R.T. Russell's Z80 BBC Basic Is Now Open Source
The original Sophie Wilson version of BBC BASIC was brilliant. I did not get to play with the Z80 version but if it is a faithful original of the BBC 6502 version then this a valuable contribution to open source software.<p>The UK owes a lot to the people such as Sophie Wilson (who wasn&#x27;t Sophie then) that were extremely forward thinking. The BBC Micro was just for kids. Rather than dumb it down the creators went the other way.<p>Anyone not familiar with the BBC Micro (because they weren&#x27;t a kid in the UK in the 1980&#x27;s) can&#x27;t really appreciate how good it was and for its time. Perhaps an analogy could be found between arcade games machines and home consoles of the era, the arcade machine just worked, the console was just compromised in every way in comparison to what you had in the arcade original.<p>It was the same with the BBC and home computer rivals. There was just an edge of performance to it that no other home computers had. This was because the hardware had all the add ons, e.g. a decent sound chip, not just one but two competent graphics chips, a socket next to the keyboard to put your home blown EEPROM in and every port you could imagine at the back and under the machine.<p>The BBC Model B was a true Rolls Royce of a machine and we gave it to kids.<p>BBC BASIC was equally deluxe. The built in assembler that was embedded in was awesome. Particularly when you only had a 6502 which has all of three registers - X, Y and A. I was doing assembler at school and plenty of other kids were. No extra software was needed, nobody needed to pay for a compiler, it was all in there.<p>The rest of BBC BASIC was sophisticated compared to all other BASICs of the time. You could and did write procedures at a time when other BASICs would have you doing GOSUB with a line number.<p>Later when I moved on to the IBM PC with MS-DOS I felt extremely disappointed. It was actually backward! It lacked the sophistication the BBC Micro had. It was MS-DOS that I found particularly dumb, I just felt &#x27;is this all there is?&#x27; and could not believe this was the new &#x27;better&#x27;.<p>Exposure to BBC BASIC, UNIX and today&#x27;s Linux makes me wonder whether Microsoft&#x27;s products from MS-DOS to Windows have really advanced computing as we know it. I am not knocking Microsoft entirely as I do believe some of their products such as Word 2.0c were fantastic at enabling progress. But with Microsoft came a particular model of personal computing, we stayed on floppy disks far too long and Microsoft BASIC introduced things that are best not taught - i.e. the GOTO statement.<p>Anyway, the BBC Micro and BBC BASIC were free from this Microsoft way of doing things, the BBC Micro got it right and it was a vision that was gifted to a generation of schoolchildren.