Re: Off Topic - BBC Micro Books

[Eric Rucker <bhtooefr@gmail.com>]

On Nov 24, 2:02 am, sicklittlemonkey <nick.westg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> All good stuff! Acorn did everything right with the Archimedes really.
> Including putting a BBC emulator app with the OS in ROM, so there was
> a reasonable upgrade path for their earlier 8-bit users.

IIRC, 65Host was never in ROM, but it was on disk all along. (Of
course, they also made 65Tube, which simulated a tube-attached 6502.
There's a slight difference in functionality there - 65Host emulates a
BBC Micro, whereas 65Tube emulates a 6502 second processor attached to
the Archimedes. This means that apps running in 65Tube can use the
Archimedes video and sound hardware. I think it was done as a
convenient way for developers to port software from the BBC without
having to convert to ARM assembly, but still being able to use the
rest of the machine as intended.)

But, they did quite a lot of stuff wrong. At launch, they didn't have
an OS, so they took the old BBC OS that they had ported to ARM,
slapped together a primitive GUI in BASIC (which had a file manager
and some desk accessories, but wasn't a desktop environment, just a
launcher much like the Mac or GS finder, and you couldn't use the desk
accessories outside of that BASIC GUI,) and blew some ROMs. They did
remedy that a year later with RISC OS 2, which was really
multitasking, and introduced some legitimate innovations, although
there were some major flaws (poor memory protection, cooperative
multitasking) that survive in the OS to this day.

And, of course, they didn't market the damn thing much outside of the
UK. I know it did get sold in Germany, Australia, and New Zealand, and
I'd be surprised if it wans't sold in Italy (Olivetti owned them at
the time.) They did get it approved as a school computer in Canada,
but I don't see any evidence that any actually got sold, and they
never tried to bring them here to the US, after the epic fail that was
the US version of the BBC B. (Basically, the Beeb ran on the strength
of being sponsored by the BBC, and being in schools, justifying the
high price. No such advantage in the US, where Apple IIs had twice or
four times the RAM and the school advantage, and Commodore 64s were
cheaper and had twice the RAM.)

Oh, and Apple did EVENTUALLY get that foresight... they managed two
CPU architecture jumps, both of them being (relatively) seamless. But,
I have other issues with Apple, so...