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Er, yes I was. I went with the Speccy, first, then moved on to the Amstrad PCP, and then I got a Speccy 128 really cheap.
The BBC Micro was the least popular of the available machines, partly because its BASIC was a bit too lame.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Well, the speccy in total sold about 3-4 times as many units as the BBC (although that is worldwide sales, you pretty much had to be in the UK to get a Beeb) so it was certainly more popular - but I don't think spectacularly so - especially as it was far cheaper.
But I cannot comprehend you saying it was because its BASIC was "a bit to lame"!
Compared to what? Spectrum BASIC?
I rather feel the difference in sales could have had more to do with the sales difference - 125 vs 335 - than anything else!
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Hey, how long have you been a CP member?
You ought to know by now that if someone says "language A is naff" it's more productive to bang your head against a wall than debate the point!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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When someone says "X" is crap where "X" is manufacturer language or whatever, I treat it with the contempt it generally deserves.
but when someone says "Y happened because X is crap", with the supporting evidence being 'cuz I said so' I fart in their general direction.
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Yeah, but BBC BASIC was cr@p!
You can probably download all the BASICs of the time, and make your own comparisons.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I have programmed pretty much all of them - at one time had a collection of all the old ones.
Its a personal opinion thing, usually weighted by the user's personal exposure, as to whether one or another is better than another.
And BBC basic was clean and well designed - especially for education, Sinclair idiosyncratic and commodore pretty straight forward.
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_Maxxx_ wrote: BC basic was clean and well designed - especially for education dull and useless, Sinclair idiosyncratic strangely inspired and strangely inspiring (addictively so), and commodore pretty straight forward damned solid, in your face, and got the job (any job!) done.
I agree.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I'm genuinely interested in what makes you say BBC Basic was "Dull and useless". in what way? compared to Sinclair's - what specifically do you see that made it dull ? And useless? in what way, again?
IMHO the great thing about BBC Basic was it added structure (it had named functions and procedures) and it 'compiled' into byte code as each line was entered (making it very efficient) and allowed you to write assembler code in the source directly.
Sinclair BASIC OTOH was a bare implementation of 'standard' Basic - it's innovation being that instead of typing in "FOR" one pressed a function key and single keyboard key; that alone should warn educators to steer clear, ,as you at once are teaching a specific tool, rather than a paradigm. And limiting variable names to one character! how advanced!
And Commodore was pretty much Microsoft Basic (an was the first BASIC I learned) - and how I suffered for the 2-character variable name limitation.
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You and your wikipedia searches! It's getting silly!
BBC Basic's PROCDEF was based on MS & GW BASICs' SUB! It wasn't added until after QuickBasic had been released, and certainly wasn't available on BBC Micros (maybe on the Acorn Archimedes, which was years later)!
Sinclair BASIC was, as you rightly say, years ahead of everyone else in the use of shortcut keys which you could choose to use, if you wanted to.
Other IDEs didn't have such a comprehensive set of shortcut keys until years later.
Etc.
Etc.
Look, if you actually know what to say in response to anything said in this thread, please add it to the discussion -- but stop just googling piecemeal, in the hope of finding arguments.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Similar here - I started with a VIC20 then a C64. The BBC B was years behind (technologically) in comparison.
Then my school got a BBC Archimedes; laughable compared with the Amiga I had at the time 
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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Nice course you steered, there.
The VIC20 (I still pronounce that "VIC Venti", because I was in Italy when it was released), the C64, and the Amiga were each big elements in the history of the microcomputer (which a lot of kids don't know is what we used to call the PC).
The BBC Micro? I'm surprised anyone even bothers to remember it.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It was a sad day when I had to admit defeat and move to a PC 
I still toy with the idea of getting hold of a second hand Amiga or C64 from eBay..
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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Brent Jenkins wrote: I still toy with the idea of getting hold of a second hand Amiga or C64 from eBay..
I bought a fully working Amstrad PPC 640 (the first portable computer a company ever issued me with), full of the joys of nostalgia -- but you forget how much work you had to do just to use the damned things!
It was a joy to set it aside and get back to pointing and clicking.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The Amiga was point and click most of the time 
it'd be interesting to have one just to show the kids.. they'd probably wonder what on earth I was raving about
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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Brent Jenkins wrote: it'd be interesting to have one just to show the kids.. they'd probably wonder what on earth I was raving about
"Siri doesn't work!"
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Brent Jenkins wrote: BBC Archimedes; laughable compared with the Amiga I had at the time
laughable in what way? Were you programming the Amiga or playing games?
