BBC Microcomputer (1981)

Introduced December 1981

If you were to make a shortlist of microcomputers that epitomised the very peak of 8-bit technology, then the BBC Micro would probably be part of that list, especially if you were British. Pushing the limits of what was possible, the BBC Microcomputer (often just referred to as the “Beeb”) introduced several features that were considerably more advanced than rivals and produced a series of machine that were available – in one form of another – for 13 years, leaving behind a lasting and arguably world-changing legacy.

BBC Microcomputer

The story starts in the late 1970s in the wake of the launch of the Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore PET – three computers that made computing relatively affordable and simple, and which challenged traditional large-scale computers used in big businesses. It wasn’t just on the desktop either, microprocessors were finding their way into everything and it seemed very likely that the 1980s was going to be a digital age – one that both the British government and the BBC thought the country was ill-prepared for.

The BBC set out to educate the masses, in line with its public service charter. This idea became the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project, and at the heart of the project was an idea to teach people how to use a computer – which for practical purposes would concentrate on a single model of machine.

But which to choose? It needed to be a British company ideally, and there were several to choose from. Promising systems had been developed by Tangerine, Research Machines, Sinclair, Acorn, Nascom and Transam… but the BBC chose Newbury Laboratories and their still-under-development microcomputer which later became the Grundy NewBrain.

The NewBrain itself has an interesting history, but it didn’t become the BBC Micro. Production problems meant that the computer wasn’t going to be ready for sale in the BBC’s timescale so instead they approached Acorn who had achieved some success with their 6502-based Atom machine. Acorn were already working on a replacement for the Atom, called the Proton.

Despite being only a few years old, Acorn had quite a lot of development under its belt. In addition to the Atom, they had a range of Eurocard systems that offered expandability and reliability, but at a price. The Proton would be an expandable and fast system, but when the BBC approached Acorn it was only a paper design but a frantic effort managed to create a prototype which was stable enough to show the BBC… who were impressed. Acorn were offered the contract, subject to some design changes.

The Proton pushed the 6502 processor to 2MHz, twice that of the competition. Paired with fast memory sourced from Hitachi and some clever circuitry to make everything work at these breakneck speeds, the Proton was no slouch. Internal memory was a maximum of 64 kilobytes, 16Kb of ROM was the operating system, another 16Kb of ROM was BASIC or any other application that could be loaded from the four ROM sockets on the board, leaving 32Kb of RAM (on the Model B) which was shared between the computer’s workspace, graphics and the rest could be used for programs and data.

There wasn’t a lot of RAM in the machine as the 6502 could only address 64Kb of total memory, and half of that was the system’s ROMs on this machine. Futhermore high-resolution graphics could take up 20Kb of the 32Kb of RAM, and with about 6Kb of RAM as the computer’s own working area this could mean that less than 6Kb was available for the user. This wasn’t a lot and it would have badly impacted the usefulness of the machine. Worse still, 32Kb of RAM was a feature of the more expensive Model B where the cheaper Model A had just 16Kb which was not even enough to display high-resolution graphics.

However, the BBC insisted that any machine they were to commission needed to be able to display Teletext, and Acorn had already implemented this in some of its machines using a Mullard SAA5050 chip. This gave 40 column text and rudimentary block graphics while taking up just 1Kb of the precious RAM. Known as display “Mode 7”, this feature became a key part of the BBC Micro’s success.

Then there was expansion. The Model B had lots of ports – on the back were three types of video output, a serial port, cassette interface plus an analogue-to-digital port plus an optional Econet network interface. Underneath were more ports that used a ribbon cable connection – a parallel port, a connector for the optional floppy disk drive plus a power output and then a user port, 1MHz bus port and a clever interface called the Tube. Apart from the floppy disk and network ports, everything was included in the BBC Model B as standard.

The Model A was based on the same board as the Model B, but lacked a lot of the interfaces. It was possible to add them in though, but this required some work with a pile of components and a soldering iron. Upgrading either model to a floppy disk drive or Econet required opening up the machine and plugging in some new components too.

With all of these interfaces you could hook the BBC up to just about anything, assuming you had the right cables, including lab equipment, joysticks, mice, modems, printers, Teletext and Viewdata adapters and more. You could do that with other computers too, but the Tube interface was something different again.

