My old BBC Micro system

Some 8-bit archaeology!

[@316diag]

Every computer museum wants a pristine example of the original. Next to each one they should have something like this to show what an extremely clever owner could do with it.

[@x0rZ15t]

The knowledge and experience this fellow has is breathtaking! Amazing 👏

[@crocellian2972]

Museum. Don't let this just go away. If it works, get it into a collection.

[@the123king]

No, not a museum, to then sit under glass. This needs to go to someone who want to service/repair old bbc micros

[@Echin0idea]

It could go to the computing history museum in Cambridge (if they were interested in having it), they actually maintain and run a lot of their collection for the public to play around with.

[@HomelessTechnology]

I was going to say exactly this. I think the computing history museum in Cambridge would be very interested.

[@crocellian2972]

I can Agree. But, who would use it and for what? Common on, you know it's time has come as far as actual use. Just another troll.

[@HomelessTechnology]

You clearly don't know what the computing history museum at Cambridge is then. Go watch some videos on it and you will see why this would be a great addition to their collection. They have a room with about 10 BBC Micro's all set up working and have just taken on a prototype Acorn from one of the people who made it. This is the sort of thing they look for to preserve.

[@theafro]

Just re-watched this after 4 years, still impressive! The beeb is such a hackable machine, but yours takes it to another level!

[@mikeswatches2480]

I had a BBC B for years . . . but this one takes customing to a whole new level!

[@tomkandy]

Incredibly impressive piece of custom kit. Definitely one to show to people who are proud of having "built their own computer"

[@404Anymouse]

GitarStu And i had to build a piece software that didn't work on my platform. I just copy pasted the four commands. The definition of building is very forgiving and there's nothing wrong with that

[@swiftfox3461]

Got any links? I'd like to have a look if you don't mind.

[@swiftfox3461]

Haha, that's so true. When somebody says "I built my own computer", I picture someone just sitting there, soldering a through-hole CPU to the PCB and I just go: "nope mate, not even close".

[@AsymptoteInverse]

I "built" a PC for the first time about three years ago. It's more like buying bits of Lego and sticking them together properly. Plus, with my clumsy hands and everything in these microscopic SMD packages, I feel like I was born to late to *properly* build a PC.

[@originalveghead]

Beautiful! I love the floppy track LEDs

[@buffplums]

Blimey takes me back… the sort of things I used to aspire to back in the day but either never had the money or couldn’t motivate myself to do … I have collected a few bits and pieces myself but no longer want to keep them but don’t know what to do with them

[@IanScottJohnston]

Very nostalgic........was doing the similar stuff on the ZX Spectrum around the same time, home made eprom programmer, home made serial to centronics printer driver etc. Great fun!

[@SpeccyMan]

Same here. So much stuff hanging off the back it is a wonder I never killed it but then I was always careful as the edge connector was unbuffered.

[@classicmacintosh]

That was a very special video, Mike. I appreciate you taking the time to share with us tales of times long past. Absolutely fascinating.

[@mikeissweet]

Shit man, this is amazing. I can see it was a massive effort to build this thing up, you must have been _very_ pleased with your accomplishment. This inspires me to get my ass back to work on my project

[@DavidWatts]

Mate, hearing you talk about this stuff is great. I could listen to you all day. Thanks

[@kaitlyn__L]

I remember reading Douglas Adams had massively expanded his BBC Micro far beyond its original design limits. I knew about stuff like the Tube port, but this is crazy great! This gives me a much better idea of the kind of thing that would've been done. (Heck, he might've had a hardware print buffer, he regularly lamented publishers didn't know how to handle floppy disks sent in the post for cheap...)

[@darkmf666]

Thank you for this great channel! I've been hooked on watching your videos for days now :D

[@NickDrudge]

This was amazing to see and I love how professional that whole rack looks, makes me want to build a rack computer from scratch just to try.

