Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi Inspired at least in part by Pi creator Eben Upton's dalliances with the home computers of the 1980s, the Raspberry Pi casts a long shadow over the retro computing world. Upton, born in 1978, was given his first computer in 1988, just as magazine code listings were dwindling and game consoles were starting to dominate. He …
"Pissed away by successive governments"..
Not really, most European countries read the tea-leaves wrong and stuck with oddball personal computers when America was moving wholesale onto the PC standard. Acorn was still pushing RISCOS when it was finally bought out, and many users were still on Amigas, Atari ST's and other long-forgotten machines right into the 90's. None of that was the government's fault, so much as the obsession of UK (and European - hello Nokia) companies to chase "smart ideas" and fragmentation.
We kept trying to out smart people, when what was really needed was a consistent, affordable and compatible experience.
USA was never trying to move wholesale onto the PC. There was plenty more workstation class platforms competing there. In reality, the PC just bulldozed everything in front of it. Even the Mac was destined for the scrap heap, barely holding onto desktop publishing at the time. Jobs took the only way out of oblivion that was available. The door that the music industry had left wide open for literally years.
I seem to remember a story in one of the PC magazines about UK computer pricing in the late 70s/early 80s.
What they were saying was that the US computer industry tried to kick start sales by offering UK resellers really low prices, to make their machines more affordable and sell at higher volumes. The UK resellers simply pocketed this extra subsidy and kept on flogging their kit at the same higher prices*
*This is not unique to the computer industry. When I was a kid my dad worked for a couple of clothing manufacturers and other family members were managers for some large manufacturing companies. Each of them had stories of bosses that would rather sell a thousand units with £10 unit/profit than 10,000 with a £5 unit profit. The idea that they could make ten quid on each sale being almost a point of principle. They refused to sell for less. I even witnessed this once. The boss wouldn't listen to a group of managers trying to persuade him to drop the price a bit, saying that no the units could fetch £x so that's what he was going to sell them for. Even though they could have sold many times more at a still decent margin, but were struggling to shift the number of units they were producing.
Yes, it was the entire electronics manufacturing industry that was hit. You could import completed units, tax/duty free, or at least very low, but in a misguided attempt to maintain the British electronics component manufactures, imported components and boards were taxed through the roof.
I'm sure I remember reading this is why the R-PI was manufactured abroad... importing a complete made-in-Asia unit incurred no tax, importing parts (memory, processor...) to manufacture in the UK incurred tax.
And again, if my foggy memory is correct, the government shat itself at this high profile reveal and changed things.
Not really.
While we were peddling ZX-80s and 380Zs, the US was into the PET and the TRS-80. They bring out the Apple II, we bring out the, er... Speccy? The Amigatari/QL revolution was more about lowering the cost of 16-bit than anything else: In the UK we saw these as serious machines and used them for things like electronic music and professional graphics. In the US they saw them as cute gaming toys. (Acorn were the oddball. They faced a choice between the education market or RISC technology, and chose the latter).
The UK simply did not have the market scale to push the QL up there with Amigatari, or the PCW or Archimedes ahead of the IBM-Compatible. We kept the bits we could - the software and the ARM. You can blame a later govmint for allowing the ARM to float abroad, but you can't blame them for making the deal.
Agreed, to an extent. We still have "non-PC" Apple :-)
Amstrad were good at spotting and filling a niche on the cheap. Apple went the other way with quality and aspiration.
It also helps if you have a vast home market that even a small percentage of it can make you rich, as you then have a head start on companies with small home markets.
"While we were peddling ZX-80s and 380Zs, the US was into the PET and the TRS-80. They bring out the Apple II, we bring out the, er... Speccy? "
Not exactly. PET/TRS-80/AppleII all came out about the same time and predated ZX-80 by a few years and at less than a quarter the price of the PET/TRS-80/Apple, not to mention the even later Speccy. The 380Z is correct, and others such as Nascom might have been the UK competition at the time, or the UK101, both primarily sold as kits. And as the article stated, Sinclair was aiming at a price point, not a feature point because he understood the British market and customer. The Spectrum was competing with the Commodore 64, and again at a vastly reduced price because that's what would sell in the UK and was one of the reasons Commodore kept dropping it's prices because they had real competition.
