Date : Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:39:25 +0100
From : darren.grant@... (Darren Grant)
Subject: Electric Dreams last night.
On 07/10/2009 21:38, "Rick Murray" <rick@...> wrote:
> Couldn't believe the stuff being spouted by the Sinclair advocate (god,
> where did they find him!) about Beeb titles like "fun with geography" or
> whatever. Um, Elite? Chuckie Egg? Perhaps one of the first Office Suites
> ever put together for a home computer??? Clueless!
Well actually he was quite right the most significant area of software for
the BBC was education related as the publishers knew that there was a market
for the education title as most schools had them and many home users bought
them for their educational or business value. The Spectrum on the other hand
had very little educational software and lots of games. In fact I would go
as far as to say the spectrum was almost a games consol with the huge focus
on games.
> Still, the Acorn bloke got his own back by introducing the kids to
> programming with a dead-easy MODE2 demo. You CAN program the Speccy, but
> it is so painful that I never personally met anybody who actually did it
> for fun.
BBC FanBoi alert !!, Most computers from that time included a basic
interpreter and the Spectrum was no more difficult to program for than the
BBC. I personally preferred BBC basic in part because of teletext mode but
also because you typed the words rather than having them assigned to keys.
Took a bit of getting used to having to find the keywords on a spectrum.
The whole point is that there was a whole variety of home computers
available at the time each with their own merits. Most homes had a Spectrum
or Commodore 64 as they were far more affordable and didn't have the fuddy
duddy image that the BBC Micro had. The Spectrum and C64 were mostly about
games and these two systems between them had the widest range of games
available.
Being more interested in the idea of a real computer myself not games I
would have jumped at the chance to have had a BBC at home especially with
the amazing CUB monitor and floppy disc drive at the time but alas like most
of the population I was given a Spectrum by my parents to which I was most
grateful that I was given a computer at all. I learnt a lot by using that
computer and eventually I replaced it with an Atari ST but wish I had got
the Amiga really.
If perhaps my parents were a bit better off and bought into the idea of an
educational computer things might have been different, but for millions of
people like me the Spectrum deserves credit for making computing affordable
for the masses. Clive Sinclair deserves the accolade of bringing an
affordable introduction to computing to the masses in the UK. The success is
down to the fact that he produced a reasonable system that worked at the
right time at a price that most people could afford.
The BBC Micro on the other hand deserves the accolade of most powerful,
expandable and well designed micro of the time but only a relatively small
proportion of the public could own one.
Actually my exposure to the BBC turned out to be fairly limited having only
spent time on one at a friends house who had one and the odd one that was
dotted about the school. Most of my formative years were spent on RM
308Z/480Z followed by the Nimbus as they were the main systems used in
Oxfordshire schools and colleges at the time. While at home I had a Spectrum
and then Atari ST, and then at my first job Tandy PC's. Despite this
relatively limited exposure to the BBC I don't go poking fun at the systems
that I know relatively little about such as the BBC, in fact I find it quite
fascinating to learn about them.
The main thing I learnt from early on is that everything has it's advantages
and being a zealot about any one technology is a stupid thing to do. Right
from the beginning I had to learn to use lots of different systems and get
used to the quirks of them. Today I use a Mac as my main system as it gives
me what I believe to be the most stable and best user experience but at the
same time I have a Windows 2003 server running exchange as it offers the
best mail server feature set, run a Linux servers for things like a web
server and Asterisk VoIP, oh and have a windows XP netbook as XP works quite
well as a simple browsing system on a low power system. It is all about
making use of the strengths of each system.
Here is a tip for anyone who works in IT, do you ever wonder why non IT
types don't take you seriously ? Well one of the reasons is that you are
seen in the same vain as passionate religious people. You can see why
product X is so much better than the useless product Y, and you really want
to share that with them but really they don't give a monkeys. To everybody
else the technology is just a means to an end. Impassioned opinions on how
much better one technology is than another immediately puts you in that
zealot category and you won't get invited back.
Darren