If you are of a certain age and nationality, you will remember the BBC Micro or Beeb, a computer produced by Acorn for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, an effort by the British Broadcasting Corporation to bring computer literacy to boys and girls in this fair. Isle. The Beeb is a beloved piece of hardware for many manufacturers, including Eben Upton from Raspberry Pi fame that made its single board computers after reinventing the BBC Micro.
– BBC Micro ???? Bot (@bbcmicrobot) November 30, 2020
A group of programmers, Dominic Pajak, Matt Godbolt, and Kieran Connell, got together and decided to emulate the Beeb using modern tools. The result is the BBCMic.ro editor, aka Owlet – an emulator that runs BBC Basic in your browser – and the amazing BBCMicroBot which will run BBC Basic, then display the results in a tweet.
“They, like me, owe their early career to that first exposure to IT through stuff like BBC Micro,†Pajak said in an interview on Twitter.
The results have been quite exciting. For example, someone built a ray tracer into a tweet, creating those familiar reflective balls that you might remember from the computer demos of the 1980s and 1990s.
– BBC Micro ???? Bot (@bbcmicrobot) November 5, 2020
“I wanted to bring a classic 80s computer back to life that inspired a whole generation in the UK,†Pajak said. “People have created amazing pixel art, fractals, and even a ray tracer in one tweet. Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton sent in an implementation of Conway’s Life in machine code 6502.
This isn’t all MIT quality code, however.
“A lot of people do 10 PRINT ‘POOP’ / 20 GOTO 10,†he said.
Pajak said he and his collaborators believe that access to older technology encourages experimentation in the same way that Raspberry Pi and Arduino are training a new generation of developers.
Screenshot: BBCMicroBot, Other
The best part? They don’t have to use 40-year-old hardware to do something cool. In fact, the emulator is now supercharged.
“We added a 6502 10 GHz emulator on the back end. Now you can see in seconds what night rendering would be like on a BBC Micro, â€said Pajak.
You can view a gallery of demos at BBCMicroBot Web page.