[@Wimpzilla]

Thanks you Sir for explaining and showing the state of the art of old systems. I feels the nostalgia, these part should be used in teaching to show and explain how it worked in old times! Thx you again for sharing, learned a lot as usual, keep it up true!

[@fabiStgt]

absolutely impressive video! also amazing how much effort must have went into the case and tidy cabling - let alone all that electronics development work!

[@justinlynn]

Beautiful work Mike. It's clear you took a lot of care and applied a lot of skill to your work :) thanks for sharing.

[@P5ychoFox]

Fantastic work. This is the sort of innovation that made this county great.

[@demoscenes]

Incredible piece of hardware! Really impressive overview too. Thanks for showing.

[@kreeger2010]

Awesome machine. I want a BBC Master 128 since I first saw them in magazine ads in early 1990 or so. Someday I will find one.

[@jimsmind3894]

Very cool. Almost before my time, but brings back memories! We had the Teletext adapter, closest thing to the internet back then.

[@ttkoh123]

Mike, you have the cleanest of workbench around!. Those bits and pieces all can add up to $$$$$ alot. LOL :-)

[@JustinEskridge]

Great tour! Very impressive stuff.

[@Jerry_from_analytics]

Hey Mike, thanks for sharing this! Could you please do similar video about that Acorn system as well?

[@hakology]

my first computer !!!

[@shiroshine7227]

When I saw the thumbnail I thought the BBC was on a test bench.... that is amazing @.@. I second all the museum comments.

[@DoogieLabs]

Good stuff Mike. I really enjoyed the trip down memory lane!

[@RetroMarkyRM]

absolutely fascinating. I could watch this for hours.

[@diyhouse]

A wonderful trip down memory lane,... I remember "pimping" my BBC model B with two floppy drives,... and paying £265 for each TEAC 80 track drive,... best price in its day,... I created a central heating controller on mine using a purchased (side-wise RAM) assembler,.. and "yet another" home grown eprom programmer to run on a separate 6502 based microsystem with home grown/etched boards... they were real fun in their day,.. none of this all-in-one SBCs you get today

[@swiftfox3461]

Mike, this thing's a beauty in every way you look at it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but just looking at all that aluminium, that backplane, the custom front panel connectors, round plugs... Man, it feels like it's simultaneously a piece of extremely serious scientific equipment, and a perfectly adjusted tool handcrafted with love by a master craftsman who needs for once in his life needs a proper tool to do his job. This is basically a definition of what I imagine the perfect retro battlestation to be. You definitely inspired me, and I'm definitely stealing that circuit board layout software idea - I want my computer project to be completely self-hosting and self-bootstrapping, but I never actually considered that circuit boards are a part of that.

[@tedvanmatje]

I watched this nigh on a year ago and I quite often think about this frankenbeeb....too often than I should admit openly. Weĺl, I had to watch this again - it's a piece of artwork, this is. Steampunk before they even invented the phrase. If you do decide to 'hoy' it into the bin Mike, please let me know and I'll be doing some skip diving. :)

[@jacobrau990]

My /GOODNESS/. This is BEAUTIFUL. Thank you for sharing!

[@pixelflow]

That track visualizer is awesome, totally need that for all media as like a radial 'VU' meter of track/sector access on CDs and HDDs. Thanks for sharing, for someone who came into hardware when the PIC was the big thing and computers were 'just software' for most of us, its really fun to see all the bus interfacing and hacking of 8bit home computers.

[@FyberOptic]

I love hearing about unique classic machines.

[@ToddFun]

Good God MIKE! That is amazing stuff and from the early 80's even! I fully transfer my genius status to you, I can see I'm clearly not worthy now. WOW!

[@phosgene87]

This tops it as one of my favourite computer builds on KZbin, big kudos. I love the progression from computer, to writing your own PCB layout software, to the memory board layout in said software, to the memory board itself, and back to the computer again. Computer Inception, we have to go deeper!

