2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

JWx — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 22:49:08 GMT

CA80 - educational DIY computer, shipped with set of books explaining basics of electronics (from simple circuits to the inner workings of CPU) by use of gnomes, positioned as Z81 competition but only with hexadecimal keyboard and 7-segment display (LED first, later VFD) .

Based on Z80A CPU, programmed using assembler which was entered as hexadecimal opcodes - there was even tape recorder interface if one got bored entering program after each reboot...

There was some add-ons, including EPROM programmer (in the era when those were unobtainable to the hobbyist) - I don't remember exactly how the content for programming was prepared, but I think that some time later- when I was given PC computer (268, upgraded to the 386sx later) and built EPROM emulator from the kit, that emulator was connected to one of EPROM sockets of CA80 and data was copied from it to the real memory.

There were even some games included IIRC...

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

ntewinkel — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:37:34 GMT

When …Iiiii…. was your age…. We had to program computers in the snow uphill both ways!! [emoticon:4191f5ee34e248a29fa0dbe8d975f74a]

My first computer was actually my brother’s TRS-80 micro colour computer. Not the TRS-80 most people think of, but a cheaper option that connected to the TV.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_MC-10

It had a tape recorder with it to store and retrieve programs.

It booted into basic, and had a neat option to program blocks of colours, which meant it was fairly easy to create games and simple colourful displays.

It didn’t come with any programs, so I started by typing in the little samples in the back of the manual… and found that one of them didn’t work - the manual had a typo. My first debugging!!

After going through the handful of little tutorials I then programmed my first game - a little shoot the airplane type game. The plane would go across at the top, and the shooter was at the bottom and could move left and right. I remember the game would slow down severely if you took too many shots at once [emoticon:752f32bcc91d4a448db162742a877a4a]

Not bad for a self taught newbie limited to 4kb of memory [emoticon:6d505171faa4497c85c5ca27290c555d]

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

obones — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 07:10:15 GMT

The first computer I was allowed to interact with was my dad's Oric 1:

It was connected on the TV SCART plug but required a 9V battery to be connected to that same plug to force the TV to select this input.
Data storage was via the home HiFi system tape recorder, it took so much time to setup, but it was worth it in the eyes of a 7 years old!

There was a quizz game with a chicken on top of a wall, and if you replied correctly to all the questions, the chicken advanced all the way to the seeds and ate them.

But my own first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464 with the tape recorder included in the main unit/keyboard:

I received it with a trove of "Amstrad Magazine" issues which gave me a very good introduction to programming and led me all the way to what I'm doing for a living today.

It took ridiculously long times to load games from the tape recorder, but this taught me patience and forced me to do something else in the meantime!

I still have it and the CPU still works, but the display is dead, I'm yet to find a way to plug it into a more recent TV set.

Very fond memories of this one, even if its Z80 is completely outdated with today's standard, I'm quite happy to have seen it used in my GameBoy, my TI-80 calculator and so many more devices.

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

dougw — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 23:56:55 GMT

The first computer I bought was a Rockwell AIM65 way back around 1979, which was the first single board 6502 computer that included a full keyboard, alphanumeric display and thermal printer. I still have it and it still works - here it is in the fold-out case I built to house it:

As a hobbyist, I used it to interface to build projects like a sound synthesizer and a video display system with color NTSC output:

Sound Generator:

I also used this model of computer for a couple of projects at work. One was a read-write maintenance terminal to program a 50,000 HP gas turbine engine controller. The 24 bit control computer, which occupied a whole room, was traditionally programmed using 24 toggle switches, one instruction at a time, so this interface was a dramatic improvement. The control computer had no electronic clock - the clock was recovered from a clock track on its 25 track drum memory. That control computer could not have a software crash. As long as the drum memory rotated, the computer executed.

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

VincentdenBoer — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 08:59:04 GMT

My first laptop was an old HP Compaq! Used to play runescape on it. Unfortunally I don't have a picture of the exact model but this one looks alot like it!

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

maxpowerr — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 16:44:55 GMT

I was pretty spoiled, so my first computer was a Pentium 2. It had a 20GB hard drive and, I think, 64GB of RAM. And also there was 3dfx voodoo, a modern graphics accelerator for those times. I remember when they gave me the game Quake II, it made a huge impression on me, and when I came across a disk from a gaming magazine on which there was an editor that allowed me to make levels for Quake (unfortunately, I no longer remember the name of the editor) and I decided to study it. But unfortunately there were no instructions or descriptions of how the editor works and how it works. It used some kind of specific scripting language (or maybe classic C or C++, I don’t remember anymore). And then I learned that I need to learn programming. Someone I knew brought me a University book on the C language and a disk with VisualStudio 6.0. Yes, it was still a nightmare for an 8 year old child. I didn’t understand anything about what was written there, the only thing I managed to do was display “Hallo World” in the console and a couple of simple examples of adding numbers. Probably due to the fact that there was no one to tell me and I had to look for information in various magazines and books (there was no Internet), my head was confused.
Therefore, I think Arduino and MicroBit are a very cool idea, which in a simplified form provides fundamental knowledge and the basics of programming for children and everyone else.

