially available multiprocessor machines, and one of the first commercial implementations of virtual memory using memory tagging. It's relevance to this list is that, while it is not considered a capability system, the b5500 and descriptor architectures like it clearly inspired the development of capability theory at MIT, with Dennis and Van Horn's "Supervisor" in 1966 and Jed Donnelly's DCSS protocol in 1967 a direct growth out of lexical protection models.

@homelessops Ай бұрын

Thanks Dylan, great Video (again). As german never owned a BBC Computer.. :-)

@tbird-z1r Ай бұрын

BBC means something different to most people on the internet.

@recreationalplutonium Ай бұрын

what a comfy channel. props for not using AI generated slop

@soberhippie Ай бұрын

I'm thinking of inventing something useful that will make a dent (not a HHGTTU reference) and calling it Oliver after a one of the cars on Top Gear, produced by, you guessed it, BBC

@Ratstail91 Ай бұрын

My desktop computer is a raspberry pi. At first it was a budget choice, but I'm really growing to love it.

@redark7 Ай бұрын

I would have loved to see a talk about BBS, a great B TLA.

@TheGeoffable Ай бұрын

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Much as I'll criticise the BBC for some things these days (false equivalence in news anyone?), I'm a child of the computer literacy project and model B. I got a few hours a year on it in my last couple of years of primary school, and gave me the passion and "but educational!" arguments to convince my parents that a computer was a good idea (dad was still doing nuclear engineering with a slide rule at the time). From there see a career where my computer skills were a selling point, a decade self employed as a webdev, and these days a school science technician who can get those old bits of kit up and running again by understanding serial ports. All hail Raspberry Pi and Arduino for being the next gen, but they wouldn't be what they are without the BBC Micro, and neither would I.

@LeeSmith-cf1vo Ай бұрын

When I moved up to senior school in 1995 the it depot had a bunch of A310s. They were very dated by then and yet I preferred to use them over the (relatively) more modern other units available. They were actually _much_ faster, I suspect because they didn't try to do things beyond their capability, unlike PCs of the time. I think they booted from ROM too, which helps!

@leyasep5919 Ай бұрын

Yes ! another letter !

@iOfSauron Ай бұрын

That was so incredibly cool and interesting.

@phill6859 Ай бұрын

It didn't launch with everything that was in the BBC specification, the specification included the ability to run CPM. The BBC tube interface was quickly added so that they could create a z80 computer that used the BBC for io.

@cyberspaceufo Ай бұрын

I didn't think it was possible to love Monty Python even more! 😮❤

@esquilax5563 Ай бұрын

The chess computer was actually named Deep Blue. It was a reference to Adams' Deep Thought, and wikipedia tells me it did actually bear the name Deep Thought for a while before it was famous, but nobody knew it as that at the time it beat Kasparov

@DylanBeattie Ай бұрын

No, Deep Thought was the computer that beat Bent Larsen in 1988, making it the first computer to beat a grand master in tournament play, but it lost to Kasparov a year later in 1989. You're correct that the first computer to beat Kasparov was called Deep Blue, but it's not exactly clear whether it was a later revision of the same computer, or a different computer entirely - most of the articles about Deep Thought say Deep Blue was a different computer, most of the articles about Deep Blue say that it used to be called Deep Thought, so I got no idea. But that's not what I'm talking about in the video.

@esquilax5563 Ай бұрын

@@DylanBeattie ah, right you are. I should've listened more carefully!

@edgeeffect Ай бұрын

I wouldn't dream of dissing "the beeb"... but let's not forget the beloved Research Machines 380Z which dominated British schools before it came along. ... ... Ooooh! CP/M is next! That gives me the warm fuzzies too!

@jammin023 Ай бұрын

I never used the 380Z that was languishing in the cupboard at school, but as a survivor of the RM Nimbus series, I find it hard to believe that anything RM did could be described as "beloved"...

@edgeeffect Ай бұрын

@@jammin023 I'm not at all sure what went on with their later products... which did seem to all be on the smelly side... but the 380z had very nice graphics and the best machine code monitor known to humanity.

@SimonPeel Ай бұрын

I *wish* I still had my A5000. And a copy of Chocks Away to go with it.

@dj196301 Ай бұрын

Something's wrong with this video. It made ten minutes feel like four.

@DylanBeattie Ай бұрын

perhaps you were travelling at relativistic velocity while watching it? Have you checked the neighbourhood for eddies in the space-time continuum?

@stroiman.development 16 күн бұрын

According to legend, while the ARM was designed to be power efficient, they were rather surprised when it was actually measured at 0 watts. When they discovered this was because they had actually forgot to connect the power connector and the CPU was able to run on the residual power of the other connectors; surprise was no longer adequate, and they were forced to resort to astonishment ;)

@ssilverleopard 9 күн бұрын

I’m way too young to understand everything in this show, and I can’t say I’ve heard of the BBC Micro, but I have heard of (and used) a BBC Micro:bit. Are there commonalities between them (although they’re something like 30 years apart)?

@PowerScissor Күн бұрын

The thumbnail promises a hat that is never delivered in this series so far. Is this some type of Schrödinger's hat statement?

@redoktopus3047 Ай бұрын

The compatability layer Apple have done for their arm chips (Rosetta 2) is black magic. I assume what happens is that Apple has a pact with the Devil where the CPU sends the bits to hell where imps re-order them.

@phill6859 Ай бұрын

Similar technology has been around for years. The black magic is they shoved ram into the CPU and convinced people to buy it Intel have copied them, but if intel had done it first they would have been crucified.

@cs233 Ай бұрын

When you get to T, is the acronym going to be TLA for Three Letter Acronyms? 😁 And are there any that start with numbers? You may need to expand to 36 episodes! Or symbols?

@stevenjlovelace Ай бұрын

I'm far from a patriotic American, but something about a TV tax makes me want to put on a tricorn hat and throw some tea into Boston Harbor.

@DylanBeattie Ай бұрын

I've seen American television... if somebody tried to make me pay tax to watch that I'd be right there with you. 😉

@stevenjlovelace Ай бұрын

@@DylanBeattie Haha. Good point!

@Jeremyak Ай бұрын

How far they've fallen. 😔

@ktbbb5 Ай бұрын

The thumbnail and opening slide say 'sofware' instead of 'software'

@DylanBeattie Ай бұрын

Thank you! I saw a couple of comments about "software has a t!" and I was like... is it bad audio? my accent? I honestly didn't know what they were referring to. The thumbnail is fixed; the opening slide, alas, is just stuck like that until the end of the universe. Or until KZbin adds an edit function. So probably the end of the universe.

@nurmr Ай бұрын

@@DylanBeattie At least we'll be able to get a good meal.