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6,401 | The Filestore was a 65C102-based machine with 64 KB of RAM, 64 KB of ROM, Econet connectivity, two 3.5" floppy drives, a parallel printer interface, expansion bus, Econet clock and termination circuits, a real-time clock, and a quantity of battery-backed RAM. The battery-backed RAM was used to hold configuration and a... |
6,402 | Initially, hard disk expansion was offered in the form of the E20 module providing a 3.5" 20 MB Winchester disk drive for the E01 base unit; later expansions in the form of the E40S and E60S provided 40 MB and 60 MB storage respectively for the E01S base unit. The "S" suffix reportedly signifies that the units are "st... |
6,403 | Acorn also offered the Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 Fileserver solutions running on sufficiently upgraded BBC Micro or BBC Master computers. |
6,404 | The Level 1 product offered access to existing Acorn DFS discs via a BBC Model B with Econet, a disc interface and single or dual drives. Printer sharing was also possible. This was intended for small networks, typically in an educational setting, to solve a narrowly defined problem of sharing what were at the time exp... |
6,405 | Level 2 delivered significant enhancements over level 1 but elevated the system requirements for the file server host machine to necessitate a 6502 second processor unit with 64K RAM. Hierarchical directories were possible with the number of files limited only by the amount of storage available, enhanced access control... |
6,406 | Level 3 introduced Winchester hard drive support. |
6,407 | With the release of the Level 4 Fileserver software providing a means to "extend the life of existing Acorn computers, such as the A310", allowing "any Archimedes computer to act as a fileserver", the emphasis had evidently shifted away from the Filestore and towards the Level 4 product at the start of the 1990s. A bas... |
6,408 | With the introduction of Acorn's Unix workstations running RISC iX, an envisaged application for Econet was the use of Master 128 computers acting as terminals to these Unix systems.: 4 Such systems also offered the capability to act as bridges between Econet and Ethernet networks, offering routing facilities to any U... |
6,409 | An Econet X.25 gateway product was offered by Acorn, providing access to X.25 networks for computers on an Econet, with the X25 Terminal ROM and the existing Acorn DNFS ROM needing to be fitted to computers to enable access to X.25 services, with the Terminal ROM providing terminal emulation and file transfer functiona... |
6,410 | The gateway hardware consisted of the core functionality of a BBC Micro, this being the network service module connected to the Econet, combined with a Z80 second processor connected via the Tube interface, this acting as the gateway module and having 16 KB ROM and 32 KB of private RAM, augmented by another board with ... |
6,411 | Econet users would send network service requests to the gateway that would be forwarded by the STS functionality of the gateway to the X.25 network. Incoming X.25 calls would be forwarded by the STS functionality to the network service functionality and on to the Econet. Network service requests could employ X.25, Yell... |
6,412 | While Econet was essentially specific to the Acorn range of computers, it does share common concepts with modern network file systems and protocols: |
6,413 | The Econet Enthusiasts Area |
6,414 | Chris' Acorns |
6,415 | Econet documentation at 8-bit software |
6,416 | RISC OS Programmer's Reference Manuals – the latest versions as of May 2014 |
6,417 | The British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, is a series of microcomputer designed and built by Acorn Computers Limited in the 1980s for the Computer Literacy Project of the BBC. Designed with an emphasis on education, it was notable for its ruggedness, expandability, and the quality of its ... |
6,418 | After the Literacy Project's call for bids for a computer to accompany the television programmes and literature, Acorn won the contract with the Proton, a successor of its Atom computer prototyped at short notice. Renamed the BBC Micro, the system was adopted by most schools in the United Kingdom, changing Acorn's fort... |
6,419 | While nine models were eventually produced with the BBC brand, the phrase "BBC Micro" is usually used colloquially to refer to the first six ; subsequent BBC models are considered part of Acorn's Archimedes series. |
6,420 | During the early 1980s, the BBC started what became known as the BBC Computer Literacy Project. The project was initiated partly in response to an ITV documentary series The Mighty Micro, in which Christopher Evans of the UK's National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming microcomputer revolution and its effect on ... |
6,421 | The BBC wanted to base its project on a microcomputer capable of performing various tasks which they could then demonstrate in the TV series The Computer Programme. The list of topics included programming, graphics, sound and music, teletext, controlling external hardware, and artificial intelligence. It developed an a... |
6,422 | The introduction of a specific microcomputer to a more general computer literacy initiative was a topic of controversy, however, with criticism aimed at the BBC for promoting a specific commercial product and for going beyond the "traditional BBC pattern" of promoting existing information networks of training and educa... |
