Advent of Computing - Episode 8 - Acorn and the BBC

Episode Date: July 14, 2019

The Raspberry Pi had been a huge success at its stated goals, and continues to be. But, this isn't the first time a British company would design and develop a computer as an accessible platform for learning programming. In fact, if you've read much about the Pi then you've probably seen people calling it a "BBC Micro 2".   So what was the BBC Micro? What did the BBC have to do with creating a new computer? And how is any of this connected to the 21st century version?   Today I want to share the story from a slice of a somewhat forgotten age: BBC's involvement with Acorn Computers and how they worked together to educate a generation of programmers. Along the way we will see how a small UK company created an impressive series of computers who's legacy may not be known in the States, but has had a surprising impact on the world.   Special thanks to Neil from Retro Man Cave for sharing his memories of the BBC Micro. You can find him on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLEoyoOKZK0idGqSc6Pi23w

I'm sure by now the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 is somewhat old news. It first hit the internet about a month or so ago. For those of you who don't know, the Pi is a small and cheap computer originally released in 2012 and designed and mostly manufactured in the United Kingdom. Since inception, it's been targeted at the educational market, with a slant towards accessibility and trying to get computers in the hands of people around the world. A lot of the emphasis on its marketing material is placed on teaching children how to program

and use a computer in general. The Raspberry Pi has been a huge success at all of its goals, and it continues to be. But this isn't the first time that a British company would design and develop a computer as an accessible platform for learning. In fact, if you've read much about the Pi, then you've probably come across people calling it a, quote, BBC Micro 2. So, what was the BBC Micro? What did the BBC have to do with creating a new educational computer? And how is any of this connected to the 21st century? Welcome back to Advent of Computing. I'm your host, Sean Haas. This is episode 8, Acorn and the BBC. Now, a lot of people in the rest of the world or not into retrocomputing aren't aware, but in the 80s and 90s, the UK had a vibrant and somewhat isolated home computer

market. Companies like Amstrad, Sinclair, and Acorn were dominant in the UK, but largely irrelevant or unknown outside the region. Today, I want to share a story from a slice of that somewhat forgotten age. BBC's involvement with Acorn Computers and how they worked together to educate a generation of programmers. Along the way, we'll see how a small UK company created an impressive series of computers whose legacy may not be well known in the states, but has had a surprising impact on the world at large. The BBC, or British Broadcasting Corporation, is England's national TV and radio broadcaster.

It's somewhat analogous to PBS in the States. Now, the BBC's existed since the 1920s, originally as a radio broadcaster, but expanding into TV once, well, the television was invented. However, in this episode, we'll only be looking at a small corner of the company's history, in the late 70s and early 80s. Last episode, we covered the release and proliferation of the IBM PC system as an architecture, which occurred in roughly the same time span that we're looking at today. Something I hinted at but never really elaborated on was the larger computer market at the time. This period, starting sometime around the 1971 introduction of the first microprocessor,

is sometimes referred to as the microcomputer revolution. However, I think a more apt term for this era is the microcomputer explosion. With the microprocessor on the scene, this was the first time that small-scale computers could be built relatively cheaply. These new micro-sized systems were initially called microcomputers. And in the coming years, there was a real explosion in both the raw number of computers being produced, but also the raw number of computers being produced, but also the diversity of those computers. Today, we don't really give much thought to the fact that most computers are basically the same thing, but during the microcomputer revolution, there were

countless different systems to choose from, almost all totally different and incompatible. The competition in the market, plus Moore's Law, meant that cheaper computers were being made every year and started putting computers in offices, factories, and eventually the home. Pretty soon, people started seeing the writing on the wall. Computers were here to stay, and they were going to change all of us on a fundamental level. But the microcomputer revolution wasn't a total good. Nothing ever can be. As computers helped to automate and replace many jobs, workers started to get concerned. Computers made office workers more efficient, so fewer were needed. The same cheap chips that made computers also

made industrial robots that could more quickly and safely do the jobs of many factory workers. Automation wasn't a new invention in the 70s, but this was a point where the pace of automation started to skyrocket. Companies were able to save money by replacing workers with machines. And with that good came the bad, unemployment. So, here's the main issue. On the large scale, companies are making more money and employing fewer workers, while on the small scale, personal hardship from unemployment is increasing.

Obviously, that's not very sustainable, economically or ethically. It's on the verge of what you may call a disaster, unless, that is, a solution can be found. One way around this problem would be for governments to ban automation. I know, that's also not a sustainable solution. You'd have to get everyone in the world on board at the same time. Otherwise, those who institute the ban would simply fall behind economically. It may sound drastic, but the idea was being floated around during this time period.

