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BBC Basic: the people's language

Posted on 7 Aug 2006 at 14:49

Indeed, the Beeb was impressed by the Proton: with its 2MHz processor, 32KB of ROM (16KB of which was devoted to the Basic interpreter), full keyboard with ten function keys, and graphics system capable of displaying eight colours, it had easily surpassed the BBC's requirements. However, the BBC did have misgivings about the version of Basic that Wilson had written for it. "It was the biggest bone of contention," says Wilson. "We'd already gone to a lot of trouble to provide a structured programming ability. But the BBC was reasonably sensible - if it was going to teach people a language, it wanted it with [easy-to-understand] labels [such as 'loop' and 'repeat until']."

After much negotiation, Wilson agreed to revise her version of Basic to meet the BBC's requirements, while the function keys on the Proton were painted bright orange to give it a modern home computer feel. Acorn had sealed the deal. The Proton was renamed the BBC Micro and Wilson's Basic became known as BBC Basic.

Low expectations

The first episode of The Computer Programme was broadcast on 11 January 1982, but despite the enormous lengths the BBC had gone to with commissioning its own computer, expectations were modest at best. "It originally forecast that the BBC Micro would sell 20,000. Steve [Furber] and I thought it was insane - we thought it would sell 50,000," says Wilson. "It ended up selling a million."

Demand for the £235 Model A BBC Micro far outstripped supply and thousands of customers suffered long delays before they could get their hands on the device and start programming. Yet, while the television series brought the BBC Micro into the public gaze, the ultimate reason for its success was its adoption in schools. During the 1980s, BBC Micros became a permanent fixture in classrooms, as schools scrambled to teach children computer literacy. For many of today's twenty- and thirty-somethings, the BBC Micro was their first exposure to a computer. Indeed, I vividly remember playing a maths game on a BBC Micro at my junior school in the mid-1980s and, in a testament to its longevity, typing up a journalism assignment on one at university more than a decade later.

So why were BBC Basic and the Micro such a roaring success? "It was able to cover the whole range of abilities of programming. It was simple enough for someone who's never touched a computer in their life to start programming, but it's also extremely powerful. There's virtually nothing you can't write in BBC Basic," says Russell.

"BBC Basic was kind of magical," adds Wilson. "It wasn't unreliable, it was worthwhile using and it was fast. Fundamentally, it's a very capable language."

The Micro's popularity was also testament to Wilson's abilities as a programmer, squeezing every last bit of power out of its limited hardware. In those days, the computer's operating system was stored in just 16KB of ROM (around half the size of the Word document used to type this article), and there was no opportunity to fix bugs with patches. "I spent many months rewriting the Basic interpreter to fit into some 16KB of memory. That was very arduous. Memory was fantastically expensive in those days. The real important date [in the build of the computer] was sending things off for ROM-ing," says Wilson.

Despite the BBC Micro's enormous success in the UK and certain regions of Europe, it failed to gain a foothold in the US market. And as the IBM PC began to gather momentum in the late 1980s and early 1990s, schools replaced their ageing BBCs with Windows-based machines. It wasn't only the Micros that were thrown out when Windows came along - the mentality that anyone could program a computer was lost too. "Schools actually taught programming and would use BBC Basic. The idea of programming wasn't alien in those days. Today, attitudes are completely different. People assume they can't program a computer," argues Russell.