[@fargogemini694]

Had a couple of BBC B's back in the 80's double sided, double density 7" floppy disk drives, expanded rom boards running system delta, we run a busy windscreen company on these. Plus all the old classic games. Fitted sound out sockets on both. Oh had a matrix dot printer too

[@Ziplock9000]

This is brilliant mate. I'm a Software Engineer that has an hobby in electronics. I had a BBC B back in the day and we used to hook things up to the analogue port. Good old days.

[@DonkeyLearningIT]

I wish I would have some good old jewel jams like this laying around in a tech shed. With these old systems one can learn more than with a new computer. One day I will build a Z80 to finally understand what a computer is truly doing by writing the BIOS for it. All my old assembly programming knowledge is gone what I learned long time ago...

[@jix177]

Nice work, what a great creation!

[@godfreypoon5148]

That roadrunner enamel smells fantastic when you solder it.

[@b3l14l]

This is amazing stuff Mike!

[@thromboid]

A new level of case-modding, Mike - epic!

[@mUbase]

WOW!! You're one of those guys I looked up to in school. :) Amazing work.

[@Tugnar]

Really appreciate this show of tech from 'our era' Mike, especially from someone who was obviously fairly deep in the fascinating era of engrish domination of consumer computing.

[@SkylerOlsen]

Just awesome. Thanks for sharing.

[@johnpossum556]

'84...blasts from the past. Nice work,, Mike. I was learning my first BASIC programming on the state university's mainframe even though I was just an excelled jun ior high math student. 110 baud acoustic coupler & noisy ass non bi directional printer -- NO screen. Got me started until I bought my own 8 bit 6809E based PC from my paper routes monies.

[@kartoffelwaffel]

Those PCBs are a work of art Mike!

[@stuartthegrant]

I still have and use a BBC B, come to think of it I have an Electron as well. Great in there day and still very nice.I love what you did with yours.

[@nlo114]

This brings back memories! I've still got my acorn electron, in it's box, as new, with all the literature plus a few editions of 'acorn user'. I kept turning up late for work having sat up all night trying to get programs to work. My boss said make a choice, I kept my job, the acorn went back in it's box. 35 yrs later I have retired, with mortgage paid off, and an as-new electron in a box.

[@m1aws]

Nice piece of kit ! My party piece was full control of my full featured CB radio. Complete with speech eprom it was the "haha gotchya" wind-up toy of the day. It went on the "breaking channel" for a "copy". I had to do was press the space bar if somebody accepted to talk to it. Then it scanned the band for the emptiest channel and challenged it for being empty, took the poor mug to the channel and asked/spoke the usual boring, as they did. The Beeb just assumed the usual conversation, after noting his signal strength. The four ADC's were used to full effect on signal, "clairifier"/VXO to calculate the frequency shifts. The *tape relay fired a dpdt relay to work the transmit. All visuals were in the teletext format and quite neat. Channels were directly actuated via the user port. EPROMS? I just soldered them on top of one another in a tight stack to stay inside the box. I pulled out the selector pin to access. Good days but I couldn't get the clock rates to receive Morse code or do radio faxes directly.

[@Avlec1000]

I was 11 years old in 1984 and just used my BBC Model B for playing Chuckie Egg and other games. I wish I had known about all the cool stuff you were up to :)

[@DevilsHandyman]

This is really awesome thanks for sharing!

[@willynebula6193]

imo that little gem is worth more than any new piece of test gear

[@derekchristenson5711]

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

[@Granite]

I'm blown away.

[@jochenblacha7241]

It's written right there on the side of the hard drive, Mike ... 8836 ... 36th Week of 1988. Just a wee bit longer and the drive is 30 years old as well. They surely don't build them anymore like they used to *looks at the ~2.5 year old SSD which died about three days ago*. :) Anyway, amazing stuff you built there, let alone the crazy amount of wiring. Oh yes, that were the days as the tin cans were easy to hack... try that with a computer nowadays. XD Thanks for the video, that was an amazing thing to watch (not that your other wouldn't be any less amazing).

