Date   : Mon, 12 Jan 2015 21:52:07 -0600
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Compromises

On 01/06/2015 06:09 PM, Daniel Beardsmore wrote:
> To me, the BBC Micro is a remarkably well-engineered machine, but like
> any product, it involved compromises.
>
> What compromises would you approach differently if you were at Acorn at
> the beginning of the 80s?

It's a good question, and I've attempted a reply three times already, but I 
keep coming back to thinking that the answer is "nothing". :-)

The problem is that it's far too easy to compare the beeb to machines that 
came out a year or two later (or even later still), and the industry was 
such that prices fell massively over a relatively short space of time. In 
reference to the posts about graphics, remember that Macs of a few years 
later were monochrome, and the PC didn't get its VGA display until '87 (I 
think).

I'd love a beeb in a rackable enclosure like the System machines, and with 
a m68k CPU instead of a 6502, and with perhaps 512K of RAM minimum - but 
back when the machines were current it would have been dead in the water; 
simply too expensive for mere mortals to own.

I even wanted to agree with whoever mentioned that they wanted the 
connectors on the underside of the machine moved to the rear, or some kind 
of access hole for ROMs, because both of those things drove me nuts - but 
then I realised that it only did so years after the fact, when the hardware 
was so readily obtainable that I owned lots of stuff to hook up. Back in 
the early 80s, peripherals and ROM boards were surely scarce things; just 
about every machine I saw was running with the stock few ROMs and maybe had 
a disk drive hooked up which never got unplugged, but that was it.

Later on, but before the Archie came out, it was clear that the Tube was 
slow and so the whole "beeb core as the I/O processor" concept had grown 
long in the tooth - but initially it did what it needed to do, and I'm not 
sure if anyone really foresaw the price drops and speed/memory increases 
that were just around the corner.

cheers

Jules