Not only that, but you have to put yourself into the mind-set of the time and try to forget what we have now. They were all amazing and revolutionary in their own way, leading the way, sometimes down dead-ends, to where we are now.
If the UK government had broken the telephone monopoly, or forced BT to have free (or just fixed cost) data lines we would've been miles ahead of where we ended up.
I watched and read jealously of the Americans using dialup for nearly free! While we had to pay 10p a minute! (was it 10p? Whatever it was, it rapidly added up to more than mom and dad would stomach for a bill, especially when it was quarterly!
So instead we had to pass floppy discs around on the playground.
I don't think a backwards and cheap computer would be useful, even to poor cash-strapped Third World denizens. There's also the question of copyright to consider if you want to run that on it. Even though the software is long defunct someone is bound to claim foul is you bundle it with your device.
In that sense the cheap smartphone has already taken the role of the desktop computer. And for those who really need it, there's a thriving pre-owned computer market where you can buy a still useful desktop or laptop for a pittance.
I'm somewhat puzzled that Upton is contemplating this. I'd rather see him staying true to the Raspberry Pi legacy by churning out cheap computers which don't need active cooling.
"staying true to the Raspberry Pi legacy"
I rather think that's his to determine.
If I recall correctly the intent was to concentrate on low cost machines for education... the massive take up in industry is great, but is funding that original requirement.
Us hobbyists are another group which is great, but not the original requirement.
I've argued elsewhere that the Pi is not an educational machine - at least in the sense that it has a meaningful presence in the UK curriculum or schools (outside of computer clubs). Our kids have sailed through primary and secondary schools, all the way through A-level computer studies without having once turned on a Pi. That's despite us living in Cambridge.
Whilst Upton has talked about it being "like the BBC", I've always understood that to mean a standalone, easily configured, hardware accessible 'building block' - that turns out to be very useful in industry, hobbyist areas and higher educational establishments where electronic design is relevant. The Pi itself is not actually particularly designed to be a 'computer for schools' - it neither fits the curriculum, nor is it actually a very practical tool for schools that really don't want the hassle of cobbling together a working system from a bunch of parts. Sure, it's cheap - but by the time you've bought monitor, keyboard, cables, mouse and all the rest, it's not very competitive with a boggo Android tablet and hugely less convenient for busy teachers.
It's low cost... but that's about the only side of it that might be considered "for education".
It's not just the low cost that made it educational, although that was useful to allow everyone to also have one for home.
It was because your kids that used PCs through school weren't allowed to tinker with them because they were locked down 'for security' and anything your kids did do would mean a hefty bill from G4S/CapGemini/Cthullu or whoever the school outsourced support to.
On a Pi, wonder what happens if I delete vmlinuz = teacher can I have another sdcard?
That, unfortunately is exactly why it isn't in every secondary school in the UK - very few schools want to manage a collection of SD-Cards, SD-card writers and other paraphernalia to deal with "Miss, it's not working". Fewer still want to waste time on a constant upgrade cycle of slightly better releases, security updates and fixes. Even fewer actually understand anything about selecting a release version.
That's ignoring that there is no official "for schools" release (which would ideally drop kids into a robust environment with simple tools ready to teach, rather than a desktop and command prompt).
Again, a cheap Android tablet or even an Arduino gives a more reliable, focussed education platform than a 'easily fixed' Linux computer.
This is a source of some frustration, as I see again and again techies decide something is "educational" based on arbitrary convenience for an experienced developer rather than a practical understanding of the challenges of teaching in a school. Yes, I understand that these are used in code clubs, but this is not an experience that is available without experienced and enthusiastic evangelists. That shouldn't be a prerequisite for an "educational" device.
"Again, a cheap Android tablet or even an Arduino gives a more reliable, focussed education platform than a 'easily fixed'"
Not really, there's a reason that Chromebooks/bases etc are popular in schools. Nothing needs to be updated, patched etc it just works, plus the actual suite of software is just superb for the school environment.
