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Authors: Rebecca Levene
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this a spec?”’ Allen recalls
Sinclair saying, before going through their list with a critical, cost-conscious eye. ‘He said things like: “Well, we have got a positivekeyboard”, and
he waved the Sinclair Spectrum keyboard at us, which is a flexible rubber thing.’
The BBC didn’t respond well to the financial argument. One of its advisers was Mike McLean of the
Electronic Times
, who was a fan of Sinclair, but even he had to admit that some
of the entrepreneur’s products had been tainted with a poor reputation for quality, and always because they had been engineered down to a price.
As for whether the Spectrum could have cut it as the BBC’s machine, Allen is unambiguous: ‘No. Not as we saw it. What he [Sinclair] might have developed it into is another matter.
But the thing about Acorn is that they had a co-operative spirit: we’ll meet you, we’ll evolve our thing in your direction. That was quite important, I think.’
The BBC made its assessment in the following weeks based on a full analysis of the technology, its adherence to the specifications, and the manufacturers’ track records. As well as
considering the two Cambridge companies, it had seen efforts from their neighbours Tangerine, and visited Dragon in Wales and Research Machines in Oxford. But the decision kept swinging towards
Acorn.
It was hugely significant that Wilson’s BASIC could match the BBC’s needs, and that the Proton’s design allowed for plugging in a Z80 with which to run exotic American software
such as CP/M – a popular operating system. It was similarly impressive when Acorn devised a way to build a Teletext decoder into the machine, meeting the BBC’s request to download
software through the spare parts of a television signal. But perhaps what mattered most to the final decision was that, at the end of that first day of meeting all the manufacturers, the visiting
BBC team had chosen to go to the pub with the Acorn team.
Then, the Newbrain reanimated.
On the day that David Allen’s team were to choose their manufacturer, Newbury arrived at the BBC with – at last – the final, working hardware. ‘Newbury turned up saying,
“We did it! We’ve got this!”’ Allen recalls. ‘And they plugged it in, and it didn’t work. It was terribly tragic, it was very sad.’ And too late. Acorn had
fulfilled everyaspect of Allen’s dream, even as it had become more ambitious. Nothing else under consideration came close.
And so Acorn’s Proton became the BBC Micro and launched in late 1981. It had a large, beige case and a rock-steady keyboard. It was so reliable that in places such as railway stations and
betting shops the machine remained in constant use for a decade. And when a government scheme called ‘Micros in Schools’ subsidised the education market, Acorn’s robust and
incredibly highly specified design became the computer of choice in Britain’s classrooms.
And every BBC Micro came loaded with an incredible asset. If there is a single tool that opened up computing in Britain in the eighties, and that laid the foundations for its vibrant games
scene, it is BBC BASIC. Wilson’s implementation of Coll’s specification was swift and elegant, and while the BBC Micro was rarer in people’s homes, most children had access to one
at school. When first turned on, it had a formal feel, with a brief list of its credentials followed by the blinking cursor politely waiting for an instruction. To the uninitiated pupil, it could
at first appear to be part of the elevated world of technology, as exciting or daunting as that could be.
In practice, it was a benign teacher: it repaid a small amount of effort with a huge amount of fun. The cursor was a prompt to enter a command in the BBC Micro’s default programming
language, which was an unusually intuitive and friendly kind of BASIC. The computer came with a thick manual that could teach everything to the most interested pupils, but there were simpler
Sinclair saying, before going through their list with a critical, cost-conscious eye. ‘He said things like: “Well, we have got a positivekeyboard”, and
he waved the Sinclair Spectrum keyboard at us, which is a flexible rubber thing.’
The BBC didn’t respond well to the financial argument. One of its advisers was Mike McLean of the
Electronic Times
, who was a fan of Sinclair, but even he had to admit that some
of the entrepreneur’s products had been tainted with a poor reputation for quality, and always because they had been engineered down to a price.
As for whether the Spectrum could have cut it as the BBC’s machine, Allen is unambiguous: ‘No. Not as we saw it. What he [Sinclair] might have developed it into is another matter.
But the thing about Acorn is that they had a co-operative spirit: we’ll meet you, we’ll evolve our thing in your direction. That was quite important, I think.’
The BBC made its assessment in the following weeks based on a full analysis of the technology, its adherence to the specifications, and the manufacturers’ track records. As well as
considering the two Cambridge companies, it had seen efforts from their neighbours Tangerine, and visited Dragon in Wales and Research Machines in Oxford. But the decision kept swinging towards
Acorn.
It was hugely significant that Wilson’s BASIC could match the BBC’s needs, and that the Proton’s design allowed for plugging in a Z80 with which to run exotic American software
such as CP/M – a popular operating system. It was similarly impressive when Acorn devised a way to build a Teletext decoder into the machine, meeting the BBC’s request to download
software through the spare parts of a television signal. But perhaps what mattered most to the final decision was that, at the end of that first day of meeting all the manufacturers, the visiting
BBC team had chosen to go to the pub with the Acorn team.
Then, the Newbrain reanimated.
On the day that David Allen’s team were to choose their manufacturer, Newbury arrived at the BBC with – at last – the final, working hardware. ‘Newbury turned up saying,
“We did it! We’ve got this!”’ Allen recalls. ‘And they plugged it in, and it didn’t work. It was terribly tragic, it was very sad.’ And too late. Acorn had
fulfilled everyaspect of Allen’s dream, even as it had become more ambitious. Nothing else under consideration came close.
And so Acorn’s Proton became the BBC Micro and launched in late 1981. It had a large, beige case and a rock-steady keyboard. It was so reliable that in places such as railway stations and
betting shops the machine remained in constant use for a decade. And when a government scheme called ‘Micros in Schools’ subsidised the education market, Acorn’s robust and
incredibly highly specified design became the computer of choice in Britain’s classrooms.
And every BBC Micro came loaded with an incredible asset. If there is a single tool that opened up computing in Britain in the eighties, and that laid the foundations for its vibrant games
scene, it is BBC BASIC. Wilson’s implementation of Coll’s specification was swift and elegant, and while the BBC Micro was rarer in people’s homes, most children had access to one
at school. When first turned on, it had a formal feel, with a brief list of its credentials followed by the blinking cursor politely waiting for an instruction. To the uninitiated pupil, it could
at first appear to be part of the elevated world of technology, as exciting or daunting as that could be.
In practice, it was a benign teacher: it repaid a small amount of effort with a huge amount of fun. The cursor was a prompt to enter a command in the BBC Micro’s default programming
language, which was an unusually intuitive and friendly kind of BASIC. The computer came with a thick manual that could teach everything to the most interested pupils, but there were simpler
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