Wednesday, April 9, 2008

The fantastic BBC B Micro Computer

Acorn BBC B MicroBBC B LogoThe BBC Micro by Acorn, affectionately known as the Beeb and original home of Elite, was quite popular in the UK (especially in the education market), despite being a rather expensive and almost luxuriant computer. You can find out more about it over at the excellent BBC Lives site or even go for the always trusty Wikipedia entry.

The average BBC Micro usually goes for 15-20£. Now, then, why does this amazing Acorn BBC B sighted @ eBay have a 70£ Buy Now price tag? Well, first of all, the seller ships worldwide. Then, this is the BBC B model, meaning it comes with 32kb of RAM and you even get all necessary cables, 29 software titles (mostly games) and the Wordwise Plus ROM.

What's more, the computer is in a more than impressive state, as it has been fully disassembled and carefully cleaned - even the keyboard has had each key removed one by one and individually cleaned. Also, the X2 suppression capacitor was removed and replaced, meaning this BBC B is more reliable than your average BBC, since the X2 suppression capacitor failing is one of the most commonly experienced hardware problems.

2 comments:

  1. X2 suppression capacitor fail?

    Well that goes without saying gnome!

    Sheeze.

    Why not just lay out that you can generate Teletext control characters by pressing ctrl or shift plus one of the row of ten red-orange function keys f0 − f9?

    Going to tell us that the grass is green next are you?

    I mean it's such common knowledge...

    Haven't you heard the colloquial expression "Fail like a X2 suppression capacitor in a BBC Microcomputer"?

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  2. Oh dear... just made me laugh while working dear Caleb. Thanks a ton mate!

    "Fail like a X2 extension"... pppff....hahahahHAHHA

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