2025 Holidays Wishlist with the BBC micro:bit!

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Very fond memories of this one, even if its Z80 is completely outdated with today's standard, I'm quite happy to have seen it used in my GameBoy, my TI-80 calculator and so many more devices.

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.

Like many things, sometimes they have been lying dormant due to lack of processing power or awaiting another piece of the jigsaw before they can be packaged into something useful that becomes mainstream.

A lot of people think 3D CAD is relatively new but it has roots back in the early 60s with Ivan Sutherland's 'Sketchpad' at MIT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o

If anyone is interested in an introduction to algorithms, then I found a rather nicely written book on them recently:

A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms, Second Edition
Level Up Your Core Programming Skills
by Jay Wengrow
https://pragprog.com/titles/jwdsal2/a-common-sense-guide-to-data-structures-and-algorithms-second-edition/

It’s just interesting to sometimes read old books and discover that those technologies and algorithms that seem modern were invented a long time ago.

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!