6,423 | The Acorn team had already been working on a successor to their existing Atom microcomputer. Known as the Proton, it included better graphics and a faster 2 MHz MOS Technology 6502 central processing unit. The machine was only at the design stage at the time, and the Acorn team, including Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson... |
6,424 | The OS ROM v1.0 contains the following ASCII credits string : |
6,425 | Additionally, the last bytes of the BASIC read-only memory include the word "Roger", which is a reference to Sophie Wilson whose name at the time was Roger Wilson. |
6,426 | The machine was released as the BBC Microcomputer on 1 December 1981, although production problems pushed delivery of the majority of the initial run into 1982. Nicknamed "the Beeb", it was popular in the UK, especially in the educational market; about 80% of British schools had a BBC microcomputer. |
6,427 | Byte called the BBC Micro Model B "a no-compromise computer that has many uses beyond self-instruction in computer technology". It called the Tube interface "the most innovative feature" of the computer, and concluded that "although some other British microcomputers offer more features for a given price, none of them s... |
6,428 | The involvement of the BBC in microcomputing also initiated tentative plans by the independent television companies of the ITV network to introduce their own initiative and rival computing system, with a CP/M-based system proposed by Transam Computers under consideration for such an initiative by the Independent Televi... |
6,429 | This proposal was voted down by the ITV companies, citing a possible contravention of the companies' obligations under broadcasting regulations prohibiting sponsorship, along with concerns about a conflict of interest with advertisers of computer products. Despite denials of involvement with ITV from Prism Microproduct... |
6,430 | Efforts were made to market the machine in the United States and West Germany. Acorn's strategy in the US focused on the education market, worth a reported $700 million, by offering the BBC Micro in an upgraded form of the Model B with an expanded ROM, speech synthesis hardware, and built-in Econet interface for a pric... |
6,431 | By October 1983, the US operation reported that American schools had placed orders with it totalling $21 million. In one deployment in Lowell, Massachusetts valued at $177,000, 138 BBC Micros were installed in eight of the 27 schools in the city, with the computer's networking capabilities, educational credentials, and... |
6,432 | In October 1984, while preparing a major expansion of its US dealer network, Acorn claimed sales of 85 per cent of the computers in British schools, and delivery of 40,000 machines per month. That December, Acorn stated its intention to become the market leader in US educational computing. The New York Times considered... |
6,433 | The success of the machine in the UK was due largely to its acceptance as an "educational" computer – UK schools used BBC Micros to teach computer literacy, information technology skills. Acorn became more known for its BBC Model B computer than for its other products. Some Commonwealth countries, including India, star... |
6,434 | Production agreements were made with both SCL in India and distributor Harry Mazal in Mexico for the assembly of BBC Micro units from kits of parts, leading to full-scale manufacturing, with SCL also planning to fabricate the 6502 CPU under licence from Rockwell. According to reporting from early 1985, "several thousan... |
6,435 | The initial strategy for the BBC's computer literacy endeavour involved the marketing of the "Acorn Proton-based BBC microcomputer for less than £200". The Model A and the Model B were initially priced at £235 and £335 respectively, but increased almost immediately to £299 and £399 due to higher costs. The Model B pric... |
6,436 | A key feature of the BBC Micro's design is the high-performance random-access memory it is equipped with. A common design note in 6502-based computers of the era was to run the RAM at twice the clock rate as the CPU. This allowed a separate video display controller to access memory while the CPU was busy processing th... |
6,437 | The BBC machine, however, was designed to run at the faster CPU speed, 2 MHz, double that of these earlier machines. In this case, bus contention is normally an issue, as there is not enough time for the CPU to access the memory during the period when the video hardware is idle. Some machines of the era accept the inhe... |
6,438 | Furber believed that the Acorn design should have a flat memory model and allow the CPU and video system to access the bus without interfering with each other. To do so, the RAM had to allow four million access cycles per second. Hitachi was the only company considering a DRAM which ran at that speed, the HM4816. To eq... |
6,439 | The National Semiconductor 81LS95 multiplexer was needed for the high memory speed. Furber recalled that competitors came to Acorn offering to replace the component with their own, but "none of them worked. And we never knew why. Which of course, means we didn't know why the National Semiconductor one did work correctl... |