[@davidf2281]

Ah, so many memories of the 80s and fiddling about with home-made projects hooked up to the user port. I still rate John Coll's User Guide as one of the finest pieces of documentation ever produced.

[@AttitudeGames]

I have about 3 or 4 BBC Micro Model B's with an original Monitor and two external drives, have also several Acorn Archimedes 3010 or 3020 cannot remember, they were old school computers that were thrown out, that have all been in my loft for like +20 odd years, they all worked the last time I tested them, man those drives were very noisy :P Man those were the days :)

[@BarriosGroupie]

There's an interesting article on the development of the BBC Micro system where Mike's mentioned: He did a PhD on image processing on the evaluation system, and later produced the Watford video digitiser for the Archimedes: www.stairwaytohell.com/articles/

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Barrios Groupie That story sounds familiar but is wrong-I never got a degree, let alone a PhD. I was just working at a college computer dept at the time.

[@gotj]

It's well known that only wankers have that :-)

[@khaitomretro]

mikeselectricstuff did you develop stuff for Watford?

[@BarriosGroupie]

@George It's well known that the stupid and ignorant tend to label these talented individuals as "wankers" :-)

[@gotj]

Yes, THEY do :-) (and have a point)

[@NivagSwerdna]

Very sweet. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange used to run on BBC Micros and Teletext. Those were the days!

[@jam99]

I knew Mike was clever, but he has just gone to genius status in my book. He also has an amazing memory! All this stuff he remembers was about 30yrs ago. 'I didn't have anything better to do in those days.' :)

[@brookerobertson2951]

This guy is the geek porn... The things he knows are unreal... Definitely my favourite KZbinrs... Been missing his content.. and been hoping for more... Just watched a big Clive video and he referred to Mike.. so thought I'd pop bk and see if I have missed anything ... But I am fully up to date.. but I did fix the bell thing to "all videos" now have to just chill and hope for more mike wisdom... 🤓

[@quertize]

That is some hackery that needs to be preserved. Maybe software dumps to archive.org and hardware to living computer museum like @CuriousMarc is working with '50/'60 machines. That roms beg to be preserved.

[@laharl2k]

mr. necercis i agree those rom chips are a endangered species. Dumping them and distributing the images to the internet would be a life saver for future computer arqueologists

[@marcan42]

Agreed, get the data out! It's a shame when stuff like this is lost to bitrot.

[@CodeAsm]

Awesome video Mike :D please do make a few more of these. Yeah, go buy/make that SD card thing and fpga. but atleast we could see this awesome piece of your history.

[@ches74]

Thanks for sharing, Mike. I'm just dusting off my model B. Ordered a flash floppy emulator and an SD storage device to play with & archive my old discs. Hopefully it'll make it easier to use being more compact. Also ordered a PiTube direct. I've got a Winchester tucked away somewhere, I think it's a Solidisk product. Came from a family friends business a few years back. I'd love to get that running just for the hell of it.

[@PiotrEsdenTempski]

Really neat! Thanks for sharing! :)

[@deltech1]

Seriously impressive.

[@robbyxp1]

Great video and system. I used to hack at the BBC in the 80s as well, hooking it up to various things. At one point it acted as a disk drive for an Atari 400. The good old days.

[@plowboyh6054]

My radio shack TRS 80 still works and the ITT 8088 works LOL love the Eprom burners that one port looks like external floppy drive.

[@dj_paultuk7052]

Thats an awesome customised BBC. Like others have said, if you dont want it, get it into a Museum. such as TNMOC. I used to have a BBC B back in the day with an ext Z80 2nd CPU. Great bits of kit, wish i kept it now.

[@christopherkise]

wooooow thats soooo coool!!! feels like its going to the moon.

[@marcin_szczurowski]

This is very impressive work you did there. Also, there were great times to live in. Try to layout and etch RAM today ;)

[@stesilaus1688]

Acorn: "But we just designed a home PC. We didn't intend somebody to design V'Ger."

