BBC B Micro
With a floppy disc, of all advanced things
With a floppy disc, of all advanced things
At school I had an old manual typewriter I experimented with generating documents. But my typing was so awful all I generated were TippEx covered bits of paper. No correction, no editing possible. But a friend had a Commodore VIC 20 which I concluded this was the way forward for the new science of "word processing". A fascination was born.
When at University I had a holiday job doing data input on an ICL 2904. This improved my typing no end and I concluded I needed my own computer. University computing classes using FORTRAN punched cards were easy, so maybe I could be a programmer when I graduited?
When I garduated my first job was at a company that had a little-used scientific computer called a Starplex (they had all sorts of stuff lying around they didn't really know how to use), with a word processor app on it called Wordplex, if I remember correctly. I was tasked with writing a manual on how to use it for producing and archiving engineering documents (still largely hand written in 1985, but clearly the writing was on the wall). It really got me started on documentation and manual writing, far more interesting than what I was really meant to be doing which was sorting out electronic fuel injection systems for diesel engines. It used 8" floppy discs which really were very floppy and quite fragile.
My first computer was an Oric Atmos, with a contsantly-malfunctioning tape drive. This had a functioning word processor but also had games, so of course I was distracted by Snowball, one of the first text adventure games. Veering close to Dungeons and Dragons but with a space-based plot. The excitement of waiting 45 minutes for the game load to fail soon faded, but the company I went to work for used the new BBC B Micro's for data gathering using the 1MHz bus and had multiple spare copies of the Wordwise word processor EPROM. It was time to buy a BBC B.
It came with a floppy drive, interfaced with my Sony TV via an RF modulator and Wordwise could be invoked from a shortcut on the keyboard. Suddenly I could create and edit documents, save them quickly to the floppy disc and then, wonder of wonders, I was given an parallel-port interface Epson dot-matrix printer. And it had a game: Elite.
Still a legend to this day, Elite involved space travel and sophisticated docking procedures. It was a ground-breaking game for its time and can still be played via an emulator at the BBC Micro Games Archive.
I used this computer for years, generating documents and databases, learning how to make peripherals work, and understanding computers.
Until my company did two things: they sent me to America for a couple of years to oversee a project in Illinois, and they bought PCs. This was the death knell for the BBC B.