King of the Mountains

I’m currently over-run by small energetic feathered things

Those are the most numerous. We also get these, these, and varieties of these

And sometimes one of these. They seem to prefer open country though, so if you want to guarantee seeing one you need to go up into the hills.

A year ago, if you’d told me I’d be writing about our garden birds I’d have laughed. But they’re such wonderful characters. We have a blackbird that seems to have adopted the connection noises emitted by a computer modem as part of its call, and that bounces around the garden in the manner of a hyperactive spring. We have sparrows that seem to regard finding a perch that nobody else has thought of and announcing this to any passing female sparrows as the very meaning of existance. The robin barely gets a chance, even this fierce fighter backs down when confronted by a fluffed-up sparrow which is determined to keep possession of a bush, tree, or satellite dish.

There are the occasional bird-human encounters too. The sparrows seem to take great delight in perching on windowsills, which seems to provoke a mutal reaction of shock when they come eye to eye with a human looking out of said window. Likewise the particularly bold female sparrow sighted pulling material out of our hanging baskets for nesting purposes seemed a mite shocked when it found me watching interestedly from the kitchen window.

A national newspaper occasionally runs stories about the decline in the numbers of sparrows. All I can suggest is that they risk travelling to the frozen wasteland that they seem to consider to exist outside the M25. The sparrows, like many humans, have escaped to the country!
   

If you grew up during the 1980s, this may be something of a nostalgia trip. If you didn’t encounter a computer until they were all “PCs” with MS Windows (or if your school/parents had a bit more money an Apple) then this will be rather like palaeontology.

I’m talking about the BBC Model B

If you (along with a majority of other computer users) are used to hearing assorted beeps, dramatic chords, and seeing graphical startup screens then the next photo will come as something of a shock. The old BBC just goes “Bduh-Beep” and below some information on the machine shows this:

BASIC
>

To get any further, you’ll need to program it yourself. Professionally written software was available but plenty of people who were either strapped for cash or just curious did produce their own work. One of the first blockbuster game releases, Elite, started like that – two students tinkering with programming in their spare time managed to produce a game that sold rather well.

There’s no hard disk on these things, just onboard memory that is more or less equivalent to the RAM of whatever you’re reading this on now. The Model B had 32K as standard, the Model A (a cheaper version) had 16K. To give an idea of how things have changed, your mobile phone probably has more memory to store photos.

So, if turning it off (and it is a simple off switch – no shutdown in 1981) will wipe out the program that you’ve spent hours working out and typing in, you need somewhere to store it. Essentially there were two ways. You could either use a standard cassette recorder (which the BBC would control, data being stored as assorted squawking noises) or if you felt a bit flush a disk drive was available. The majority of these used the genuinely “floppy” 5.14in disks.

About now you’re probably thinking “So what can it do then?”. Well, the answer would be pretty much everything a new PC can manage. The keyboard is pleasant to use (the BBC insisted on high quality components, so these things are tough), it’ll do word processing, spreadsheets, in fact most of the office tasks you might need. It was even possible to add a network connection to allow multiple machines to access files and printers. This was rather handy in the days when a 67mb hard disk was priced at £700 or so!

And the other inevitable question, why mess about with this old thing?

To me, the BBC Model B was very much a part of my childhood. I used them at school to drive “turtles” using Logo, or attempt the assorted logic problem games (which weren’t so much of a problem if you knew how to access the source code…). The machine that inspired this post was given to me by a friend of the family who was in the process of an attic clearout. It’s had a good clean to remove 24 years of gunge from the keys and case and is now being used to play around with. In the days of the Model B you did have to know what you were doing to get any results, but equally you knew precisely what the machine was up to. Think about it, no spyware, few viruses, no mysterious processes running that you do not understand. To this nostalgia-ridden computing veteran it represents a more innocent age, before the scammers and spammers crawled out from under their rocks. An age when anything seemed possible if you could just figure out how to cram it into the memory, and your computer was unlikely to send your bank details to D’odgy and Co. in Nigeria.

If this has piqued your interest, take a wander around some of the sites I’ve linked to during this entry. There’s a thriving user community for these machines with plenty of advice on their care and maintenance. If you don’t fancy the hardware but want a play with Basic, there are emulators available that will give your PC the abilities of a Model B. See where a lot of programmers got their initial training. These things seem to be fetching ever-increasing prices so don’t hang around.

That said, the budget version of it seems to go for pennies…

If you’ve searched the internet for information in recent months, there’s a good chance that you’ll have seen the name “Wikipedia” pop up in search results. Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia with serious aims.