2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

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:

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:

In the early days it was quite difficult to learn that sort of stuff. 

I recall when the BBC micro came out there were some TV programmes broadcast to support it but to get the listings to follow along you either needed to have Teletext/Ceefax on your TV or write off to the television transcript service to get a hardcopy several weeks later. 

No Internet and often no access to a video recorder either. I recall some episodes where they fast scrolled the program listings at the end which you were expected to video record and playback at slow speed. However the TV was probably also your computer monitor...