The other option was to adapt. Mainly, that would involve getting people into more jobs surrounding computers, like electrical design and engineering, or programming. But that raises another problem. A job like programming requires more than just on-site training. You need education and exposure to computers. During this era, microcomputers were just starting to make their way into homes, but there wasn't really a unified

front for educating people on how to use them or how to program. This is where the BBC finally hits the scene. In 1979, on the heels of public discussion spurred on by media coverage of the oncoming economic disaster, the BBC wrote and submitted a report on the matter to the British government. This document, simply called Microelectronics, formally laid out the problem. It breaks down where automation and computerization will cause job losses and where new fields will open up. computerization will cause job losses and where new fields will open up. A thing goes on to explain how the BBC, as a broadcaster with experience in education, can provide a unique solution.

The ensuing project, which would go public in 1982, is now known as the BBC Computer Literacy Project. In the 80s, this project would work to educate the public about computers, both in and out of the classroom. And you need to remember that the larger goal of this was to prepare the UK for the shift in the job market so that the company could avoid depression while also educating a new generation of programmers and computer users. So how did the Computer Literacy Project work towards this goal? Well, as a broadcasting company, the BBC obviously tried to tackle the problem by creating a series of educational TV shows about computers and programming. Working in tandem to the educational media, the BBC decided it would need a matching computer.

The big advantage of this tactic was that they had a single machine to base their educational material on. A TV show can go only so far in educating the masses, but having a standard platform to display and for people to learn on would ensure the success of the project. But here's where we once again run into a problem. The BBC isn't a computer company, you can tell by the name. And beyond that, they had a very short timescale to come up with a system. From design to publishing of the first TV series, it was about two years of work. So the BBC had to find an outside manufacturer, ideally in the UK, to build them a machine that would be up to their educational

needs. I want to stop the overarching story for a second and cover two quick points that I think will help explain things. One's a little more important and the other one I feel will just help you connect with the story more. The first one is the form factor of these early computers. Now, these aren't the desktop systems that we'd recognize nowadays. Instead, most of these early home computers looked something like an overgrown keyboard. The system was built into a small box with a keyboard affixed atop it. This made it easy to set up since you only needed to plug in the power and a monitor. Also, since they looked roughly like a typewriter,

it was easy for people to adapt to it. It was more inviting. Second, and most importantly, is how these computers were interfaced with. Obviously, this is before GUI computers were on the scene. The user interface was all text-based. Specifically, most computers of this era used the BASIC programming language as an interface. Now, BASIC is a topic deserving its own episode, but to give a broad brush, BASIC, that's all caps, is a programming language designed for beginners. It was also relatively easy to implement an interpreter for the language on a lot of these early home micros, so a lot of them did. This meant that by learning to use one of these micros, you'd end up also learning to program. Also, most computers had a slightly customized version of BASIC, often called a

dialect. So, wrapping that up, let's get back on track. In the early 80s, the BBC put out a bid for manufacturers. And with that bid came a specification for exactly what they wanted. I've talked about spec sheets before on this podcast, but I think it bears repeating because this is an important topic that comes up a lot. A specification document is a formalized explanation for what something, be that hardware or software, should do and how it should accomplish that. For the BBC, their spec included an outline for a new dialect of BASIC, complete with graphics, sound, and math functions. The BASIC implementation needed to not only be useful for education, but also robust enough to be used for real-world tasks.

but also robust enough to be used for real-world tasks. Outside of that, the spec called for onboard networking, the ability to output to a standard color TV display, and external expansion and peripheral ports. Now, the BBC did already have a computer in mind, or rather, in brain. That machine was Newberry Laboratory's NewBrain, a small and relatively inexpensive computer that met almost all of the BBC's requirements. However, not all was well. The NewBrain project was hitting delays, which in turn threatened to delay the BBC's computer literacy project.

