Benjamin Ellis

Twestival – What is That?

It’s all too easy to take it for granted that people know about something. In the last day or two a few people have asked me what Twestival is. Now, some of you will all ready know about the Twitter Festival, but some won’t, so here is a little background.

It was almost two years ago that I went to the first Twestival, Harvest Twestival – Gathering with many of the people I had met via Twitter and listinging to Ben singing his (tongue in cheek) Twitter song, “you’re no-one if you’re not on twitter“.

Fast forward six months, and I found myself in the BBC’s London television studio (thank you Jaz and the team), explaining why thousands of people, may of whom had never met in real life, were gathering in towns and cities around the world at Twestival events to raise money for Charity:Water.

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The BBC Micro Remembered

It seems that BBC Micro retrospectives are sweeping the web.

The BBC ran a story: Beeb creators reunite at museum on the recent meeting at the science museum.  There is a great video embedded in the story, showing the BBC Micro loading programs from a cassette tape. Ah, those were the days, waiting fifteen minutes and jigging with wires just to try and get a game to load.

The Guardian also covered the BBC Micro story, noting that the team went on to develop the ARM processor, which powers most mobile devices today. The successor, the Archimedes was never quite as successful, and RM (Research Machines) took over the lead as schools moved to IBM compatible PCs and the national curriculum pushed IT skills into the main stream, just a few years after I did my PGCE.

The BBC wasn’t my first computer, although it was my first introduction to electronic music and to computer networking. Just seeing the Owl logo again brought memories flooding back! It is amazing to think what we did with 16k of memory and a 6502 processor running at 2MHz! The ZX Spectrum may have been cheap, but the BBC Micro oozed quality and it was many years later that I finally traded in my BBC (by then a BBC Master) for an Amiga, but that is another story.

The Science Museum is planning an exhibition about the BBC Micro and its legacy in 2009, and Dr Tilly Blyth is writing a book about it (Tilly’s blog here, I think).

I hope they cover something about the Music 500 and M,usic 5000. I still miss the ‘Ample’ music programming language, and haven’t seen an equivalent since. Some of the e-music pioneers are still around and making music, for example Dave Morley. I worked with Pear Tree Computers for a while, demonstrating that amazing technology. I wish I had tools to write music like that again.