Currently I am at an office 365 school and trying to use it is like pulling teeth when you're used to Google Suite for Education.
Teams and One note? No thanks.
Different functionality with the app versions of word etc as
opposed to the web versions is such a block to teaching.
Give me strength.
Give me strength.
>plus the actual suite of software is just superb for the school environment.
Yes for training the little Proto-Human-Resources for their job at the email factory
But this was the problem Upton was trying to solve:
30 years ago: So you want to study CS at Cambridge? We both know O-level CS is worthless, so what do you know?
Smug Student: Here is a Speccy game I wrote in assembler featured on the cover of Speccy-Gamer Magazine.
Now; So you want to study CS at Cambridge? You have 5A*** Extra Platinum grade A-level CS so what do you know?
Smug Student: I can underline AND do right justify in Google Docs AND MS Word
Picking two what?
This is the actual syllabus headlines for GCSE :
Fundamentals of algorithms
Programming
Fundamentals of data representation
Computer systems
Fundamentals of computer networks
Cyber security
Relational databases and structured query language (SQL)
Ethical, legal and environmental impacts of digital technology on wider society, including issues of privacy
Assessments
You won 't find anything about "underlining and right justifying in Word". Which is what I was responding to.
That's ignoring that there is no official "for schools" release (which would ideally drop kids into a robust environment with simple tools ready to teach, rather than a desktop and command prompt).
This is a source of some frustration, as I see again and again techies decide something is "educational" based on arbitrary convenience for an experienced developer...
^This. I have a couple of Raspberry Pi's and I think that they're fantastic. But how in the world did a Unix-alike machine gain the label of "educational"? Would my 12-year-old self be motivated to wrestle with the cryptic commands and labyrinthine directory structure of Linux? Or would I have just given up and decided that this computer lark wasn't for me?
Thankfully, the first computer that I ever experienced (ZX Spectrum) booted straight into a simple command line for the BASIC programming language. No OS commands or directory structures. Just type 'LOAD ""' and press 'Play' on the cassette desk.
I recently watched a BBC Horizon episode called "Talking Turtle" from February 1983 about Seymour Papert and the LOGO programming language. By the end of it, I couldn't help feeling that when we threw out the 8-bit machines, we lost the best way of introducing children to the magic of getting a computer to follow a list of instructions.
Speaking of my 12-year-old self, this would not have been a problem, and a more limited computer in a world like ours would have been. With a Linux machine, the user can start at the desktop level, with a bunch of developer tools and useful programs on it, and eventually start to do more and more with it. Maybe at first the student just plays around with the included game thing that's supposed to teach developer skills*, but eventually, they want to do something else and end up running their first command in the terminal, which introduces them to more commands, which introduces them to understanding how those commands work. This is useful education.
If, instead, I was faced with a computer which did nothing unless I wrote in a program every time, I wouldn't be drawn in from the start because I already have another computer which can do a lot of interesting things, so why don't I program that one? I'd also end up getting annoyed at limitations. For example, if I have a computer which has an internet connection, I will eventually want to write a program that sends or receives some data over the internet. If I've been learning to program on a computer that doesn't have any concept of that, then I'll find it annoying and want to stop. In my opinion, the worst thing to hear while getting students interested in computers is "it can't do that". "It can do that, but it's hard" gives them motivation to learn enough to do it. "It can do it and it's easy" lets them do what they want. "It can't do that" makes them ask what the point is. Therefore, the computer on which they're learning should be able to do most common things, something the Raspberry Pi's Linux system enabled.
Had I grown up in the 1980s, this situation would have been different. Sure, the set of things I could do with a disconnected, no persistent memory machine would have been limited, but there weren't boxes that could do orders of magnitude more all over the place. As the most advanced devices available to me as a child, I'd have been interested in those computers instead. It's when I compare a ZX81 to a modern laptop that it comes up short.
* I've never used it, but I understand that the Pi's version of Minecraft actually does involve a coding area and that some children have learned by starting with it. That's a convincing education purpose, given that no organized educational programs using the Pi are generally available.
