Date : Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:31:48 -0500
From : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Advocacy...
Rick Murray wrote:
> Sod off and buy yourself a Beeb on eBay and discover how the '80s could
> have gone if only your parents hadn't bought you that horrid machine
> with an unimaginably grotty keyboard and a BASIC designed to actively
> discourage any attempt at structured programming. Oh, and we won't even
> mention the peeks and pokes required to be able to do anything out of
> the scope of the built-in so-called BASIC...
Sometimes I swear that modern apps are written in BASIC... it's the only thing
that explains their glacial execution speed and enormous memory / storage
footprint :-) It might have been far better if everyone exposed to computers
during the "80's boom" had been forced to program in assembler...
> What d'you mean
What d'you mean it has a case the size of a small house? ;)
> There are people nowadays who are making
> IDE interfaces for their Beebs. Why? Partly "because they can" but
> largely because the design and philosophy of the system encourages
> things like that.
Sometimes I wish the beeb hadn't been simply an Acorn System machine - a metal
case / PSU and backplane of the size that the user chose, and a bunch of cards
providing the functionality. There's something even more elegant in my mind
about that (and given the way everyone migrated to metal-cased PCs with ISA
backplanes - albeit a motherboard design - it could have worked).
I think the beeb just hit that brief period in time within the UK when
plastic-cased all-in-one machines were popular; S100 was on its way out and
PCs were yet to really take hold - and a metal case would have made it look
too much like a business computer*.
* the less said about the ABC range the better ;) I love my ACW, but holy cow
it's a cruddy bit of packaging!
One day maybe I'll get time to build a beeb from scratch as a backplane design
- but that's many years off.
> Ever looked under a Beeb? You might see scary rows of connectors and a
> few hundred shiny copper pins.
Nothing quite like trying to plug a bunch of things in *underneath* the
machine, is there? :-) I think that's one of the beeb's major design failings,
actually - the bus connectors should have been at the back of the PCB, with
the stuff that was more tolerant of longer cable runs (serial, Econet, display
etc.) at the front and running via shielded cables to ports on the back.
(I've actually wondered about butchering my 'testbed' beeb before and trying
just that - seeing if I could desolder the rear connectors and turn the PCB
through 180 degrees before shoe-horning everything back in)
> I see potential. Potential that has not
> been expressed, to my knowledge, in ANY computer aimed at the domestic
> market in the two decades since.
TBH I think the PC did come close (and lets face it, they've been 'domestic
market' for a long time now too) - but was hampered by a crappy choice of CPU
and support chips, crappy firmware, and a lack of easy-to-interface ports as
standard (a uni-directional byte-wide parallel port does not count). Worse
still, it was hampered by a company who provided lots of expansion potential,
but then seemed to go out of their way in encouraging third parties not to
use it.
cheers
Jules