Acorn built the system to be expandable, and the Tube was a way of connecting a second processor to the BBC. This wasn’t a coprocessor, these units essentially took over and reduced the BBC Micro itself to handling input and output only. These processors could be anything at all – Acorn (eventually) provided a 6502 or Z80 (both with 64Kb of their own RAM) and a National Semiconductor 32016 with up to 1MB of RAM. Other companies produced other second processors too, including the Motorola 68000 or Intel 8088. Because the work was now split between two computers, these solutions could be both fast and made lots of RAM available. Although none of these add-ons were very common, they did offer a lot of power for the price.

BBC Micro with Teletext Adapter and Second Processor

Mostly though, BBC setups were more modest. Typically paired with one or two 5.25” floppy disks (which could cost as much as the computer), a printer and a TV (or if you were lucky a Microvitec Cub monitor). They were versatile machines for small businesses, were pretty good for games (although the lack of RAM was always a problem) but most of all they succeeded in education where their robust design and wide variety of software made them the most common computer in schools at the time.

The built-in BASIC was also very fast and allowed structured programming, becoming a popular platform for bedroom coders who would then take their skills out into the real world when they started careers in IT.

Games were always a bit of a problem – compared to the rival Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64, the lack of RAM meant porting popular games from those platforms difficult or impossible. But in 1984, Acornsoft announced Elite - – space trading gaming the capitalised on the strengths of the BBC. In Elite, the player flies a spaceship flying through an impressively rendered 3D space environment with wire frame graphics with hidden line removal. The galaxy the player is in is procedurally generated, a semi-random technique that allows for a great variety of locations but with little memory used. Elite had a clever trick of managing to display two screen modes at the same time – something regarded as impossible – giving high-resolution black and white 3D at the top and a more colourful status bar at the bottom.

Upgraded versions of the BBC followed, the Model B+64 and B+128 adding more RAM through paged memory, and the more substantially upgraded BBC Master which took the computer into the 1990s. A cheaper version of the BBC called the Acorn Electron met with limited success. But Acorn had something else up their sleeve which was ultimately more important – the Acorn Archimedes, the world’s first production computer with an ARM processor. The ARM itself was designed by Acorn and was largely shaped by their experience with the simple, speedy 6502 found in the BBC.

Acorn Electron

Because it was both a popular machine and very reliable, there are lots of BBC Micros on the market today. Typically the capacitors in the power supply fail over time and need replacing, but other than that there are few problems. Floppy disk drives are another matter though, these can be quite rare. A complete working system with accessories can be worth well over £500.

You can argue at length what the ultimate 8-bit computer was, but the unique expandability options of the BBC surely make it a contender in any contest. The ARM processor which it inspired is – of course – what the world runs on today,

Image credits:
StuartBrady via Wikimedia Commons - CC0
marcus_jb1973 via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Steve Elliott via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
Adam Jenkins via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Zork I (1980)

Introduced December 1980

Although early microcomputers came in all sorts of different and incompatible varieties, they had a few things in common. Specifically, they didn’t have much in the way of memory and if they had graphics capabilities they were pretty rudimentary. Early computer games therefore required a bit of imagination, and one great example of where this was the case if the Zork series of text adventures from Infocom.

Zork running on an ADM31 terminal

Originally designed as a follow-on from the 1970s “Colossal Cave” adventure, Zork (in those days just called “Dungeon”) was developed for the DEC PDP-10 (a 36-bit minicomputer system) and was written in a version of LISP called MDL. Computers like these tended to have a relatively large amount of memory and decent hard disk storage, so the game itself grew quite large and complex. And just like Colossal Cave, Dungeon was very popular amongst people with access to the expensive computing equipment required to run it.

The next step by the authors – Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling and Bruce Daniels – was to port the game (now called “Zork”) to the ever-expanding range of microcomputers on offer. Some compromises had to be made due to the small amount of memory these machines had, and the original minicomputer game was rewritten into three episodes.

