Where your host gets all misty-eyed about a long time ago in a bedroon far, far away...
Growing up in the 1980s meant that my first home computer was not a PC or a Mac, but a BBC Master 128. As was standard with Eighties' computers, it came with its own version of BASIC, the Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code so detested by all of the World's Greatest Programming Authorities. Not only was BASIC pre-installed, most Eighties' computers booted straight into BASIC. Add in the fact that most computer magazines of the day featured programs that you could type in yourself, and getting into programming was very easy.
My parents got me the computer quite late, around 1985/86, just as all the cool kids were turning their backs on 8 bit and embracing the brave new world of 16 bit, exemplified by the stunning (at the time) ATARI ST and COMMODORE AMIGA. The problem with 16 bit computers was that they did not boot into BASIC, but into graphical user interface. When actually programming your computer required more than just switching it on and starting to type, coupled with the power of the computers meaning that Arcade-quality games could be played in the comfort of your own bedroom, it is not hard to see why coding started to decline and home computers became little more than glorified games machines.
So, much as I may have cursed my parents' foolishness at buying a computer that was long in the tooth, and much as I may have wished that it was me that had the Atari ST and not my friend, there was one massive advantage to owning a BBC: BBC BASIC. It an age when structured programming was virtually unheard of and GOTO and GOSUB ruled the programming roost, BBC BASIC came complete with the ability to add user-defined procedures and functions. It may have run on out-dated hardware, but it was streets ahead of any other BASIC. If it had been me with the Atari ST, it is unlikely that I would have ever learned to program.
I spent a lot of time programming on my trusty old Beeb, typing in listings from magazines, adapting them, and even writing my own programs from scratch. None of it was very good, but it taught me the rudiments of programming. Then I left home for University, moved on to using PCs and Macs, and the Beeb was packed up and consigned to the loft. Even though I was no longer actively programming, I would often find myself idly speculating on just how a particular feature in MacDraw or Office had been coded. A brief flirtation with INFORM (an amazing language, based on C++, for creating text adventures) was the sum total of my programming experience between about 1993 and 2007.
Then, bored while visiting Mum, I dug the old Beeb out of the loft. Sadly, it had not survived its confinement. A few quid on eBay later, and I was the proud owner of a working Master 128. I hooked up the disk drive, and promptly trashed several of my old 5.25 inch floppies before I threw in the towel. A few months later, I paid someone to transfer the few remaining disks to disk images that I could use with BeebEm, a program that turns a PC (or Mac) into a BBC Micro. And, while googling for information on the syntax of a particular BBC BASIC command, I made an astounding discovery...
BB4W is the creation of Richard Russell, who was closely involved in the original specification of BBC BASIC. You can download a fully functional free version of BB4W, which is limited only by the amount of memory available. It only took me a few seconds of playing with this demo version to convince me that £30 for the full version would be money well spent. Shortly after buying my first Mac in 1994, I had investigated what versions of BASIC were available, and had come across Chipmunk Basic on the fledgling WWW. Sadly, it was sufficiently different to BBC BASIC that I gave up on it pretty quickly. BB4W, in contrast, was like an old friend! The commands and their syntax were soon retrieved from a dusty corner of my memory, and I was again making my computer do whatever I wanted it to do for the first time in 15 years!
Home
How I wasted my teenage years!
Letter Graph
Make your graphs more meaningful...
Colour Check
A colour sampling tool.
2048
My take on the game that is sweeping the nation!
FRapp
A file rename utility.
Magnifiques
An old friend – the latest version of a program I started in the Eighties!
Textractor
A useful text extraction tool.
Tangler
A simple text reformatting tool.