Jalaj P. Jha

The evolution of BBC Micro Computer, started in the early 80’s. A descriptive history is available at http://bbc.nvg.org/history.php3. The site caption says “The BBC Lives!”, which is also evident from sites as http://beebmaster.co.uk/ which has update as recent as Nov 2006…


Photo courtesy : http://beebmaster.co.uk/

The BBC Micro had the keyboard and the CPU built in the same box and could be attached to most existing television sets. The system I had privilage to work on was the Model B having 32KB RAM (yes! KB), 74 keys keyboard, external 5.25″ floppy drive (my floppy from those days formatted to 360KB on DOS) and no hard drive. The softwares we worked on (BBC Basic, LOGO, and a word processor) were available on a ROM chip each. The floppy those days were genuine dual sided, each one having it’s own File Allocation Table (not the exact term, just in terms of DOS), and had no folder structure as it exists now. A shiftLock provided in addition to CapsLock, provided single key access to shift characters. The Delete key worked as Backspace key of now. There was not lengthy boot procedure and prompt was accessible the moment you switch on the computer. A warm reboot occured on press of Shift+Break keys (As far as I remember).

The specifications sounds as Grandparent’s tales now!!