"Eventually they'll want to do everything a fully specc'd computer is able to do" (I paraphrase).
That's an argument for giving primary school kids a Unix computer and telling them that eventually they'll be coding in Python, so they'd better learn to download endless libraries. I don't think that's how education should work.
You say that "It can't do that" is off-putting - I'd suggest that so is "Yes it can do that task, but first you have to install these five programs, set up the correct directory structure and install exactly the right versions of these six libraries".
A genuinely educational environment abstracts away as much as possible so the pupil can (a) learn some key concepts without distraction and ideally (b) be rewarded by a positive result. Yes, sure they eventually want to be able to write a full networked game in Unity, but there are a lot of steps along that path that benefit from not exposing them to the full horrors of a modern computer.
That's why raspbian comes with various things preinstalled...
You have a fairly robust environment, with many things available.
Ideally a netboot enviornment at schools would be good - kids can have an SD card, and the systems can just power on and boot from the network if there isn't an SD card there.
Netboot is now supported on the 3B+ and 4, and maybe the version of the Zero they've released recently but I don't know for sure. I haven't used it, but I know people who have and at least one place that uses it to use Pis as rentable cloud servers without having to bother with the SD cards.
There has been another option for schools since the Pi was relatively new, which was to create a minimal image that would boot, connect to the network, then run the image from the server. It still required SD cards to work, but you could use really tiny ones and wouldn't have to worry much about wearing them out through lots of writing. There's some work involved in either option, but it's not too difficult to get going.
Installing those libraries is abstracting it out. Eventually, they'll learn what calling requests.get is really sending to the HTTP server, and they'll also eventually learn how those servers talk to each other, but for the start, they can retrieve some data from a server in their programs.
That was, however, not what I was saying. I was saying that, if you give me a ZX81 today, it won't be able to retrieve from an HTTP server no matter how much code I write. Eventually, I might want to do that. When I find that the computer I'm supposed to learn on does not let me do something I know my normal computer can do, I'm not going to be motivated to use the limited one.
There is another aspect to this as well, specifically that skills you learn writing a program on the Raspberry Pi's Linux can be easily transferred to other computers. The code a student writes on a Pi will also probably run on their university's Linux servers, and if it doesn't the change needed will be small and easily understood. If they want to run their code on Windows, they'll have some more changes to make such as running their shell scripts in Cygwin or something like it, but their Python scripts will probably be fine and most of their CLI programs will compile and run without a hitch. If they learned how to write Z80 assembly or whatever archaic basic you put on the machine, it won't run anywhere else except for an emulator running on it. The skills will not transfer, and they'll have to throw away their experience and relearn another language. While it will probably be much easier for them to learn that language than someone who didn't have any experience, it can be nice to start them out with a tool that actually works in the modern day.
The modern equivalent to that is the Jupyter notebook. No line numbers, just an array of cells that can contain code (in Python or other languages) or narrative text, and even mathematical formulas. And you can do rich output (images/audio/video/3D), with simple interactive widgets for added flavour.
When in teh early '70s I got interested in computers at school we were writing in hexcodes and addressing memory locations, and so forth. We had an IBM school computer ( which resembled and was probably based on their cash registers). Coding was lists of numbers that meant, "Place the x value into cell 027, place the y value into cell 127. Add the contents of 027 to .... 127 and place the result into 227...."
And we had stacks of cards that we marked with special pencils that we then went off to the University of Manchester computer centre, who returned them with our errors a week later.
But we, the few who were doing this, persisted because we wanted to. And may well have gone into this as a profession ( some I know about did.)
Which is very different from hauling hundred of reluctant kids through compulsory "coding" lessons.
In my opinion today's coding curriculum is just the modern era's equivalent of when my generation of working class lads were required to do "shop". i.e. woodwork and metal work lessons, ready for when we left school at 16 to go and work in Ferranti or Connoly's cables- down the road, or become joiners and plumbers. It was making the school a training ground for proles.
In reality few needed that skill then and even fewer will ever need coding skills now.
I upvoted you, even if I don't completely agree.
