History
During the early 1980s, the BBC started what became known as the BBC Computer Literacy Project. The project was initiated partly in response to an extremely influential ITV documentary series The Mighty Micro, in which Dr Christopher Evans of the UK's National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming microcomputer revolution and its effect on the economy, industry, and lifestyle of the United Kingdom.
The BBC wanted to base its project on a microcomputer capable of performing various tasks which they could then demonstrate in their 1982 TV series The Computer Programme. The list of topics included programming, graphics, sound and music, teletext, controlling external hardware and artificial intelligence. It decided to adopt a microcomputer brand, then developed a fairly ambitious (for its time) specification and asked for takers. The BBC discussed the requirement with several companies including Sinclair Research, Newbury Laboratories, Dragon Data and Acorn Computers.
The Acorn team had already been working on an upgrade to their existing Atom microcomputer. Known as the Proton, it included better graphics and a faster 2 MHz MOS Technology 6502 central processing unit. The machine was only at the design stage at the time, and the Acorn team, composed largely of students including Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, had one week to build a working prototype from the sketched designs. The team worked through the night to get a working Proton together to show the BBC. Not only was the Acorn Proton the only machine to match the BBC's specification, it also exceeded it in nearly every parameter.
Read more about this topic: BBC Micro
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)