Retro Computers

The following article contains material that some people may find offensive. Please only follow the link if you don’t mind a little bit of 8-bit adult entertainment.

You have been warned.
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Thanks to John of http://www.transistorized.org/, he has scanned in a article from BBC Acorn User May 1990. The article describes the computer setup behind the scenes for the 30 monitors used in the game.

Strike it Lucky was a popular game-show hosted by Michael Barrymore in the early 90s.

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Managed to pick up a rather special machine last week – a BBC Model A. It looks like this one has not been upgraded as it only has the printer port. No tube, disk drive, RGB, Econet, user or analog ports either!

Im still in the process of cleaning it. I’ve run out of my ‘special’ cleaning stuff. It was brown with over the top school markings on.

You can see the rest of the photos on Flickr! and read more about the BBC Model A here.

Micro Men will be repeated on the 22/05/10 at 10:30 on BBC Four. All computer hardware and most props were supplied by The Centre for Computing History who are a computer museum based in Haverhill, Suffolk. Jason Fitzpatrick, the curator of the museum played a small part in the film as David Johnson David. See if you can see him dancing in the background!

The BBC website says the following about the show…

Affectionately comic drama about the British home computer boom of the early 1980s.

Legendary inventor Clive Sinclair battles it out with ex-employee Chris Curry, founder of Acorn Computers, for dominance in the fledgling market.

The rivalry comes to a head when the BBC announce their Computer Literacy Project, with the stated aim of putting a micro in every school in Britain. When Acorn wins the contract, Sinclair is furious, and determines to outsell the BBC Micro with his ZX Spectrum computer.

Home computing arrives in Britain in a big way, but is the country big enough for both men?

If you missed the program, you can catch it on the BBC iPlayer.

Here are probably 2 of the most important computers of all time (Well, the BBC is definitely a very important machine!)

You can click on the photo above to see a higher resolution copy on Flickr.

Here are the specifications of the 2 machines.

BBC Model B

• CPU : MOS Technologies 6502 at 2Mhz
• RAM : 32k as standard (This one has 52k RAM)
• Storage : Either audio casette or disk. This one has a SD Card reader acting as a disk drive
• Graphics : 640×256 with 8 colours + teletext (Mode 7)
• OS : OS 1.20 and Watford Electronics DDFS 1.50

Apple MacBook Pro

• CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.26Ghz
• RAM : 2GB DDR3
• Storage : 160Gb SATA
• Graphics : 1280×800 16 Million colours
• OS : Apple OS X 10.6.3

The BBC is the older machine, but it boots to its OS in under a second. If only modern macs and PCs would be as quick.

Up and running and on display at the Centre for Computing History is the BBC Domesday System. The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England.

Although the Centre for Computing History already had a complete system in its collection it was sadly non-functioning. A recent donation from Carl Elkins of another near complete non-functioning system allowed volunteers to swap parts, fault find and tease a system back to life.

Thanks to Carl we also now have a larger number of interactive laserdiscs on a wide range of subjects including robotics, business systems and pre-school learning. We even have the original BBC Domesday System promotional disc which we will be digitising and putting online very soon.

Preservation
The Domesday System was part of the BBC Computer Literacy Project and is an important record of British life in the mid-eighties. The Centre for Computing history will be looking to collaborate with other organisations in order to preserve this information and make it available to th general public if possible. However, the scope of the presevation project may be limited by copyright issues.

Volunteers
Projects like this are made possible by the hard work and commitment of our volunteers. The museum regularly holds ‘Volunteer Sundays’ where like-minded enthusiasts, engineers and programmers get together at the museum for a productive day of tinkering and fixing of retro computers as well as helping create new interactive exhibits. If you would like to be involved, please contact our volunteer co-ordinator : Andy Taylor(Me!) : andyt@computinghistory.org.uk

You can read the original post here.