We will need coders, even with AI assistants. Same as we will need plumbers and wiring harness makers. And school is where you find out you've got an aptitude for that sort of thing, or not (unless your parents/family friends/etc introduce you, but that's no way to build a country)
It's not even being at school that makes it educational.
Eben said (sorry I've lost the link but I'm pretty sure I'm remembering this right) he was thinking of families whose parents don't dare let the kid genius try to reprogram the family computer.
Raspberry Pi is cheap enough for said kid genius to buy by themselves no matter what the parents think, as long as they let the kid plug it into the family TV and borrow a keyboard. And THEN they can experiment as much as they like and the worst that can happen is you have to re-image the SD card.
I don't know how much this is actually happening, but this was definitely the original vision.
Cash strapped schools keep forcing iPads, and Laptops onto kids that cost several hundred pounds each, when they could simply be using a pi400 costing £30 each that has all the same capabilities and much less faff factor. But schools do like to blow money on toys to keep the little'uns amused under the pretense of being a valuable teaching aid. My wife's experience of issuing laptops to kids in school was that they were invariably broken -or- if not broken subject to kids breaking them, while iPads were targets for light fingers. None of the kids would consider nicking a pi400 - and ALL of the content they access in school is web-based...
"I rather think that's his to determine."
Not really. He can determine what they do, and what their goals are now, but he can't retroactively change what the Raspberry Pi used to do, what they said their reasons were, or the goals they were using. Legacy usually refers to those past attributes. Their goals from before were not focused on retro computing, but on cheap modern computing and education. Hence using modern kernels, open source components rather than stuff that's probably not being protected by an IP law team, and modern standards such as having good networking support and using more common languages like Python and Java. A computer that's intended to focus on running old software will have to change most or all of that, which would be changing the legacy. Whether to do that is his decision. Whether it is a change in direction is not.
Worth mentioning that their original idea was for a dedicated learning platform that could run a Python-based environment and nothing else. They discovered it was actually cheaper to make it a full-fledged Linux computer. And the rest, as they say, is history.
I rather think that's his to determine.
If I recall correctly the intent was to concentrate on low cost machines for education... the massive take up in industry is great, but is funding that original requirement.
Us hobbyists are another group which is great, but not the original requirement.
The users determine the legacy, not the developers.
Sinclair tried to sell every computer as some kind of business machine but they obviously weren't really, they were mostly used for games and by hobbyists. Then he got to the QL which he really tried to design for business and it flopped.
It started out aimed at education but if it turns out it's mainly used for emulation and media centres so that will be its legacy. But mostly it's used by embedded developers, by industry, and in thin clients and when there was a component shortage then there was no Pi for anyone else.
He isn't getting the reasons why people who don't have computers don't have computers. Making the computer part even cheaper won't fix it. You can buy a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 or local equivalent (sort of). That's plenty cheap for people to buy. That computer won't have an internet connection, but none of the retro computers he's talking about had one and none of the ancient software he thinks someone might run could use it, so who cares. Take an original Zero, 32 GB SD card which are pretty cheap when bought in bulk these days, and an image that includes lots of emulators, and you have what he's talking about possibly building.
People won't buy it because of the rest of the parts. When the first Pis were released with an educational goal, they'd be pretty cheap to buy for a student by a parent: just buy the board and an SD card. The child can plug it into the existing television and there's bound to be a USB keyboard and mouse somewhere in the house, and if not come to my house because I somehow have more than I can ever use even though I don't keep them around when others ask me to get rid of them. If you've never had a computer before, though, you won't have a keyboard, and if you didn't have a computer because it was too expensive, there's quite a good chance that you don't have a television. If you didn't have a computer because electricity is limited, you won't be very happy even if you did get all these things. The computery part in the middle can be a little cheaper and much less powerful, and all those problems still exist. Phones get around this problem because they include all the peripherals you need for a basic setup in the device, including a battery so you can use them frequently.
