Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

When …Iiiii…. was your age…. We had to program computers in the snow uphill both ways!!  

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  

Not bad for a self taught newbie limited to 4kb of memory  

When …Iiiii…. was your age…. We had to program computers in the snow uphill both ways!!  

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  

Not bad for a self taught newbie limited to 4kb of memory