State of the Game

Longpig burger?
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Sorry for dragging up something from the ancient history of this thread.

I'm loving your BBC B! I used an electron back in the day but occasionally got to borrow the big brother to play elite on.
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Thank you.

I had to save hard to buy it, but it was worth every penny, and it acted as a gateway to and catalyst for my career. I found I loved writing programs in BBC BASIC, and even busked up a recursion-based 'AI' system (or so I thought at the time) - thankfully however I switched it off off before 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. The name's John, John Conner, come with me if you want to live.

The thing I liked about the Beeb (over say the Sinclair) was that it had a proper keyboard that was a joy to use and, oh my goodness, when I upgraded to the 5.25" (floppy) disc drive, the loading times tumbled - goodness it was a revelation. I also got an add-on sound module (...I still have that too... Mrs PiLhEaD is 'delighted'...), which was also (sort of) my introduction to music production and a not at all lucrative but very enjoyable 'second career'.

As for the Elite Fn strip, well this was in the days when Lord Sir Dahling David Braben OBE TGC* would pop over in person to install said strip of card. He had two cups of tea and four and a half biscuits! Honestly, some people!

Sorry to ramble on a bit, but the BBC-B* was hugely formative for me, I suspect for many others (including DBOBE), and it seems to me now, it was a product designed and built to a quality for a big reason - teaching children and other assorted yoof about computers and computing. And you could well argue that without the Beeb we wouldn't be here mithering on about the merits of Homer's Odyssey. And cats. Blam, what a hullabaloo!

* Terribly Good Chap.
* For those not from the UK, the BBC-B was made by Acron Computers in conjunction with that BBC (the (very wonderful) British Broadcasting Corporation) for their Computer Literacy Project. Acorn then went on to become ARM. DBOBE went on to write a bit of software himself, and be involved in the Raspberry Pi, powered by an ARM chip.
 
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Then I started to switch memory slots violently, after few times and few hard punch ins after 30 minutes can you imagine it worked!!! Maybe ram slots contacts had some oxidation after years. Or maybe capacitors gone numb. Who knows. This is so cool mystery, and that after all it just works! Amazing.
I find shaking, punching, disassembling and reassembling a standard starting procedure for any device that has been in longer break.
 
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