6,440 | The Model A shipped with 16 KB of user RAM, while the Model B had 32 KB. Extra ROMs could be fitted and accessed via paged memory. |
6,441 | The machines included three video ports, one with an RF modulator sending out a signal in the UHF band, another sending composite video suitable for connection to computer monitors, and a separate RGB video port. The separate RGB video out socket was an engineering requirement from the BBC to allow the machine to direc... |
6,442 | The computer included several input/output interfaces: serial and parallel printer ports, an 8-bit general purpose digital I/O port, a port offering four analogue inputs, a light pen input, and an expansion connector which enabled other hardware to be connected. An Econet network interface and a disk drive interface ... |
6,443 | Additionally, an Acorn proprietary interface named the "Tube" allowed a second processor to be added. Three models of second processor were offered by Acorn, based on the 6502, Z80 and 32016 CPUs. The Tube was used for third-party add-ons, including a Z80 board and hard disk drive from Torch that allowed the BBC machin... |
6,444 | Separate pages, each with a codename, are used to control the access to the I/O: |
6,445 | The Tube interface allowed Acorn to use BBC Micros with ARM CPUs as software development machines when creating the Acorn Archimedes. This resulted in the ARM development kit for the BBC Micro in 1986, priced at around £4000. From 2006, a kit with an ARM7TDMI CPU running at 64 MHz, with as much as 64 MB of RAM, was rel... |
6,446 | The Model A and the Model B were built on the same printed circuit board , and a Model A can be upgraded to a Model B. Users wishing to operate Model B software need to add the extra RAM and the user/printer MOS Technology 6522 VIA and snip a link, a task that can be achieved without soldering. To do a full upgrade wi... |
6,447 | The BBC Model A was phased out of production with the introduction of the Acorn Electron, with chairman Chris Curry stating at the time that Acorn "would no longer promote it" . |
6,448 | Early BBC Micros used linear power supplies at the insistence of the BBC, which, as a broadcaster, was cautious about electromagnetic interference. The supplies were unreliable, and after a few months the BBC allowed switched-mode units. |
6,449 | An apparent oversight in the manufacturing process resulted in many Model Bs producing a constant buzzing noise from the built-in speaker. This fault can be rectified partly by soldering a resistor across two pads. |
6,450 | There are five developments of the main BBC Micro circuit board that addressed various issues through the model's production, from 'Issue 1' through to 'Issue 7' with variants 5 and 6 not being released. The 1985 'BBC Microcomputer Service Manual' from Acorn documents the details of the technical changes. |
6,451 | Per Watford Electronics comments in their '32K Ram Board Manual': |
6,452 | Early issue BBCs are notorious for out of specification timings. If problems occur with this sort of machine, the problem can generally be cured by the use of either a Rockwell 6502A CPU chip, or by replacing IC14 with either another 74LS245 or the faster 74ALS245. |
6,453 | Two export models were developed: one for the US, with Econet and speech hardware as standard; the other for West Germany. Despite concerns of unsuitability for the Australian market, with the design failing at temperatures above 35 °C , the machine was still "widely used in Australian schools". Export models were fitt... |
6,454 | US models include the BASIC III ROM chip, modified to accept the American spelling of COLOR, but the height of the graphics display was reduced to 200 scan lines to suit NTSC TVs, severely affecting applications written for British computers. After the failed US marketing campaign, the unwanted machines were remanufact... |
6,455 | In October 1984, the Acorn Business Computer /Acorn Cambridge Workstation range of machines was announced, based primarily on BBC hardware. |
6,456 | In mid-1985, Acorn introduced the Model B+ which increased the total RAM to 64 KB. This had a modest market impact and received a rather unsympathetic reception, with one reviewer's assessment being that the machine was "18 months too late" and that it "must be seen as a stop gap", and others criticising the elevated p... |
6,457 | The B+ is incapable of operating some original BBC B programs and games, such as the very popular Castle Quest. A particular problem is the replacement of the Intel 8271 floppy-disk controller with the Western Digital 1770: not only was the new controller mapped to different addresses, it is fundamentally incompatible,... |
6,458 | There is also a long-running problem late in the B/B+'s commercial life infamous amongst B+ owners, when Superior Software released Repton Infinity, which did not run on the B+. A series of unsuccessful replacements were issued before one compatible with both was finally released. |
6,459 | During 1986, Acorn followed up with the BBC Master, which offers memory sizes from 128 KB and many other refinements which improved upon the 1981 original. It has essentially the same 6502-based BBC architecture, with many of the upgrades that the original design intentionally makes possible now included on the circui... |
