Floppy Friday #18

This is a big week for 1980s computing. Wednesday marked the 40th birthday of the BBC Microcomputer, the machine that helped launch thousands of software development careers (including mine) in the UK.

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This was such an important machine, in so many ways: it was really well engineered, with great performance, but also – due to government subsidies – available in the majority of schools in the UK.

For my Computer Science A-level I used some networked Beebs to automate a hypothetical fast food restaurant: from touchpad-driven ordering by customers to printing of receipts and stock control. Here’s an image of the kind of touchpad I used (although this one is A3, I think mine was only A4):

Concept keyboard touchpad

While I don’t (yet? 🙂 own a BBC Micro, I did receive some boxes containing four of its 1980s siblings, late last week. So this week’s Floppy Friday is a simple retro unboxing, showing the ZX81, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC464 and ZX Spectrum+ that I received (some in their original…

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