Remembering the BBC Micro Computer

Last night I dreamt about using BBC Micro's at school when I was 7. It was a great program created by the BBC to ship these computers to schools and homes across the UK. At my school Alywn, we had one, myself and the children in the classroom with my teacher Mr Montgomery had a lot of joy with it.

It was first introduced in 1981 and they shipped 1.5million. Yes the BBC, the same company that you can now listen to Radio 1 and watch Doctor Who on.

This image doesn't really do it justice but it's only 14kb, reduced from a 246kb PNG image, using the avif file format. Which is great and I can't wait for other websites to adopt this image format.

I missed the chance to adopt one with the National Museum of computing for only £25 which would've been really fun to try and run the best game I played, Granny's Garden.

There was another great device that was wonderful for young children to work with to learn computing and mathematics, which was the turtle, looks like a robot from the future and if used today would probably be seen like one again in 2025. It allowed you to draw out what was programmed on the computer as a picture, with any pen, whether a star, or another drawing of some kind. An elegant printer. Today we still stumble with introducing 3d printers into homes.

Today the spirit is still alive, with the BBC microbits. I have used them to construct little robots with my children and they are a lot of fun for children to become adept with programming and hardware construction.