The BBC had originally planned on releasing its first broadcast in their literacy series in 81,, but the new brain issues forced that date to be pushed back to 82. Obviously, this was not alright for the BBC. Fed up, they went looking for other options. At roughly the same time that the British government was starting to come to grips with the idea of a shift towards computing, a small group of programmers were starting a new computer company in Cambridge. This new company, Acorn Computers, was tiny, but it started at exactly the right time to really make it big. 1979 was a year on the cusp of the microcomputer exploding into home use. So it was a good year to sneak into the

newly minted market. In 79 and 80, Sinclair's ZX80, Commodore's VIC-20, and Atari's 800 series, along with Tandy's TRS-80, started hitting the scene as options for personal computers. All of these would become legendary in time. Following along in this packed field, in 79 Acorn started producing computers, first as hobbyist kits, but eventually moving towards fully assembled microcomputers targeted for home and office use. But the company wouldn't really hit it off until 1980. That was the year they released the Acorn Atom. The Atom was in good company,

hardware-wise. It was centered around a MOS6502 CPU, a very popular 8-bit processor at the time. Base models of the Atom came with 2 kilobytes of RAM expandable to up to 12, a cassette interface for storing data on tapes, and could display both monochrome and color video on a standard TV. The machine was used via a basic command line. As far as things went, this was a pretty standard loadout for 1980, and it had been shown before to be a recipe for success. The Atom was in production from 1980 to 1982, and it turned out to be a huge hit. It quickly became one of the

best-selling computers in the UK. Behind the scenes, Acorn was already working on a follow-up to this home run. The new machine was internally called the Proton and it was slated to be an advanced 16-bit home computer. But there was something on the horizon that would make Acorn change their plans. In 1980, Acorn was one of the companies contacted when the BBC put out bids for a new computer. And, unsurprisingly, Acorn jumped at the opportunity. The current in-development Proton could deliver nearly everything the BBC was asking for. It also helped to entice Acorn that whoever was chosen by the BBC would have massive amounts of marketing behind it, and the possibility of government subsidies.

Through a series of meetings, Acorn pitched the Proton as a new platform for the computer literacy project, and the BBC bit, requesting a demo. The only issue is that the Proton only existed on paper. There was no working prototype. To make matters worse, the team working on the Proton was only given around 4 or 5 days notice to get a demo ready. If you've ever worked in IT, then this should be sounding all too familiar.

Delivering an uncompleted product to a client is always a nightmare scenario, but it seems too good to pass up for a lot of management. However, this is one of the rare cases where that nightmare had a happy ending. A team of about five Acorn employees would spend the next five days sprinting to a prototype. In that time, they went from rough sketches to designs, sourcing parts, and finally building the prototype. A process like that would usually take months, maybe more. But Acorn only had days. If the demo wasn't ready, the BBC may have just gone to another vendor. So Acorn had to be ready in time. Sophie Wilson, one of the developers of the Proton, explained the mad dash of the last few days of development in a 2008 interview, to quote,

We built the actual machine Wednesday night and into Thursday evening, and then of course it didn't work, and we had to start debugging it. That debugging took all Thursday evening into Friday morning. I had to go home and get some sleep because I knew I would have to write some software for the machine. I came back 6am Friday morning, by which time it was working. By the time the BBC people had arrived at our offices, we had an operating system and basic interpreter running so that we could type on the screen and that stuff could come out. Before they left, we had random graphics showing on the screen. We were fairly confident we had

built something that would stay working during the demonstration. It was a rush to try and alter things to a state that we thought would be interesting to look at, to show them things that they would understand. End quote. The BBC was scheduled for a 10am meeting on Friday, and the team had the whole system working with just 3 hours to spare. Lucky for Acorn, everything went well. By April of 81, the BBC had signed for 12,000 machines. The Proton was now to be known as the BBC Micro, and would soon become the computer of the BBC. In the end, the tech demo wasn't the only thing that won the contract for Acorn. The demo and the time frame it was accomplished in was impressive. But more than that, Acorn had a track record of putting out

quality computers, and they were more than willing to work with the BBC to make their specification a reality. But the system wasn't done, the prototype wouldn't be the final system shipped. The dev team still had to finalize the computer design, and in the coming months, the released version of the BBC Micro started to come together. The original specification was implemented into the hardware and the software of the machine. The final product came in two variants, the Model A and Model B. Each was powered by an 8-bit MOS 6502, just like the earlier Atom computer. The A came loaded with 16KB RAM while the Model B came with 32KB RAM. The BBC Micro would connect to cassette tapes and floppy drives for storage,

and displayed both text and graphics with color on a standard consumer television. Acorn met the networking requirement via their Econet interface, a simple networking protocol somewhat similar to UDP. Another key feature of the Micro was its internal expansion interface, called the tube. This interface allowed a second coprocessor to be added to the machine to aid in its operation. Most commonly, the tube was used to add a Z80 to the micro so that it could run CPM, another common operating system at the time. Interestingly enough, the tube would end up being used in the early development of the

ARM processor that now powers many embedded devices, but that's a story for a later date. The software side of the machine was handled by BBC BASIC, the dialect of BASIC laid out in the earlier specification doc. Overall, the BBC Micro would meet or exceed all the requirements set out in the original designs for the computer. In December of 81, the first units shipped, and just one month later, the first of the BBC's educational broadcasts started. The video portion of the computer literacy project would end up being spread across multiple TV series, but the first was called The Computer Program.

