- Tuesday, 1 December 2009
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Beeb boffins bring back bygone boxen
THE TEAM that designed and created the BBC Micro, probably the world's first truly affordable home computer, is getting together to blether about the past at London's Science Museum today.
The seminar, which has been organised by the Computer Conservation Society, will discuss the legacy of the machine which changed the public's perception of computing forever and introduced a thousand spotty herberts to a lifetime hunched over a keyboard in a darkened room for the first time.
The BBC Micro was at the heart of an ambitious programme of education, backed up with TV programmes, lessons in schools and a nationwide network of teachers and educators who learned to use the machine.
Although not a condition of entry, we predict hideous cardigans aplenty.
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£399 back then? got rich parents did you?

sinclair's zx81 and spectrum (at about a quarter of the price) where the only "truely affordable" computers back then. please filter the press release before publishing.
"The world's first truly affordable home computer"? Not even Britain's - it was a penny under 400 Quid! - that 32k BBC Model B was up against the 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum for £175. The earlier ZX81 & the build-it yourself ZX-80 were even cheaper.

On top of that you had to suffer interminably patronising programmes by the aforementioned woolly cardies plugging it at every opportunity ("here's a typical home computer"... oh look a BBC-B) on the commercial-free (sic.) BBC-TV. 

If they had their way it would have been "affordable" in the way that their "terribly good value for money" licence fee is collected by their state-approved terror guard (= the price of 16k Speccy in 1982!)
I don't think so. 

I bought my first S100 bus 4MHz Z80 CP/M machine for $600 (I think the exchange rate then was 5:1, so 120 lbs., if 2:1 then 300 lbs.) American in 1978, and by 1980 had a nice little business selling complete SOHO systems for $700, which included Magic Wand (word processing) and dBaseII. For additional fees (typically ~ $500) my wife and I would set up a complete database management service that included programming your dBase database, data entry and management screens, and letter and label generation from selected fields from the database to your printer.