"In that sense the cheap smartphone has already taken the role of the desktop computer. And for those who really need it, there's a thriving pre-owned computer market where you can buy a still useful desktop or laptop for a pittance."
yes, no matter how cheap the computer, there still the stuff you need to plug in to it. keyboard, mouse and power source (possibly battery) is one thing, the real expense comes with a display of some sort. If you are aiming at the very poor, first time computer owners, the display is probably the biggest hurdle now. There are cheap, surplus smaller LCD displays out there now, but you still need to make them available in the target markets. Even brand new, smaller 8-10" panels from AliExpress are adding quite a bit to the system costs.
It's not about being a hackable platform, but being the available platform. The comments in the article spoke of people who don't have access to computers, with the idea that giving them a 1980s-style computer will fix this. It won't, because when compared to a phone, the old computer loses every time.
Power requirement: Phone has a battery. Retro computer doesn't.
Screen requirement: Phone has full-color, video-capable screen. Retro computer didn't, the screen it's connected to now probably does, but the software can't drive it that way.
Communication: Phone has WiFi, Bluetooth, and can connect to local mobile infrastructure. And it has a USB port in case you find something to connect to that. Retro computer probably has a USB port of some kind and who knows what you can even do with that.
Peripherals: Phone has screen, camera, microphone, speaker, assorted sensors, touch input. Retro computer has: beeping thing, external keyboard, external screen.
So the retro computer has a basic interpreter which lets you write your own software, but if it's worse at everything else, people will not want to buy it when a phone which is less open but much more useful is available. A person who buys a phone can write a message, send it to someone else, and if they can get a connection, look up information online. A person who has a retro computer can write a document in an ancient text editor which probably has a limit on the size of ASCII text file it can use, then send it to a printer, which they don't have. If you could only buy one, which would you pick?
That's why people don't have bicycles anymore when a pickup truck is much more useful.
It can demonstrate how tough you are are at traffic lights, it can haul garbage, it can lead a Chad militia against the Libyan army
Except that still fits my analogy. You may not be able to buy a truck because they're too expensive, but the bicycle is cheap and functional. It is similar to the phones, because they are cheap and quite capable even if they typically have specs we would be pretty unhappy with today. A retro computer would probably be analogous to an ancient vehicle which only accepted leaded fuel or something similarly uncommon and wasn't much cheaper or easier to maintain.
Isn't he describing the "Book 8088" (more or less)? Bit pricey, mind - especially given that I could just install FreeDOS on my old eee 701 instead:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/brand-new-laptop-recreates-1981s-ibm-pc-complete-with-8088-cpu-and-640kb-of-ram/
There's something quite appealing about a computers not tied into advertising behemoths in some form.
I am very, very tempted to pick up a professionally refurbed Amiga with capacitors that will last longer than me. As fun as the interweb is, I spend enough time emulating old hardware to say that I prefer to "play" in that environment over current stuff.
"I am very, very tempted to pick up a professionally refurbed Amiga with capacitors that will last longer than me."
It'll cost you! Vintage/retro computing hit a high during the pandemic and it's hard work finding something "ready to run" because of that and there's no signs of the prices dropping. They probably won't drop, since as time goes by, they are becoming even more rare.
You can't possibly do this subject justice in the comments section on El-Reg - or even within interesting interviews - there are a lot of nuances and interesting ideas floating about.
There are two competing challenges here. The first is not the 'core processing unit', but the overall delivery mechanism to get 'computing' into the hands of many. The keyboard, display, network and storage that make up a complete working system. That's actually where Sinclair excelled. Where other manufacturers (including the BBC) were using expensive off the shelf components such as mechanical keyboards and floppy drives, Sinclair was pushing the limits of industrial design to come up with lower cost alternatives. Rick Dickinson, the designer behind the Spectrum and many other Sinclair machines came up with revolutionary techniques for delivering a computer that you could plug in and go, for a fraction of the price of any competitor. There are plenty of tales of where Sinclair himself pushed things too far (both in flaky hardware that made it to the consumer, and some of the internal projects that were cheekily referred to as "special Sinclair technology" within the company), but arguably the ZX81 and Spectrum were very close to a sweet spot.