I think this clip from the first episode of that show sums up the situation pretty well. You may have noticed 1982 is information technology year. There's a minister of information technology and the government is even spending a great deal of money on publicizing it. But what is information technology? All it really means is the world of computers. But why have they suddenly become so important? And what should we as non-computer experts know about them? Well, that's exactly what I shall be finding out during this series. One thing I know already, don't expect the computer revolution to happen tomorrow. It's happening now. That was the voice of Chris Cyril, one of the hosts of the series. The computer program laid out the state of computing in the early 80s. It showed viewers

where computers were in use, while giving them a gentle introduction to the theory and practice of using a computer. A lot of the episodes came along with programming demos, and of course all of these demos were presented with one of the Acorns' BBC Microcomputers. The computer program would run for just 10 episodes, but that was only the start of a larger overall project. Over the course of the next 9 years, the project would span over a dozen separate TV series, countless books, radio programs, and educational courses aimed at both adults and school children. The TV programs reached somewhere between 500,000 and 1.2 million

viewers. Exposure to the idea of computers as a tool that anyone could own or use started to shift public perception and really garner interest. And the availability of courses and more in-depth educational material helped to increase computer literacy in adults across the UK. One of the first new classes, 30 Hour Basic, developed by the BBC and the National Extension College, combined a distance learning course with a companion book of the same name. 30-Hour Basic, the book, sold around 200,000 copies. It would go on to be used as the backbone for computer literacy classes in countless colleges.

The other piece of the puzzle was teaching the up-and-coming generations. At the height of the computer literacy project, 85% of primary and 65% of secondary schools in the UK had BBC micros in the classroom, to some degree. The British government helped spur this on by providing subsidies for BBC micros in schools, and training programs for teachers. This made the system an easy choice, because it was especially accessible, and there was a glut of educational materials geared towards use with the BBC micro. Talking in abstract about the Computer Literacy Project is one thing, but what was it actually like in the classroom? Well, in case you

can't tell by my accent, I'm not exactly from a part of the world that was involved with this program. Luckily, I was able to get in touch with someone with a little more personal experience with the BBC Micro. I can think of no better way to close out this episode than hearing from someone who had first-hand experience with the machine and how it affected them on a personal level. Hello, it's Neil here from the Retro Man Cave. Now, I think it's fair to say I grew up in a typical small British town. It was a very small school that I went to in the 80s, and it was in no way cutting-edge or progressive, shall we say. In fact, my very first teacher was a nun, and I remember the head teacher was also the physical education teacher, and he would put on his full gym kit and stand in a corner smoking a pipe for the duration of the PE lessons. And we only had one class per year with about, let's say, 20 to 25 students in, so really quite a small school with quite a small budget.

But computers, and in particular BBC micros, were always a part of the setting in that school. And I'm under no illusion that that's entirely because of the computer literacy project and the subsidies that went with it, so that the school could afford those computers. In our school we had the BBC Model B, which was the model with a bit more memory, and I remember they all had floppy disk drives, which was quite a luxury because at home it was much more common in the UK for us to use cassette tapes to load our software than the nice quick fancy floppy drives and they were all complemented with a cub branded monitor and they had to be because the BBC's were industrial looking units designed to survive children smashing their sandwiches and bashing

the computers so the monitors were no different so overall it had quite an industrial and serious look again compared to our home computers which would have been the small cheap ZX Spectrums and the Amstrad CPCs and the like. So being a small school we had one BBC Micro per year in the corner of each classroom and what we did with them was not just programming it wasn't just a case of we had BBC Micros and we learned basic programming. The computers we incorporated into every part of the curriculum so for example we might learn something in a maths lesson and then there would be complementary software on the BBC micro that we would take in turns because we only had

one computer so we would have our allocated time to go and play the software that complemented that part of the curriculum so the teachers no doubt had lesson plans for the computer literacy project, but because this was done by the BBC, a huge media company, we also had a lot of complementary videos. I remember one in particular was called Geordie Racer, and the whole premise was about this kid in a northern town, and he and a friend, I think it was, bred racing pigeons. So we had these videos provided by the bbc the teacher would wheel

