NewBrain? Never
It has been claimed that the BBC was leaned on by the government to choose one company in particular: Newbury Labs. At the time, the government's National Enterprise Board (NEB) owned Newbury, which was developing a computer that might meet the BBC's needs and could certainly do with the money a BBC-promoted product was sure to generate.
The BBC Micro that might have been: the Newbury Labs/Grundy NewBrain
Newbury had acquired the NewBrain project, begun in 1978, from Sinclair Radionics, of which the NEB had gained ownership after rescuing the pocket TVs and calculators company with a major cash injection. Radionics eventually collapsed anyway, allowing Clive Sinclair to join Science of Cambridge, which Chris Curry had earlier established on his behalf, and for which Curry created the MK14. The NewBrain, however, was retained by the NEB and handed to Newbury to develop further.
The machine's long gestation was not accelerated under the stewardship of Newbury. Legend has it that, having selected the NewBrain, the BBC soon learned that development problems would ensure the machine wouldn't be ready in time for the planned October 1981 broadcast of Hands on Micros. That, it's said, forced the BBC to reschedule the series, which would eventually transmit as The Computer Programme in January 1982.
BBC documentation from 1983 confirms that difficulties implementing the hardware did indeed prompt The Computer Programme's broadcast schedule to be put back. But these difficulties were not those being experienced within Newbury Labs. The documentation says that Acorn, having demonstrated a working prototype of its putative BBC machine – the Proton, essentially – was awarded the BBC Micro contract as early as February 1981.
A separate BBC document from June 1981 details a full BBC Micro specification right down to launch pricing that matches exactly what the BBC Model A and Model B machines would actually deliver when they were finally unveiled to the public in December 1981.
Was, then, the NewBrain ever a serious contender for the BBC Micro? It certainly seems the case that Newbury was one of the seven companies approached by the BBC during its 1980 consultations, quite possibly at the behest of the NEB. If the NewBrain was the Corporation's first choice, subsequently dropped, Acorn being signed as a hasty substitution – as Acorn's Chris Curry was alleging as early mid-1981 – it must have been signed up in 1980, and not so very long after the BBC began approaching manufacturers.
Acorn's BBC Micro circuit board schematic
Click for larger version
As it stands, the NewBrain did not go on sale until July 1982 – by then the NEB has sold Newbury Labs to Grundy – so it's clear that any claim that Newbury might have made that it could launch a BBC Micro in September or October 1981 would have been optimistic in the extreme.
Even choosing Acorn in February 1981 didn't prevent set-backs: due seven or eight months later, the BBC Micro / Proton, didn't launch for a further two months. The Basic code wasn't finalised until September, leading The Computer Programme's production team to fear they wouldn't have kit they'd be able to use when they went into the studio to record the episodes in November.
Acorn's BBC Atom team: (L-R) David Johnson-Davies, Hermann Hauser, Chris Curry, Roger (later Sophie) Wilson, Nick Toop. Absent from photo but a key team member is Steve Furber, but that didn't stop the BBC from giving Furber Johnson-Davies' pullover-and-specs look in the drama Micro Men
How different the Proton would have been had Sinclair or another company won the BBC's backing, is open to question. The 6502 CPU, the "Tube" secondary-processor bus, Econet networking support and much of what became known as BBC Basic at least would have been part of the package. The casing would not have been much different.
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COMMENTS
Re: i'm off for a walk down memory lane...
Only shame is you can't go and do it in WHSmith, Boots, Laskey's, etc any longer
What the article doesn't mention is the BBC's operating system. Unusually for most micros of the age, which mostly consisted of a CPU and some RAM in a box with just enough Basic to let you write programs, the BBC actually had one. It was simple and elegant and very modular: the OS ROM lived in the top 16kB of address space, then you had a paged bank of application ROMs living in the next 16kB section, and the bottom 32kB was shared RAM.
Application ROMs could consist of standalone utilities, proper applications (like the excellent BBC Basic, or word processors like Wordwise or View), file systems (like the fast and simple DFS, the slower but much more sophisticated ADFS, the network file system NFS, etc), and so on. The OS would seamlessly page from one to the other, so an application ROM could make file system calls which would get delegated to the currently selected file system even though they both lived in the same place at the same time. It was even possible to open file descriptors to more than one file system at a time and copy from one to the other!
The OS system call API was fast, capable, well-documented and sufficiently abstract to allow some really neat things: the Tube second processor interface allowed system calls to be executed via RPC from a *completely different computer*. Tube second processors really were CPUs in a box; no I/O other than the connection to the BBC, no ROM other than the RPC stub. So you got 64kB of RAM and maximum perforfmance, with all the fiddly I/O overhead handled by the BBC itself, now acting as a dedicated and extremely capable I/O processor.