The creators formed a company to market the game called Infocom, and set about the challenge of rewriting the game. The approach was a novel one for the time – the Zork game itself was written in its own language called “ZIL”, which ran in a virtual environment called a “Z Machine”. This meant that the game (and others based on the same technology) could be easily ported to any compatible platform that had a Z Machine coded for it. Infocom partnered with the distributors of VisiCalc to sell the game, and by 1980 it was ready for the wider world.

You could call the finished product either an adventure game or a piece of interactive fiction. Rich text descriptions, clever natural-language parsing and complex gameplay made Zork a compelling proposition. The player starts in a field next to a white house, which turns out to be the gateway to an underground layer full of treasure and monsters – including the infamous “Grue” who would kill the adventurer if they wandered around in the dark. By solving a series of puzzles, mazes and other challenges, the player could bring all the treasure back to a cabinet in the house and thus win the game.

Sharp-eyed people may notice that this Kaypro II is accompanied by the Amiga version of Zork I

Sales were good, and as word got around – and the software was ported to more devices – the popularity began to grow throughout the 1980s. Zork II & III were released in 1982 and a wide variety of other games were released in the ZIL platform, including 1984’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” designed in conjunction with Douglas Adams. As a novel twist, some of these games included “feelies” which were physical objects in the box that would form part of the puzzles in the games.

Even as rivals tried to come up with graphical adventures, Infocom’s position remained very strong. But Infocom wanted to move beyond being just a games company, and in 1985 they launched a novel database product called Cornerstone. It wasn’t a success and Infocom was taken over by Activision, which ensured the short-term survival of the company… but in the end Activision didn’t really understand the Infocom brand and by the end of the 1980s development of text adventures had ceased, although there was a brief renaissance in the mid-1990s when several Infocom games compilations were released.

Because of the portable nature of the game, it’s possible to play Zork online for free. Be warned though – you may find that once you start, you won’t be able to stop playing until you’ve solved it all.

Image credits:
CyberHades via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
Marcin Wichary via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

 

Tangerine Microtan 65 (1979)

Tangerine Microtan 65

Introduced December 1979

As the 1970s drew to a close US computer manufacturers were dominating the market with fully-featured but expensive systems such as the Apple II and Atari 800. Where these systems were popular in the US market, British consumers had rather less to spend on these new-fangled machines and many hobbyists were tinkering with simple board computers such as the Acorn System 1 instead.

Although board computers were inexpensive, they were also very limited. Although it was usually possible to add a few peripherals, they still couldn’t do the sorts of things that the new American microcomputers could.

Into this market stepped the British-based Tangerine Computer Systems with the Microtan 65. This was a 6502-based single board computer with just 1Kb of RAM, 1Kb of ROM with a simple OS called the monitor, a video output and a hexadecimal keypad. But the system itself was highly expandable, with the first step being the TANEX expansion board that added a cassette and serial interface, plus the option of more RAM and up to five EPROMs.

However, expansion could go on and on with more boards for more memory, disk controllers, printers, better graphics and more. All of these could be slotted into a 19” rack-mountable case to make a microcomputer that could be used for business, home or scientific or engineering purposes. And although the price of all these components added up, you only needed to buy what you were going to use.

The result was a technically capable and scalable system that was successful enough for Tangerine to look at creating a follow-on model. Initially they looked at creating a CP/M compatible Z80-based machine that was developed for HH Electronics, named the HH Tiger. Despite an elegant design, the Tiger was not a success and is largely forgotten if it was even noticed at all.

Tangerine’s next hit was the Oric-1, another 6502 machine made very much in the mould of the very popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This machine and its successor – the Oric Atmos – proved very popular in the UK and some other European markets. But that is a story for another time.

Ultimately the Microtan 65 could have been the start of a huge revolution in personal computing, but it didn’t quite make it. Forty years later the Microtan 65 is a hard thing to find for collectors, but our research indicates that a well-specified system might cost you something in the region of £1500.

Image credit: Ian Dunster via Wikimedia Commons

LaserDisc (1978)

Either a LaserDisc or a CD being held by a very tiny person

Introduced December 1978

You might think that movies on disc started with DVDs in the late 1990s, but in fact the idea was first explored commercially in 1978 with the LaserDisc, sold at the time as the MCA DiscoVision. Although it was only ever a niche product appealing to people who like their movies very much, the LaserDisc paved the way for CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays.

