BBC 'puter

I have just discovered a BBC 'Puter in a box in the attic compleate with a modem look alike that I used to talk to my stock broker. Early on line trading. What fun. Who remembers BBC basic computer speak? I also found a Commadoor 64 and a Sinclair. The latter I did at least have some design input into when I did a propper job.
ttfn

 

I can remember the Tomorrow's World on the air transmission of the first over the air transmission of of data. I recorded it on tape then fed it into my Sinclair ZX80 and watched in wonder as it came up as "Welcome to Tomorrow's World".
Moved from Sinclair to Commodore Pet and BBC "B" then spent two years managing the "Micros in Schools" scheme for our region. Had a heck of a lot of problems due to the the tape based systems, but fortunately we moved onto discs after the first year. Then moved to Apple computers and finally to MS in its various incarnations.

 

Oh dear - ZX81!! Did a little cartoon of a dog lifting its leg against a tree and thought it was amazing. Played with the Spectrum and bought a Dragon. Loved the Commodore 64! Ran a local Computer Town for the kids and then found that the kids soon knew much more than me - ouch!

 

You are right HB it was a ZX81 the 80 was the orginal Sinclair offering I think. "Control your own power station" was the advertising blurb I think.
Some local schools moved onto the Spectrum when it came out but it was very unreliable. In one school the caretaker had to use a watering can on the carpets due to static causing crashes.
We used to say the best use for a Spectrum was for wheel chocks for a Sinclair C4 :D

 

Crikey I remember loading geography programs into those old BBCs. If the kids made a mistake entering data they had to start at the beginning. And when they printed out the graphs the printers used to make that high pitched screeching sound - it was like nails being dragged across a blackboard.
Some muppet broke in and stole all the library BBCs. So they replaced them with IBMs.

 

My first was the ZX90! Spent hours typing in loads of programming from a magazine - get one character wrong and you had to start all over again. And what did you get at the end of it? A game of 'Pong'!!!

Do you remember THAT?

 

and the agony of waiting for game programs to load from tape - in ordinary cassette players!

 

One lasting benefit of writing programs in BASIC was that it taught me to think logically. I still find myself doing critical path stuff when working out real life problems...

 

And of course there was the TRS 80 and the Tandy 16 Colour machine (Dragon was a rip off copy of this) with a magnificent 4k of memory! But do not knock them. My eldest son now pays more in tax than I used to earn in a year becuse of the time he spent writing Machine code for the ZX81, Tandy and BBC machines (as a very precocious 11 year old!)

 

Hornbeam,
For me the worse legacy of that time is only being able to think in zero's and one's.
But as long as life does not get more complicated than--- 'one row' set plants 'zero row' dont set plants I should be o.k.

 

We played Mazogs on a ZX81 at a friends house. We started with a Spectrum 48k and then onto an Oric Atmos that got bought out by a french firm and so did all the software!! Then onto an Atari and then a horrible PC that cost about �£1000 but was less than a tenth as powerful as i have now for a few hundred!!