The news that the creators of the BBC Micro are getting together again this week at London's Science Museum has got me feeling all nostalgic.
The BBC Micro was the machine that started my love-affair with computers (if you exclude the Commodore PETs that I occasionally got to play with at school). I can still clearly remember the day I came home from school one Wednesday afternoon (for some reason, in my junior school we got Wednesday afternoons off) to find this wondrous new machine that my dad had brought home.
Initially, we mainly used it for playing games (the early Acornsoft titles being the ones that stick out in my mind: Snapper, Monsters, Planetoid, Rocket Raid and, of course, Elite). But it was also the machine that I did my first programming on, the listings for one of my games even appearing in a national computer magazine (back in the days when computer magazines printed program listings instead of putting the compiled game on a cover disc). Indeed, it was probably responsible for the career that I'm following today.
I'd love to be able to give Aidan a similarly wonderful experience when he's a bit older. But sadly, I think the world is a different place today. The BBC Micro was one of the first home computers, but now, of course, they're commonplace, as are gaming consoles. And I think that writing even a simple game on a PC today would be a lot harder than it was back then on the BBC Micro.
