If you’re of a certain age and nationality, you’ll remember 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. of this fair. Isle. The Beeb is a material valued by many manufacturers, including Eben Upton from Raspberry Pi
fame that made its single board computers after reinventing the BBC Micro.
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, also known as 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.
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“They, like me, owe the start of their careers to that first exposure to computers through things like BBC Micro,” Pajak said in an interview on Twitter.
The results have been very interesting. 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 ’80s and’ 90s.
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“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 a tweet. Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton submitted an implementation of Conway’s Life in machine code 6502.
However, not all is MIT quality code.
“A lot of people do 10 PRINT ‘POOP’ / 20 GOTO 10,” he says.
Pajak said he and his collaborators believe that access to older technology encourages experimentation in the same way the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are training a new generation of developers.
The best part? They don’t have to be using 40-year-old hardware to do something cool. In fact, the emulator is now supercharged.
“We added a 10 GHz 6502 emulator on the back end. Now you can see in seconds what a night rendering on a BBC Micro would look like, ”Pajak said.
You can see a gallery of demos in the BBCMicroBot Web page.
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