We look back at a classroom computer and an old friend
Those of us who are old enough to recall sitting in a classroom in the mid-80s will undoubtedly also remember the sudden swarming around one of the school’s limited computers.
At the teacher’s signal, the students would race over to one of the few BBCs and sit around arguing whose turn it was to sit at the keyboard and whose turn it was to read out from the hastily written BASIC listing in the exercise book. It was a pretty remarkable time to be growing up, although we never realised it at the time.
The BBC Micro was the winner of the government’s race to get computers into schools, beating Sir Clive’s Spectrum despite being significantly more expensive. The Micro was a great computer for the classroom, though, and looking back a far better fit than the Spectrum would have been. The robust build and easy-to-use nature of the BBC meant it was able to take a considerable onslaught from keyboard-happy teenagers. And thanks to its ever-growing status, it was being upgraded fairly rapidly too.
In 1986, the first significant upgrade was released, the Acorn BBC Master 128. At around £499, it certainly wasn’t cheap, but it was a far more powerful school machine than what we’d previously been used to.
Its History
Being the successor to the hugely popular BBC Micro was no easy task, but the Master 128 did a superb job and offered students and teachers (since it was designed for use in schools) a healthy 128KB of RAM, 128KB of ROM (with some sideloading ROM programs that could be paged into a memory area), a numeric keypad, ROM cartridge slots and a Tube interface whereby you could fit an external secondary CPU.
Obviously, it was as robust as its predecessor, and those sideloading ROMs included the rather good Acornsoft View word processor, BBC Basic, Advanced Disk Filing System, Viewsheet spreadsheet package and a Terminal Emulator.
Quickly, Acorn started to release upgraded Master models, with the Master Turbo, which featured a faster processor (one which would be bought as a machine itself or as an upgrade to the existing Master). The Master AIV (Advanced Interactive Videodisk) housed a SCSI port and a Video Filing System ROM, which went on to form the BBC Domesday System to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book.
There was also the Master 512, with a 10MHz Intel 80186 coprocessor and 512KB of memory; the Master ET, with an EcoNet Terminal; and the Master Compact, a machine that was slowly beginning to resemble a modern-ish PC.
Sadly, production ended in 1994, and the Acorn BBC was officially laid to rest. However, that didn’t stop the legion of fans, who upgraded their kit with ARM processors and more memory.
The Good
Tough machine, solid construction, more memory, better version of Elite.
The bad
Some of the software (I can’t remember which) from the Micro didn’t work with the Master. Expensive and heavy.
Conclusion
It makes you wonder: what would have happened if the PC and Microsoft never took off the way they did? Would our standard desktop computer be some distant descendant of the BBC Master, with an ARM processor guiding it through the alternateuniverse version of Facebook?
Did You Know?
• The Master Compact had its own GUI.
• The Master 512 could run DOS Plus and GEM.
• The Master Scientific was never released. It was to have an 8MHz 32016 coprocessor and 512KB of memory.
• The original Master 128 had a 2MHz Rockwell R65SC12 processor.