6,460 | The BBC Micro platform amassed a large software base of both games and educational programs for its two main uses as a home and educational computer. Notable examples of each include the original release of Elite and Granny's Garden. Programming languages and some applications were supplied on ROM chips to be installed... |
6,461 | Although appropriate content was little-supported by television broadcasters, telesoftware could be downloaded via the optional Teletext Adapter and the third-party teletext adaptors that emerged. |
6,462 | The built-in operating system, Acorn MOS, provides an extensive API to interface with all standard peripherals, ROM-based software, and the screen. Features specific to some versions of BASIC, like vector graphics, keyboard macros, cursor-based editing, sound queues, and envelopes, are in the MOS ROM and made available... |
6,463 | BASIC, other languages, and utility ROM chips reside in any of four 16 KB paged ROM sockets, with OS support for sixteen sockets via expansion hardware. The five sockets are located partly obscured under the keyboard, with the leftmost socket hard-wired for the OS. The intended purpose for the perforated panel on the ... |
6,464 | Not all ROMs offer star commands , but any ROM can "hook" into vectors to enhance the system's functionality. Often the ROM is a device driver for mass storage combined with a filing system, starting with Acorn's 1982 Disc Filing System which API became the de facto standard for floppy-disc access. The Acorn Graphics ... |
6,465 | Acorn strongly discouraged programmers from directly accessing the system variables and hardware, favouring official system calls. This was ostensibly to make sure programs keep working when migrated to coprocessors that utilise the Tube interface, but it also makes BBC Micro software more portable across the Acorn ran... |
6,466 | Many schools and universities employed the machines in Econet networks, and so networked multiplayer games were possible. Few became popular, due to the limited number of machines aggregated in one place. A relatively late but well documented example can be found in a dissertation based on a ringed RS-423 interconnect. |
6,467 | The built-in ROM-resident BBC BASIC programming language interpreter realised the system's educational emphasis and was key to its success; it is the most comprehensive BASIC compared to other contemporary implementations, and runs very efficiently. Advanced programs can be written without resorting to non-structured p... |
6,468 | When the BBC Micro was released, many competing home computers used Microsoft BASIC, or variants typically designed to resemble it. Compared to Microsoft BASIC, BBC BASIC features IF...THEN...ELSE, REPEAT...UNTIL, and named procedures and functions, but retains GOTO and GOSUB for compatibility. It also supports high-re... |
6,469 | Acorn had made a point of not just supporting BBC Basic but also supporting a number of contemporary languages, some of which were supplied as ROM chips to fit the spare sideways ROM sockets on the motherboard. Other languages were supplied on tape or disk. |
6,470 | Programming languages from Acornsoft included: |
6,471 | Many of these languages were also provided under the Panos environment for the 32016 Second Processor. As the Z80 Second Processor provided a CP/M environment, languages available for CP/M were supportable via this route. For example, Turbo Pascal was regarded in one instance as "by far the best version of Pascal" for ... |
6,472 | Acornsoft C did not run on the original BBC Micro models, requiring the extra resources provided by the B+ and Master series machines. Beebug C did, however, run on the standard Model B and later machines. Both of these implementations provided compilers producing interpreted "p-code" as opposed to machine code, simila... |
6,473 | For a BBC Micro without a second processor, Acornsoft's ISO Pascal primarily saw competition from Oxford Pascal. A Forth-based Pascal implementation from HCCS known as Pascal T was regarded as being "intended primarily for learning Pascal, rather than using it seriously", putting it in the same category as Acornsoft's ... |
6,474 | As a computer aimed at the education market, the BBC Micro was supported by several implementations of Logo: Acornsoft Logo competing with Logo products from Logotron, LSL, and the Open University. These products provided either one or two 16 KB ROM chips for fitting inside the machine, although the Open University's O... |
6,475 | In line with its ethos of expandability, Acorn produced its own range of peripherals for the BBC Micro, including: |
6,476 | Various products from other manufacturers competed directly with Acorn's expansions. For example, companies such as Torch Computers and Cambridge Microprocessor Systems offered second processor solutions for the BBC Micro. |
6,477 | A large number of third-party suppliers also produced an abundance of add-on hardware, some of the most common being: |
6,478 | Acorn produced their own 32-bit Reduced Instruction Set Computing CPU during 1985, the ARM1. Furber composed a reference model of the processor on the BBC Micro with 808 lines of BASIC, and Arm Ltd. retains copies of the code for intellectual property purposes. The first prototype ARM platforms, the ARM Evaluation Sys... |
6,479 | Acorn's last BBC-related model, the BBC A3000, was released in 1989. It was essentially a 1 MB Archimedes back in a single case form factor. |