And the Tube wasn't limited to 6502s --- they also made Z80, 32016, 68000 second processors, all using that same system call interface. Even the ARM chip, now a juggernaut taking over the world, started life as a second processor connected to a BBC micro!
(I don't believe they ever tried system call RPC via Econet, but it would have been an interesting experiment.)
It's a shame that Acorn's master plan fell through. After the Electron debacle, they regrouped and produced the BBC Master, which was an excellent machine in many ways but not a patch on the machine that *could* have been. With better marketing, we could by now be using BBC-descended multiprocessor systems instead of PCs...
Electron?
I knew a whole two people with a Beeb, about 20 - 30 of us with Speccies and even an Oric user.
But never once heard of anyone wanting a an Electron; a Spectrum 128 / QL, C64's yes but an Electron?
Ahh I miss those day. BBC's are Pants Spectrums rule! No Spectrums are toys, BBC are proper computers.
Shame we don't have any of that childish behavior 30 years on.
"Please stop this absurd idea that the BBC "B" mattered."
Please stop this absurd idea that the BBC "B" didn't matter.
Just because a lot of schoolkids played games on their Spectrums and C64s doesn't mean that there wasn't a hell of a lot of people who did get to use the BBC (and Electron) at every level of education (primary, secondary, tertiary, higher), in addition to the people who did have those machines at home, and no, not all of those people were "posh" or "rich", either.
The absurd notion that the BBC was only as influential as the Tandy and the Oric (which one?) is a bit like saying "That ARM chip led to nothing!" while stroking your smartphone - a clueless retort based on the kind of playground tribalism mentioned in the article that ignores the actual influence on society this specific technology had.
BBC Micro - best 8-bit computer of all time
Although Apple set the standard years earlier with the Apple II, the BBC Micro trumped it and all other 8-bit computers ever made by having the best hardware, OS and BASIC interpreter of its class. Sort of a "UK Mac" for the early 80's if you will and it wasn't until the Archimedes came out in 1987 that the technical prowess of the BBC Micro was finally beaten (yes, I tried an early Mac, but it felt quite straitjacketed even back then).
I helped out in a computer store in the early 80's and saw pretty well every type of 8-bit micro that was going then. Spectrum had the most games obviously, but its keyboard, graphics and sound were so poor as to be actually embarrassing to use. The Commodore 64 probably came closest in terms of hardware to the BBC, but was hugely let down by its poor OS, BASIC and utterly dismal disk system (so slow, that it was beaten by turbo tape loaders!).
I think that the BBC Micro was a perfect design for going into schools to replacing fairly doddering RM 380Z's and the like - its strength was indeed the OS and BASIC - the built-in assembler was a stroke of genius and you could actually develop commercial code on the same machine you ran it on (note that many Spectrum programmers - think Manic Miner and the like - used TRS-80's to code Spectrum games (downloaded via some clever add-ons) on because the Spectrum itself was a disaster to code commercially on.
The crying shame that was overpriced and never actually came down in price during any time in its production run, which ultimately was fatal to it. A drop of 100 quid would have probably doubled its sales. The Electron was horrendous - who wants a machine with no Mode 7 and half the speed of the BBC, especially when it was launched when pretty well everyone who wanted something in the BBC Micro range already had one.
I also felt Acorn were terrible at marketing - you'd hardly ever see ads on TV or print media for it, whereas Spectrum ads seemed to be everywhere. The Spectrum may have been significantly worse in almost all respects except the amount of RAM (the hardware was shoddy, it was slower, the OS and BASIC were simply dreadful), but Sinclair knew that once he got game developers on board, the cheaper machine would win out, even if it was basically a piece of junk.
My path went BBC Micro A, added RAM, added disk interface and disk drive, added speech chip, added sideways RAM (very handy for, er, running ROMs from disk)...then about 5 years later, jumped to the Archimedes A310, which I never bothered with a hard disk because it booted from ROM and 3.5" floppies were quick enough for me at the time.
Loved the Archimedes hardware, OS and BASIC again - a tour de force of engineering, the ghost of which lives on in most mobile phones as the ARM chip of course. Built-in assembler and a module loading system to add functionality, plus a reasonable WIMP for the time (perhaps not as good as the Mac's, but certainly better than GEM and Workbench) combined to make it a dream ARM development system.
It took many years of Archimedes use before a generic PC with Linux finally overtook it both in terms of speed and functionality - yes, I've never used Windows as a primary OS in all that time, though I do it run it via dual boot or VMs occasionally.
The 80's were the golden age of choice in the UK, but the 90's brought us the "one PC fits all" of Windows 95, the "nice but overpriced" of Macs and very little else (Linux really did take a long time to get the distros to be easy to install and use, but now they are technically by far the best OS to use, particularly if you are a developer).