Random fact: If you've ever seen this photo, you've probably wondered what kind of giant display John Carmack was using around 1996:

It was a 28-inch InterView 28hd96 monitor made by Intergraph. This monitor offered resolutions up to 1920x1080, which is pretty impressive for 1995:

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

danielF — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 12:39:21 GMT

In college, I built a Pentium MMX 200MHz, with 64MB RAM and a 20GB disk, solely on spare parts. Used it for college works such as MatLab modeling, pSpice simulations, and Word for reports... As long as I didn't run these applications at the same time!

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

redcharly — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 16:09:13 GMT

My first computer was an 80386 which I used for my first experiments using C, Pascal, Visual Basic. Then I changed PCs several times and in the early 2000s I used my PC, a National Instruments acquisition card, Labview and Matlab to acquire a sound signal fron a piezo sensor and classify it using a neural network.

The learning phase of my poor neural network took many hours using Matlab, today I do the same thing in my school, during a single lesson, simply using an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense or an Arduino Nicla and Edge Impulse board for the network implementation neural. I have never used a BBC micro:bit but I have seen how many applications and examples we can find on the Internet and I would like to explore its features with my students

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

maxpowerr — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 12:39:29 GMT

MicroBit is a very cool idea. I have the first version of this board and am now trying to make it work as an HID device via Bluetooth. I found a video on YouTube (BleHID) where they add a library for MicroBit and turn it into an HID device (mouse or keyboard), but it is for MicroBit V2.
I found libraries for MicroBit V1 (BluetoothKeyboard, BluetoothMouse), but they only work on an Android device, and on Windows 10 you need to find some kind of driver that will work with it. Also, the keyboard library works strangely when you press the button on the MicroBit so that it prints the text, error 030 lights up (Corruption detected in the micro:bit heap space (memory allocated usually for the storage of variables). Try flashing a different .hex file to your device).
Has anyone tried using MicroBit as an HID device? I have a couple of interesting ideas.

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

manojroy123 — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 05:56:05 GMT

My first computer was a keyboard computer with game console in it. It had a build in BASIC programming language. changeable game cartridge. Parallel port interface, serial port interface and two joystick to play game. Used to get directly connected to Tv set. Cost around 60 to 70 dollar during that time.

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

wolfgangfriedrich — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 01:28:27 GMT

My first computer was the C-64.

I was amazed about the speed-up when I programmed a graphic mode clear screen command in Assembler vs Basic. Fractions of a second in assembly vs ~30 seconds in Basic, IIRM.

Also earned my first money programming on this machine. It was a program, reading out the state of all tracks and sectors (empty/used/not-readable) of a floppy disk and display it nicely on the screen. It was back in time when programs were short enough that they were printed in a magazine and if you want to use it, you had to type it in. Real free-ware; sort-of as you had to buy the magazine. Good times.

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

DAB — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 19:14:09 GMT

Nice list for a budding engineer/maker to choose from.

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

dougw — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 15:32:35 GMT

I was unaware that a BBC micro:bit could be programmed using the Arduino IDE. Have you tried it?

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

Najah — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 23:34:27 GMT

As a newbie, never had access to a pc in my early years and teens. I was only desperate to know what it is like to have and use one. I'd normally sneak in to have some few strikes on the keyboard of an old IBM computer owned by my brother.

With a lot of unanswered questions on my mind, I always wondered how things worked on such devices. Little did I know that my curiosity was actually leading into finding myself and my passion. In 2016, I found myself owning an old Toshiba pc. But wait, I just didn't know what to do with that. Thanks to a neighbor who introduced me to the BBC microbit and makecode interface.

This was wow, I enjoyed every bit what I did with the makecode online editor. I'd normally go round and gather children to come and witness the wonders.

Now the virtual is becoming a reality to me as I layed hold of my first physical Microbit pocket-size computer that is programmable in 2022. I was in a team that build several projects using the microbit device. My favourite of them all is the 'Smart pedestrian crossing' project.

It looked like that was the end, but NO, it was just the beginning. How can I help children of today who are so curious and have lots of questions unanswered as in my case?

This led me into starting the BotTech STEM club where I train students in basic schools and high schools in Ghana.

RE: 2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

javagoza — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 16:06:06 GMT

In the 70s I learned to program in RPG on my own on an IBM S/38 that my father had in a large clothing store. Then I had a Sinclair ZX81 and built a kit with the Elektor Junior Computer. The Junior Computer experience is what influenced me the most as a teenager.

I don't have any photos from that time or the machines that I gave to a college friend after a move.

https://www.elektormagazine.com/magazine/elektor-198005/44396