6,480 | Furber said in 2015 that he was amazed that the BBC Micro "established this reputation for being reliable, because lots of it was finger-in-the-air engineering". As of 2018, thanks to its ready expandability and I/O functions, there are still numbers of BBC Micros in use, and a retrocomputing community of dedicated use... |
6,481 | In March 2008, the creators of the BBC Micro met at the Science Museum in London. There was to be an exhibition about the computer and its legacy during 2009. |
6,482 | The UK National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park uses BBC Micros as part of a scheme to educate school children about computer programming. |
6,483 | In March 2012, the BBC and Acorn teams responsible for the BBC Micro and Computer Literacy Project met for a 30th anniversary party, entitled "Beeb@30". This was held at Arm's offices in Cambridge and was co-hosted by the Centre for Computing History. |
6,484 | Long after the "venerable old Beeb" was superseded, additional hardware and software has been developed. Such developments have included Sprow's 1999 zip compression utility and a ROM Y2K bugfix for the BBC Master. |
6,485 | There are also a number of websites still supporting both hardware and software development for the BBC Micros and Acorn in general. |
6,486 | Like the IBM PC with the contemporary Color Graphics Adapter, the video output of the BBC Micro could be switched by software between a number of display modes. These varied between 20 and 40-column text suitable for a domestic TV and 80-column text best viewed with a high-quality RGB-connected monitor; the latter mode... |
6,487 | Mode 7 was a Teletext mode, extremely economical on memory and an original requirement due to the BBC's own use of broadcast teletext . It also made the computer useful as a Prestel terminal. The teletext characters were generated using an SAA5050 chip, for use with monitors and TV sets without a Teletext receiver. Mod... |
6,488 | Modes 0 to 6 could display colours from a logical palette of sixteen: the eight basic colours at the vertices of the RGB colour cube and eight flashing colours made by alternating the basic colour with its inverse. The palette could be freely reprogrammed without touching display memory. Modes 3 and 6 were special text... |
6,489 | The BBC B+ and the later Master provided 'shadow modes', where the 1–20 KB frame buffer was stored in an alternative RAM bank, freeing the main memory for user programs. This feature was requested by setting bit 7 of the mode variable, i.e. by requesting modes 128–135. |
6,490 | A speech synthesis upgrade based on the Texas Instruments TMS5220 featured sampled words spoken by BBC newscaster Kenneth Kendall. This speech system was standard on the US model where it had an American vocabulary. The Computer Concepts Speech ROM also made use of the TMS5220 speech processor but not the speech ROMs, ... |
6,491 | The speech upgrade also added two empty sockets next to the keyboard, intended for 16 KB serial ROM cartridges containing either extra speech phoneme data beyond that held in the speech paged ROM or general software accessed through the ROM Filing System. The original plan was that some games would be released on cartr... |
6,492 | The BBC Domesday Project, a pioneering multimedia experiment, was based on a modified version of the BBC Micro's successor, the BBC Master. |
6,493 | Musician Vince Clarke of the British synth pop bands Depeche Mode, Yazoo, and Erasure used a BBC Micro with the UMI music sequencer to compose many hits. In music videos from the 1980s featuring Vince Clarke, a BBC Micro is often present or provides text and graphics such as a clip for Erasure's "Oh L'Amour". The musi... |
6,494 | The BBC Micro was used extensively to provide graphics and sound effects for many early 1980s BBC TV shows. These included, notably, series 3 and 4 of The Adventure Game; the children's quiz game "First Class" ; and numerous 1980s episodes of Doctor Who including "Castrovalva", "The Five Doctors", and "The Twin Dilemma... |
6,495 | In 2013, NESTA released a report into the legacy of The BBC Micro, looking at the history and impact of the machine and The BBC Computer Literacy project. In June 2018, the BBC released its archives of the Computer Literacy Project. |
6,496 | The BBC Micro had a lasting technological impact on the education market by introducing an informal educational standard around the hardware and software technologies employed by the range, particularly the use of BBC BASIC, and by establishing a considerable investment by schools in software for the machine. Consequen... |
6,497 | BBC portal |
6,498 | 1980s portal |
6,499 | Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage device that consists of a long strip of paper through which small holes are punched. It was developed from and was subsequently used alongside punched cards, the difference being that the tape is continuous. |
6,500 | Punched cards, and chains of punched cards, were used for control of looms in the 18th century. Use for telegraphy systems started in 1842. Punched tapes were used throughout the 19th and for much of the 20th centuries for programmable looms, teleprinter communication, for input to computers of the 1950s and 1960s, and... |
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