Unlike modern digital discs, the LaserDisc stored video tracks in an analogue format, in the same way that VHS tapes did. Compared to modern methods, this is relatively inefficient and in order to fit a meaningful amount of video on video onto them, they were made in a 12” format (much like an LP record). Depending on which format the disc was, it could store up to 60 minutes of video on each side, although with many players you would physically need to flip the disc over after the hour was up.

The main competition at the time was VHS. Although VHS tapes were smaller and easier to handle, LaserDisc had nearly twice the horizontal resolution and (if handled carefully) a much greater lifespan. As with a modern DVD, it was possible to skip through parts of the film without having to wait for (seemingly) ever as the tape rewound or fast forwarded. Theoretically, LaserDiscs should have been cheaper than VHS tapes too, but in the end VHS could leverage the economy of scale to bring the price down.

Market penetration was not huge – by the late 1990s 2% of US households had one, but the format stayed around until 2001 when DVDs finally got good enough to replace LaserDiscs in quality terms, but even then the differences were marginal and it wasn’t until the introduction of Blu-ray that the quality of LaserDisc was definitely beaten.

Because of its analogue nature, the quality of playback varied depending on the quality of the device. Today, a good quality player can cost hundreds of pounds, or even £1000 plus if it comes with movies. And although these technological relics are somewhat impractical,  for collectors of esoteric entertainment equipment they may well make a worthwhile addition.

Image credit: Windell Oskay via Flickr

Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos (1968)

9th December 1968

Video conferencing, the computer mouse, hypertext and windowing systems, collaborative working, computer graphics, networks of computers… it all sounds very contemporary. But we are not talking about now – it is San Francisco in December 1968, and THIS is The Mother of All Demos.

Presented by Doug Engelbart, a pioneer of early computing and frankly a genius, this technology demonstration combined almost all the elements of modern computing decades before they hit the mainstream. Back in the 1960s, computers were seen primarily as number crunchers, but Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute were more interested in how humans could interact with computers and use them to extend their own capabilities.

Using a combination of modems, microwave links, video cameras, projectors and start-of-the-art computer equipment, Engelbart and his team wowed the thousand people or so watching his 90 minute presentation. And although the technology was being pushed to its limits, many of the audience were inspired to take the concepts and improve on them, including many other people who became pioneers in the early computing industry. Several of the ideas were picked up in the Xerox Alto five years later, and that in turn inspired the Mac and Windows operating systems.

The name “The Mother of All Demos” came much later of course, applied to the talk in the 1990s when the true extent of its influence had become apparent (and named after Saddam Hussein’s “Mother of All Battles” earlier that same decade). In retrospect, this was an under-rated but highly significant 90 minutes that helped to shape the future of technology, and that even 50 years later is still relevant. Although it took a while, from the late 1980s onwards Engelbart received many honours, including one from Bill Clinton. He died in 2013 aged 88.

The talk was recorded for posterity, and there are several versions available including an interactive and annotated one or a YouTube playlist showing the highlights, or a 17 minute version below.

Kogan Agora and Agora Pro (2008)

Announced December 2008

When Android was launched in 2007 there was great anticipation about what the first handset would look like, and in September 2008 we saw the launch of the world’s first Android smartphone – the T-Mobile G1.

Although the G1 was OK, you needed to be a T-Mobile customer to get it in most regions and it lacked the polish and elegance of the iPhone 3G. There was a lot of excitement over what Android phone would come next, but it nobody expected it to come from Kogan.

If you don’t live in Australia there is a good chance you haven’t heard of Kogan. Founded in 2006 but twenty-something entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan, the company at first was involved in selling electronics such as TV sets. Over the years Kogan’s retail offerings have expanded and started to include financial products, travel services and it became an internet service provider. All of this expansion was no doubt made a little easier by the absence of Amazon until November 2017, allowing Kogan to grow massively. But back in 2008 while a relatively small company, it decided to branch out into the smartphone market.

Unlike most electronics retailers, Kogan worked closely with the east Asian manufacturers of their products to come up with new products. To this end they announced the closely related Kogan Agora and Agora Pro Android smartphones in December 2008.