out the television and we'd watch this series called geordie racer and after each episode of pigeon racing we would go to the computer and then we would play games based on the series and that would be things like planning out the quickest route for the pigeon to fly from house to house or from town to town and I think someone was trying to steal the pigeons as well so it was um it was very visual the BBC was capable of quite colourful graphics and it needed to be to appeal to us young kids it couldn't just be text but it was so well complemented by the lesson plans and by the videos the whole project was seamless so like I said it wasn't just about kids learning basic

it was about computers being incorporated into the entire curriculum across the school so that we would become confident with computers so that they would become second nature to us and yes there was then the opportunity to learn things like basic programming on the programming side what I remember was logo so this was a very visual programming language because you would have what's called the logo turtle, which was just a triangle in the middle of the screen. And you would input commands like forward 10, right 20. So that would go forward 10 and turn by 20 degrees to the right. And then you'd put a pen down command. So it would drop a pen and then you would go forward 100. So it would draw a line then in that direction for 100 whatever the measurement was so you could input a list of commands to draw a simple pattern but then you could incorporate things like loops

into it so you would get a kaleidoscope effect as the pattern drew itself over and over again and what every school wanted and what our school never had was the logo turtle so you had the virtual turtle on the screen but if your school had the budget you could buy a physical turtle. This was like a big remote controlled car with a umbilical cord back to the BBC micro and you would put that in the middle of the classroom and it would physically put a pen up and down onto a huge sheet of paper. So you would program your design and then the physical turtle would go and draw it on the classroom floor. Wow, that would have blown my mind.

It would still blow my mind today if I could get hold of one. But yeah, that was always the dream, the logo turtle. But I have good memories of the BBC Micro. I would always badger the teacher to let me use the BBC Micros in my lunch break rather than going out and playing sports. And they would let me. I had full access to an 8-bit computer in the 1980s with a lot of programs and a lot of learning materials and my best friend JP would always join me and he in fact also like me went on to have a career in IT and we both attribute the start we got with the BBC

Micro into breaking into our careers. It really did give us the confidence and the skill set that we needed. JP is now working in the Mediterranean in IT. I've worked all over Europe and we've both found that we do bump into British people all over the world who have the same story to tell. British people of a certain generation who have the same story to tell of how the BBC Micro gave them their head start they need and led them into the career that they're in. I say of a certain generation because there was a definite change when we moved into the 90s and the computer literacy project ended. The focus shifted very quickly from that all-encompassing top-down view

of the whole curriculum and incorporating computing into it to here's an IT lesson. You do it once a week and in this lesson we will learn how to use Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. You will learn how to use an application on top of an operating system that you don't understand how it works and that application is a program, is a list of instructions but that's irrelevant. What we want to do is use WordArt and print a certificate or something pretty to put on your wall. That is what IT became and it was a sad development. It really was. And I really hope

that one day what was done with the BBC Micro can be done again for children all around the world, not just in England, so that they can get their head start and the skills and the confidence in computing and not just in jabbing tablets or using applications in the same way that we did. in the same way that we did. So, where does this leave us? Acorn really made out well from the Computer Literacy Project. Over its production run, 1.5 million BBC Micros would be sold. The success of the Micro let Acorn go on to develop even more ambitious computers,

including designing the first ARM processors, which would one day come to dominate the embedded and mobile market. As for the BBC and the UK at large, the computer literacy project was a huge success, but it wasn't just that it educated both adults and school children, it was also the cultural shift it facilitated. Thanks to the good timing of the project, a whole generation of UK children were inspired to become programmers, just as the field was expanding. Ultimately, the BBC succeeded in its goal of preparing for the coming computer revolution in the best way possible. In the 21st century, the Raspberry Pi would revisit the idea of an educational computer designed and produced in the UK. And it's no coincidence. Many of the

developers of the Raspberry Pi project were exposed to computers for the first time via the BBC Micro and the Computer Literacy Project. Today, the Pi is being used to continue the spread of computers in education, just like the BBC Micro did in the 80s. I want to give some special thanks to Neil from Retro Man Cave for sharing his memories of the BBC Micro with me. To hear more from him, check out his YouTube channel. I'll link it in the description. Thanks for listening to Advent of Computing. I'll link it in the description. Thanks for listening

to Advent of Computing. I'll be back in two weeks time with another episode. With the last few episodes being devoted to 80s microcomputers, I think I'll be heading a little further back into the past and more picking up on the era of Big Iron for a time. Until then, if you liked this episode, consider sharing it with a friend. You can also rate and review on Apple Podcasts. If you have any comments or suggestions, hit me up on Twitter. I am at Advent of Comp over there. And as always, have a great rest of your day.