Manufacturer	Acorn
Period of Manufacture	1981 to 1986
Wub Rating	Ooooo warm tingly feelings

Ahhh the BBC Model B. My first love affair. Brought home by my dad to replace our Dragon 32. How could he possibly imagine what it would do to me. I hold him responsible for the damage done to this day: unrequited love, addiction, loss, a career in IT. The list goes on and on.

The history of the BBC is fairly well documented but indulge me. I'm going to tell you it all again anyway. Acorn was founded in 1978 by Herman Hauser and Chris Curry and had already produced the System series of kit micros and the Acorn Atom micro that was sold in both kit and preassembled forms. In 1980 Acorn began work on the design of there next microcomputer: the Proton which like its predecessors was based around the 6502 microprocesor. Around the same time the BBC was looking for a micro to base a computer literacy project around. They met with a number of companies and rejected a number of micros (including a Clive Sinclair machine - take that Sinclair fanboys) before looking at the Proton. 8-bit folklore (some say fact I say folklore, potatoe, potato, tomatoe, tomato) has it that Acorn got the prototype Proton up and running an hour before the BBC turned up. To cut a long story short (not that there's much more to tell) the BBC liked what they saw and signed a contract for the order of 12000 Proton's. Now renamed the BBC Microcomputer it ended up bought by just about every school in the country (the UK that is) and so used by just about everybody who went to school in the 80s. And it was ace. And I love it. Still.

In all its creamy glory Back in the time of leg warmers and glam rock the BBC was quite a hi-tech piece of kit (with a price tag to match). There were actually two models available - the Model A and the Model B. The main difference between the two being the amount of RAM and some IO features.

In addition to the kind of ports we take for granted on modern computers (serial and printer ports for example) the Model B had three very unique IO features - and I'm not talking about USB or FireWire here.

Firstly there was the Tube interface. This allowed a second processor to be added to the BBC and, surprisingly, it was actually used. Acorn released a Z80 second processor to allow the BBC to run the then popular CPM operating system and also a 6502 co-processor unit: after all why limit yourself to just one 6502 chip when you could be using two! Secondly Acorn included a User Port. This was in use on many BBC Micro's for one of two things the Logotron Logo Turtle (which still haunts my dreams, that thing was freaky) or for the AMX Mouse. Then there was the 1 MHz Bus which, well, I'm not really certain what that was for but I'm sure some innovative boffin-like Acorn user put it to good and unimaginably clever use as opposed to my poking a screwdriver in it.

I can hear you now: did he really just say networking. You think I'm making this up don't you? Yes I did just say that, and no I'm not making this up. Right from its launch it was possible to network BBC Micro's together using a network system designed by Acorn called Econet. And this wasn't just some basic loop of serial cable between two machines network. No. This was a fully feautred network complete with workstations, file servers, and printer servers. If you went to a school in the 80s with a well equipped computer room you may recall the hours of fun *NOTIFYing people and *REMOTEing machines.

Given how important networks have now become and how rare they were in the very early 80s I still find this quite astonishing.