My BBC Master - - - getting Beeped-off.

[Richmond Mathewson]

Judy Perry wrote:

"As I had never heard of BBC master, with out without beeps"

Wow, talk about deprived :)

http://bbc.nvg.org/

On the "other side of the pond" we folk who speak English with funny
accents and were fiddling with PCs in the late 80s were heavily into
BBC computers (called that because they were underwritten by the
British Broadcasting Corporation and supported by them with a series
of very well-constructed TV programmes). Their native OS was called
MOS (dunno; maybe "Mucky Operating System" - like DOS) - and everything
can on ROM chips - they came as standard with BBC BASIC, and then you
could buy other chips with PASCAL and so on.

I bought my BBC Master Compact from a Druze businessman who was running
a shady business college in Al Ain (a city in the United Arab Emirates
where I have lived and worked twice) as he had bought one in a fit
of naivety, not knowing anything about computers and expecting it to
do all sorts of wonderful things at the flick of a switch. At present
it is 'holidaying' in the attic of my house in St Andrews, Scotland; and,
if I can manage transportation, I shall liberate it and take it back to
Bulgaria when I am over in the summer for the RunRev conference (Ha, Ha, 
come to think of it I could bring it along to the conference and have it
play Jacobite tunes with beeps). Unfortunately it now has to depend on a
CUB monitor as the original monitor was too big to ship back from the UAE
in 2000 (it has also 'holidayed' for a period of 7 years with my best
friend in Oman between my 2 tours of duty in the UAE).

If you are just "slobbering with anticipation" you can download
 either HORIZON or BEEB-EM (runs on all main platforms) and get
ROM images:

ftp://ftp.nvg.org/pub/bbc/rom [legal]

then refer to the following for comprehensive documentation:

http://bbc.nvg.org/docs.php3

(the Advanced Reference Manual is good for those who like digging)

http://www.bbcmicro.net/old-8bs/othrdnld/manuals/

if you want to play horrible "space music" the section you need is:

http://www.bbcmicro.net/old-8bs/othrdnld/manuals/musicmasterclass/

be warned, it can be addictive!

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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