Kogan Agora Pro. A camera! WiFi! GPS!

The standard Agora had a 2.5” 320 x 240 pixel touchscreen display, 3.5G support and… errr… well, not much more it turns out because the Agora was strictly a misery-spec smartphone, but then it did only cost AU$299 or about £175. If you wanted essentials such as WiFi, GPS and a camera you’d need to fork out AU$399.

The BlackBerryesque design of the Agora didn’t seem that odd back in 2008, both because of the prevalence of BlackBerry handsets themselves, and the fact that there had only been one Android handset to date – the G1 – and that too had a physical keyboard. In truth though the need for a physical keyboard was a limitation of early versions of Android, as Google’s prototype (and touchscreen-less) Sooner handset demonstrated.

It might seem obvious to us today that the Agora wasn’t going to have the appeal that the big-screen G1 did, and indeed Kogan got cold feet shortly before the launch and effectively cancelled the product. There was an outcry at the time and accusations that it had all been a publicity stunt, but the Agora does seem to be under-powered in retrospect.

Other manufacturers tried a similar format, the Samsung Galaxy Pro and HTC ChaCha being examples. None of these have been particular popular, although BlackBerry persists with physical keyboards today.

The Agora never made it to be the second Android phone to market, instead it was a keyboardless version of the G1 known as the HTC Magic. A few months later though, Samsung debuted the I7500 Galaxy which brought forth an enormous family of hundreds of other Galaxy handsets. The flop with the Agora didn’t do Kogan much harm in the end either, and they use the Agora name today for their current crop of smartphones.

YotaPhone (2012)

Announced December 2012

A long time ago, phones used to have a really great battery life. Then powerful big-screen smartphones took over, and suddenly you had to charge your phone more than once a day. A lot of that problem was down to the screen itself, and as screens got bigger and bigger the problem became more acute.

Not every type of display is a power hog though, and electronic ink displays such as those found on e-readers offer much better battery life. But while displays such as that are good for reading text, for a lot of other applications they are not usable because of their slow refresh rate. So you can’t really fix the power drain problem of smartphones with electronic ink displays.

Russian company Yota had different ideas, and their approach was rather radical – give the phone TWO displays. The YotaPhone had a traditional 4.3” LCD panel on one side, and on the other a 4.3” 360 x 640 pixel capacitive touchscreen electronic ink display. The secondary display was designed for things like notifications, email, calendars and other reasonably static displays. Some clever software trickery was required to do this, but otherwise the YotaPhone was a pretty standard Android smartphone.

Although it was announced in December 2012, it took nearly a whole year to get to market, finally shipping in November 2013. The €499 price tag was somewhat expensive, but it found a market niche and its own fan base. In February 2014 the YotaPhone 2 was launched with some much needed improvements and in 2017 the YotaPhone 3 followed.

The YotaPhone concept lives in that no-man’s land where products that neither fail nor succeed live. Perhaps if the YotaPhone had a better-known name on it, it might have been more of a success. But perhaps the YotaPhone is simply ahead of its time, and in another five years we’ll all have dual-screen smartphone like this…

Image credits: Yota

Anticipating the iPhone – how manufacturers misjudged the future (2006)

By late 2006 there were persistent rumours that Apple was in the process of launching a mobile phone. But the absurd lengths that Apple went to in order to keep it a secret meant that rivals had very little idea of what Cupertino was about to unleash in January 2017.

Motorola ROKR E6

Motorola probably thought that it had some sort of idea what Apple would be doing, as it had collaborated with them on the disastrous ROKR E1 back in 2005. Perhaps based in part in what Apple had been doing with its fifth-generation iPod at the time, Moto came up with a music and video capable device called the Motorola ROKR E6 in December 2006, which coincidentally had a touchscreen and ran Linux too which made it a sort-of-smartphone. Hampered by a GSM-only connection and no WiFi, the ROKR E6 came tantalisingly close to what we might consider to be a modern smartphone... but missed.

