Long live the Beeb

Added by Chris Gabriel, about 1 month ago.

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Well the creators of the BBC Micro met last week at the Science Museum in London to celebrate the birth of this (and let me be a bit soppy here) beautiful invention.

I was driving down the M4 when I heard it on Radio 4 and I was immediately taken back to my teens, and Computing Club at the War Memorial Club in Wrexham every Thursday night, and, the time I now argue when actually being computer literate meant being able to actually program a computer.

Computer Club (and the Beeb) was a clear demonstration of social class. The Beeb owners, sons and daughters of teachers, bank managers, publicans (social climbing at its worst if you ask me).

The ZX Spectrum owners, the aspiring offspring of the working classes, all rubber keys and Chuckie Egg!

And there was us, the visionaries amongst the group, daring to be different, the Picassos of the computing world. We were the ones on our own, tapping away on our real keyboards, getting and putting our graphics like daubs of paint on an electronic canvass. The Dragon owners club were loud and proud, we had to be, when my mum and dad bought mine on tick from Dixons there were only 5 games available for the damn thing. My Dad has always been a maverick, with the Dragon came a Tandy printer, using real pens that actually wrote the words onto the page. Imagine showing that to a 13 year old today, they would think it was an invention of the steam age (wow a printer that writes long hand like a human being).

Anyway, every Thursday night, we loaded our 28 inch black and white or colour televisions into the backs of cars and lugged the lot to a hall in the middle of town like nerdy moths seeking out a single light of truth.

Our class system meant nothing, we sat there and programmed hundreds of computers, the sound of keys writing code, not controllers moving silent premiership millionaires across lush green animated football pitches.

We were computer fans, not games console players. We looked at a computer and thoughts about lines of code and debugging. We saved our pennies every week to buy computer magazines that contained pages and pages of programs, not a free CD on the front with the latest killing fest.

God it takes me back. It takes me back to a time when owning a computer meant knowing something about computers, and it makes me proud to have been a teenager when the Beeb, the Spectrum and the Dragon 32 (It still makes me smile) were born, because hundreds of us were born in that big hall, born to a life of knowing what computers really can do with a bit of effort and knowledge, and in a place where bingo gave way to Beebs.