The other challenge is accessible software. Arguably, Acorn didn't quite make it as they were pushed into the education niche, though the BBC stood way above its competitors when it came to a functional language and fledgling disk O/S. Some CP/M machines got closer thanks to the system's ubiquity, but it was IBM that finally achieved the scale that meant every tool could be found on a DOS disk somewhere. Remember though that even with the IBM machines, a simple "get you up and started" BASIC programming language was still around so that users could always write something for themselves. I can't decide if Python is a modern equivalent, or over-exposes new users to the complexity of vast, arcane software ecosystems and tools.
Regardless, we're currently at an interesting stage where there are many systems designed to fit every possible niche, from the Micro:bit to the Pi 400, via ESP-32s and Arduinos. That new ones are being launched on a weekly basis perhaps suggests that we're both benefiting from fragmentation, and perhaps still searching for that sweet spot of innovative, low cost hardware and highly accessible software.
Looking back to those days, certainly the Spectrum was worth buying as a present for my son and arguably launched him on his career as it did with many. On the other hand buying my own PC of any sort was long delayed in the gap between those with 90% of what was needed to be worth buying and those too expensive to be worth buying. It was a long time before slowly rising income and falling prices met.
"Suppose you'd taken the Tube out. Would anybody have really cared?"
He is basically describing the Acorn electron. Problem is by removing what made the Beeb special just meant you were competing with other low end computers, most of which had a larger software catalogue
In my day, the rich got a beeb, the well off got a commodore 64, while the rest got a spectrum. In the end however whichever one you bought was enough to give you a glimpse of the world ahead
I'm not sure it was the presence of the Tube that made the Beeb sell - just that it was the flagship educational machine. The Electron came later when Acorn realised they were missing out on the much larger market Sinclair had captured, but not only was it too late, it also managed to be incompatible and slightly underpowered when directly compared with the top selling Spectrum and C64. The absence of the Tube was not as important as the relatively limited and slower graphics capabilities.
Yes, it certainly would have. Many, many hardware designs were tested out by cobbling together interfaces to 8-bit computers of the time, since most of them exposed pretty much the entire system bus to peripherals. As an example, the Apple II had a whole range of expansion cards that allowed you to try out alternative and sometimes exotic processors and operating systems.
My family got an Acorn Electron, and it was actually pretty good. It gave us days of fun playing games, (Repton, Southern Belle, Holed Out Golf, Plan B, Synchron, to name a few of the better ones) and a few years later, with the "View" cartridge, I typed all my GCSE English coursework and printed it on a dot matrix printer... (Lots of it, my school year had a couple of "exam condition" essays but no actual exams in English.)
Really, the statement should be "Would enough people have really cared?" - because yes, I would have cared. I needed my 6502 coprocessor to make my programs run fast enough.
Not that they were especially exciting programs, but they did keep me amused.
Yep, as a young adult I had the Electron. And lots of fun third party add-ons. (Watford Electronics pops into my head)
On it I learnt to programme in BASIC then assembler, with a bit of LISP thrown in.
And with that I could write some decent and useful programmes ( and modify a few pretty poor ones- particualrly educational software.- to make them usable in the classroom).
Oh, and I recently taught myself the basics of Python. But almost half a century on from my Acorn days I wasn't able to create anything useful and gave up. Partly because, in my mid-sixties I don't have the flexibility of thought. But also because these days writing programmes appears to be more about creating a script for calling up the right modules.
The
"We talk a lot about the BBC Micro, because it's a machine that I had – it's a machine a lot of people had – but if you think about the actual impact, probably the Sinclair products are the ones that had more impact. They had more impact because they sold more units. And they sold more units because they cost less."
Is a bit off in my view. Most people learned to program the BBC at school. Plus it ultimately led to the Archimedes and ARM CPU… and obvs the Taspberry Pi.
The lasting legacy of ZX 81/Spectrum is a bit kore limited- Rare, GTA?
The lasting legacy of Commodore … I’m struggling to see what C64 and Amiga brought.
Is a bit off in my view. Most people learned to program the BBC at school
BBC? Never saw one, it was a rich persons computer. The equivalent chunk of salary now would be a Macbook Pro purchase.
Spectrums were in homes and more affordable, turned up on more birthdays and christmas mornings. People had their own with unfettered access at home, rather than the occasional access at school (iuf your school had a BBC Micro, mine never did).
