barnoid

BBC B running 2048 I’ve recently been experimenting at the Hackspace with UPURS and UPURSFS. These unfriendly strings of letters amount to a cable that links the BBC’s User port to my laptop via a USB to serial converter, two ROMs that go in the Beeb and some Perl code that runs on my laptop. The upshot of which is that I can access parts of the filesystem of my laptop as if they were floppies on the BBC.

TwitBeeb Photo by John Honniball TwitBeeb is a BBC B microcomputer (vintage 1981) from which you can Tweet. The Beeb itself was my main computer until 1994, I taught myself to program on it. A few years ago I pulled a rather scuffed up BBC out of a skip at Sussex University and took it home. Inside it had an add-on ROM board with several programs in ROM chips including a serial terminal emulator called Termulator. This allows it to connect to other computers via its serial port and for everything typed on the BBC’s keyboard to be sent to the other computer which sends responses back to be displayed on the BBC’s screen. It acts as what used to be called a “dumb terminal”, just handling the input and output while a more powerful computer does the actual work. This was quite a common way of doing things back when computers were room-sized. Several terminals would connect to a large shared computer, possibly over phone lines using modems.