I had an Atari ST, Amiga and Archimedes - and the Archie was by far my favourite - the OS was exceedingly well thought out- way ahead of its time - the RISC chip powerful - it just suffred from a lack of software IMO
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Quote: it just suffred from a lack of software IMO
True, very true, it was at the time the first WIMP system I played with, I still think having an Icon for the floppy was a work of genius the Amiga (which I still own, some where...) clicked all the time never really got too near an Atari ST to see how that handle it, plus it had an A to D built in a boon for electronic geeks like myself!
Mind you the Amiga's predilection for C was a major plus in my book
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_Maxxx_ wrote: it just suffred from a lack of software IMO because no-one wanted to code in that god-awful BBC BASIC!
Don't leave sentences unfinished.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Programming.. I'm not into games, although these days I'll play a casual game on an iPad if I've got a few minutes to kill.
My VIC20 came with one game which I played for about 5 minutes on Christmas morning before learning BASIC programming from the manual - it came with a memory map at the back which led me into machine code programming
The C64 was VIC20 on steroids - more colours for graphics apps (including sprite support), more RAM, better CPU and access to the internet (Compunet as it was back then).
At school our IT lessons (BBC B's) consisted of moving a green turtle to various locations around the screen, creating a Ceefax screen or an occasional beep if our teacher felt rebellious enough. No wonder most kids turned away from computers.
At home, I moved onto the Amiga A500 when it came out and it was a whole leap forward from the C64. 4,096 colours, multitasking, a decent OS which actually allowed you to get things done. This is where I learned event driven programming and UI development, file IO, etc. At 14 years old, I was selling Amiga apps on floppy disks at school
I didn't like the Archimedes OS at all - it seemed seriously lacking compared with the Amiga. Perhaps it was the lack of decent applications, like you mentioned, that killed it. Hardware's nothing if you haven't got anything to run on it.
The ST was pretty good, but seemed more to find it's place in the music arena. I probably would have gone for a ST if the Amiga hadn't been around (or if they hadn't made to A500 - the A1500, A2000 and A3000 were well out of my price range).
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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Using BBCs in schools was subject to all the problems associated with IT in schools - mainly because it tended to be taught be teachers who hadn't got a clue and struggled to get "Hello World" working themselves!
The thing I loved about the Archie OS was that it was well designed and documented, and simple. It was easily extended too.
The three button mouse wasn't just stuffed on there - they defined what the functionality should be in every application and, generally, people stuck to that, so once the basics were grasped, every program just worked!
By comparison, neither the Amiga or ST were so easy to work with.
All of the other computers in the BBC time (vic, speccy etc.) were prettier, I think, and because of all the games available, kids were attracted to them - in the 'good' schools, teachers moved beyond the Logo crap and got the kids doing real, integrated stuff (one school, for example, had the older kids writing programs to read data from various devices (like temperature sensors) to use in science classes for all the kids.
Then the kids coming through the school could look at the programs and come up with their own ideas of stuff to develop.
they wrote timetable software, educational games for the littlies, all sorts of stuff that they were interested in, and was educational not only from a learning to program point of view, but also in thinking logically, planning etc.
I think you are one of the people that the BBC really wasn't so useful for - partly due to your teacher, but also because you had the interest already.
I originally cut my teeth on a Commodore Pet - so just having bit mapped graphics was awesome!
& I really wanted the power that assembler gave me - and being able to write it out of the box inside a Basic program was awesome - it allowed very fast development compared to the Pet (where I hand-wrote every line and entered the byte-code)
My preference for the ST over the Amiga was partly due to the music side, partly the cost, and partly due to the fact that I got a job working for Atari ST User and ST World magazine!
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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_Maxxx_ wrote: I think you are one of the people that the BBC really wasn't so useful for - partly due to your teacher, but also because you had the interest already.
I don't think they were useful for any of the kids in my school - those interested already had a computer in some form, but those not interested certainly weren't going to be swayed by the Beeb - you couldn't have come up with a machine more likely to put kids off.
It's a wonder the kids weren't provided with brown corduroy trousers as part of the lesson
You must be a bit older than me? I didn't leave school until '89. I've always felt I missed the 80's by a few years (I wish I'd been about 10 years older in the mid-80's), they were very cool times.
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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I once came across an app (can't remember if it was Silverlight or WPF) that showcased various features of XAML, with things like transitions, drag/drop, and a whole load of other things, which you chose from a list down the left-hand side.
I think the project had a bit of a weird name and was written by one of the XAML team at MS. I can't remember what it was called though, or where to find it. Anyone?
modified 13-Mar-15 4:27am.
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MVVM Light?[^]
Also, there's tonnes of sample projects under New Project => Online >= Samples >= C# => Desktop => WPF
modified 13-Mar-15 4:54am.
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I found it - it's called the "WPF Bag of Tricks". The app was originally at bot.codeplex.com, but this has now gone and it can instead be found here: https://github.com/thinkpixellab/bot[^]
Not sure why I thought it was something to do with Microsoft - perhaps the guys running this company were employees once.
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