[@DavidAlanGilbert]

Nice! That's got to be one of the most loaded Beebs I've ever seen. The other Tube cards that were around at the time were the 80186 (which I've got in a Master) and a 16032 (aka 32016) which I always craved but never had. And yes the Tube ULAs were touchy, we went through at least 2 on our 6502 second processor. As I remember the hard drive cards were SASI weren't they? I've got a Syquest drive someone gave me years later that worked on them. Very nice.

[@kirkpennock2997]

If it is not in a museum that's my vote too. Very interesting history. I started at 8086 4 MHz, MS DOS 3.3 and rode the upgrade wave for years. Good times.

[@MariaEngstrom]

Love stuff like this! :)

[@erickford8081]

I had a BBC B and also a ROM board. You could put a RAM chip in and load an image of pirated software into it from your floppy disc. They then started to have the software try to write to itself to prevent this, so boards then had a switch on them to stop write access after loading.

[@gotj]

Ahhh, at least what we did have was a better "tube" processor: the "ZipChip", a clever 65c02 @8MHz with built in caches, that thing made the Apple IIs fly beyond belief.

[@disgruntledgoat]

Bloody hell - actual, genuine Vero Electronics Veroboard!

[@TheDutyPaid]

I was at school at and used the BBC Micro. I remember the school rising funds for new computers and one day helping take 20 BBC micros to the skip.

[@RetroGamesCollector]

Your Beeb B+ looks like it should be part of an ICBM launch system. Awesome stuff. Old video I know but I'm going through my subs catching up with earlier stuff.

[@gotj]

I have enjoyed this vidjeo very much, it brings back so many good memories of that times.

[@againstalloddstherussiansg3206]

Wow! Cool old stuff!

[@shomonercy]

Daaaamn. Archaeology is fun.

[@georgebegbie6308]

Omg... a system 4/5? You probably know this is not just rare but super rare, the original systems before the Micro. Never let it go!!!

[@FuzzyOne2007]

Watford electronics,. there's a name I've not heard in ages :)

[@thrasher7625]

My home town, the amount of time I spent in there staring at stuff I couldn't afford probably isn't healthy. :D

[@thomas.alexander.]

Amazing!

[@scottgfx]

Had an ST296N in an Amiga, Circa 1990, so 1988 for your drive sounds right.

[@garyprice3757]

nostalgic. ahh the good old days. thx

[@Gooberslot]

That's amazing. I was expecting a standard teardown of an old computer. Boy was I wrong.

[@jonathanwarner1844]

Wow! It's a beast!

[@dragonlard4595]

Cool Case Design.

[@johnhodgetts6617]

What a truly awesome machine! It's like the mother of all Beebs - a Swiss Army Beeb! It's a pity your genius with engineering didn't extend to the simplicity of labelling all the switches and ports, then you wouldn't need to guess what everything does now, although I'm sure back in the day you knew EXACTLY where everything was!

[@JacGoudsmit]

So I got an email saying "mikeselectricstuff posted a video". Okay that's always interesting... 'My old BBC Micro System" wait how can he possibly make that interesting... LOL Not disappointed at all! Thanks for posting.

[@Jordankewl]

Inspirational!

[@NanoCottage]

Great video, will you give us a tour of your Archimedes system some time?

[@gotj]

I had an Apple II. I also tried to program my own pcb router but I failed miserably. Also made my own 2716 programmer, that worked wonderfully,, never made a pcb for it, it was born on a breadboard and I kept it around on the breadboard for years. I also managed to design and manufacture a custom local area network card (for schools, even sold a few hundreds, wow !) based on the 6551 @ no more and no less than 64kbaud IIRC wahaha. I was so proud of it! That was in 1981. That year the IBM PC came out and ruined my school network card "business" because everybody wanted an IBM better than a computer from a "fruit company".

[@MaxKoschuh]

great story, thanks for sharing

[@redtails]

What a genius mind, spending most of his time fixing and hacking other people's limits.

[@whitefields5595]

Mike's already forgotten things I will never know!