5 million spectrums+ were built and sold but despite the support of the government, the BBC and some schools, less than a million of all variants on BBC Micro. (https://bbcmicro.computer/how-many-made).
No chance that me or any of my peers were getting hands on a BBC Micro, I just about managed to obtain a ZX81 and that got me rolling. You'll find there are many more ZX babies than Acorn ones and that's where the deep legacy is.
The Commmodore machines, after Vic-20 were popular but far more of those were just used as games consoles with a keyboard.
You managed to mention the BBC Micro and the Tube in a Raspberry Pi article, but somehow, despite pointing out the Pi being used as expansions to several other retro platforms, you managed to forget about PiTubeDirect, a Pi interface and software that gets your Pi able to be virtually any of the various Second Processors ever created for the Beeb, and even some new ones that don't yet exist in physical forn (e.g. RISC-V).
Another Pi project (very well suited for the Pi 0) is Pi1MHz, that emulates some other peripherals, including 4 ADFS hard discs giving a massive 2GB (total) disc space across 4 drives (all simultaneously accessible), and fully supported by the built-in ADFS in the Master; an 8MB RAM disc add-on, and Music 5000.
I find it a bit of a shocker, too. My 1970 edition of the Guiness Book of Records listed the ICL 1900 as the most powerful British computer, and the CDC 7600 as the world's most powerful. Twelve years later, as a PhD student, I was submitting jobs to a CDC 7600 in the University of Manchester Regional Computing Centre via an ICL 1906A front-end. The longevity of those things seems incredible now.
Some games are just timeless. If dropping an emulator on your $9 bleepy thing is the easiest way, do it. If recoding for native RISC V is more practical, do it. The kids won't give a fsck how "retro" they are or aren't, as long as they can play. I am sure that the lower-end Pi can find its place in the ecosystem, and the high-end Pi, costing those few dollars extra that Sinclair would have baulked at, will not turn its nose up.
"If you took the Tube out would anybody care?"
YES!!!!! Me, and thousands like me. And the Tube wasn't even "in" the Beeb, it was just an exposed edge connector, barely anything more than the Spectrum's edge connector. Having it "in" or "out" had zero cost, because all the "Tube" was entirely external, but Just. Having. That. Edge. Connector just allowed so much stuff to happen IF YOU CHOSE TO.
Ideally you don't radiate a signal in the first place. Blocking it by making the case radio tight is always a struggle.
The classic textbook in the field "Ott - On low noise electronics" had the advice (from memory) "To shield the most sensitive electronics from low frequency interference, I find a battleship turret to be most effective"
"the choice between not having a PC at all or having a computer that has this huge back catalog of software"
The promblem is, something in the region of 386% of users want to get their priated version of Microsoft Office working on it. If it won't do Microsoft Office (no, not Libre Offce, not not Open Office, it's Microsoft Office at work, we're taught "Office" at school), it's not a computer.
I used to bang out hundreds of pages of documentation with View on my Beeb, and a colleague was nonplussed at how I could fit "all that" on a 400K disk. "What do you do when you run out of space?" ieurinoo? I've got about 80 reports on this disk, probably space for another 30 (*FREE, bit of mental arithmetic, yeah that looks right), then I'll get another disk out of the box. He couldn't understand that what I was using Was Not Word.
I nearly ordered a Raspberry Pi 5 recently. However when you add in the extras like HDMI lead, official power supply, cooling fan, case, it's actually cheaper to buy a i5 Optiplex with 16GB and SSD from eBay for £60. And it'll easily out perform a Pi.
Seems like PI pricing is going a bit pricey for what it is.
Soon after the PC came out I had a choice of a 64k ram Z80, STD bus, CP/M boxen or a 640k PC-XT clone out the back door of a Chinese factory, both the same $1500. Wouldn't even think about any of the little, basically useless toys out there.
The PC came with a mountain of pirated software and IBM firmware proms with a math co-processor.
So the choice was pretty simple, that ugly beige box and green screen looked pretty good and did everything was asked of it, work or play.
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