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The BBC Microcomputer Page
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The Reid's Hardware Inventory
The following is a list of hardware that the Reid family
owned.
Acorn Computer's Model B BBC Microcomputer system,
lovingly termed as the "Beeb."
Intial purchase: CPU, 1 Double sided floppy disk drive.
Connectors enabled us to connect to our Television and so we had full
colour 'monitor' from the start.
A year after: CPU, Disk drive and OKIDATA dot matrix
printer.
Soon after: CPU, additional floppy drive (the drive was
vertical in arrangement not horizontal like the Apple II series
drive, the other drive (labeled 2) was stuck between the first one
and the housing.) A sketch will be forthcoming, an RGB 12 inch
display, OKIDATA Printer.
A year later: CPU Two disk drives, EPSON dot Matrix
printer. 1200 baud Practical Periphial MODEM.
A few years later Mr Reid attached a ZIFF NET socket. This
peice of hardware is unique. Probably will never see its kind again.
It involved a long 'female' flat connector with a plug that looked
like the sprokets of a normal chip. This fitted into the mother board
of the BBC. For those of you who don't know, the BBC had four slots
(remniscent of simm expansion slots today) that allowed the
'expansion' of the BBC for more powerful uses, e.g. word processing
using a chip called VIEW. These chips were called ROMS and out of the
four two were in use. The ZIFF NET allowed the user to plug in a ROM
(like a periphial or diskette) so that multiple powerful programs can
be used. In the case of the Reid family BBC the ROM that was plugged
in and out using the ZIFFNET was the PROLOG ROM. I'll try to sketch
this too. . .
At the time of donation this is what the BBC was made up
of:
CPU, RGB Monitor, EPSON printer, Double disk drive, ZIFF
NET socket, and a tape recorder and appropriate connector for
cassette programs.
Thanks to Robert Schmit for putting up some of these pictures on
his web site so that I could have access to some of them for research
sake and to my father for helping me reconstruct the past.
If you would like to learn more about the history of the BBC Micro
then go here
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