At roughly the same time, Samsung announced the F300 (“Ultra Music”) and F500 (“Ultra Video”) handsets. Unusually, these were two-sided phones with a small screen and number pad on one side and a larger screen and multimedia controls on the other. The F500 was a 3G device and had a hinged arrangement so you could use it as a tiny video player, the F300 was a GSM-only device without the hinge. Both were interesting a novel devices. Neither was particularly successful.

The mistake that Motorola, Samsung and other manufacturers had made was to guess that Apple was working on an “iPod phone” when in fact they were working on an all-touch smartphone instead. In fact, Motorola in particular (with devices such as the A1000) and to a lesser extent Samsung (with the SGH-i700 and others) had experimented with devices much like the iPhone years before Apple, but consumer responses had been cool.

Today the F300, F500 and ROKR E6 are quite rare devices, especially the Motorola. Typical prices seem to be around €70 or so going up to several hundred for good examples of the F300. And while they are certainly interesting devices, they were also dead-ends. Just a few weeks after Samsung and Motorola announced these, Apple revealed what it had really been working on..

Samsung F300 Ultra Music and F500 Ultra Video

Image sources: Samsung Mobile and Motorol

Retro 5|10: December 2004 and 2009

December is usually a quiet month as manufacturers concentrate on shipping already-announced products to the shops in time for Christmas, but there were a handful of announcements five and ten years ago.

December 2004

Ten years ago, Sharp was leading the pack when it came to screen and camera resolution, but most devices were exclusive to Vodafone. The Sharp TM200 was only the second two-megapixel camera on the UK market, and the other one was the Sharp 902. Despite this, Sharp didn't really capture the public imagination, which seemed to be a curse facing the Japanese mobile manufacturers.

Sharp TM200

Another Japanese handset this month was the Sanyo S750, a capable enough device but in a slabby and unattractive package which must have lacked shelf appeal in the shops. Sanyo didn't stick around in the market for long.

Sanyo S750

Motorola on the other hand kept pumping out variations of the same clamshell, and the Motorola V330 was yet another example of this. Despite a lack of imagination, Motorola sold quite a lot of these attractive but somewhat unfriendly devices.

Motorola V330

December 2009

The original Nokia 6700 Classic was a tasteful feature phone.. until Nokia covered it in some sort of yellow metal and called in the Nokia 6700 Classic Gold Edition. It was either a must-have fashion accessory or deeply tacky, depending on your point of view. We will let you make your own mind up.

Nokia 6700 Classic Gold Edition

Rather less garish was the Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition which was a GPS-equipped Series 40 feature phone, bringing budget satnav capabilities at just over €100. Of course, it was never going to be as easy to use as a dedicated navigation device or modern smartphone.

Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition

Two phones that attempted to be more environmentally friendly than average, the Sony Ericsson Elm and Hazel came with reduced packaging and a higher level of recycled plastics, but they didn't really address all the problems and met with a cool reception from consumers.

Sony Ericsson Elm

Sony Ericsson Hazel

Retro 5|10: December 2003 and 2008

The mobile phone industry tends to wind down in December, here is what we were looking at five and ten years ago.

December 2003

Although they had been on the market for a while, we looked at the Panasonic G70 and Siemens Xelibri 6 "girlie phones", neither was particularly impressive when it came to hardware and although both were quite interesting to look at the whole concept was rather patronising. Another somewhat unusual phone was the LG G7050 which was a strange cross between a slider and a "candy bar" phone.

Panasonic G70

Siemens Xelibri 6

LG G7050

December 2008 Back in December 2008 there was still only one Android phone on the market, the T-Mobile G1.. so there was still intense competition to be second. For a while it looked like the Kogan Agora would be that phone, but the product was cancelled before launch amid rumours that it might have been a publicity stunt. In 2013 there is quite a lot of interest in smartwatches, but LG were doing something similar five years ago with the LG GD910 watch phone which never really captured the imagination of consumers at the time, but these days a good one will sell for hundreds of euro on eBay. Kogan Agora LG GD910 At the more expensive end of the market was the original BELLPERRE phone, a high-end luxury device that allowed a high degree of customisation. Also pitching at the luxury end of the market was the Samsung Ego which managed to look quite cheap at the same time as being stupidly expensive. BELLPERRE   Samsung Ego