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By Ian Jones, 1 January 2002 00:30

NEWS Ian Jones writes: My own experience was with a BBC Model B, which my parents bought for the whole family. I remember the electric anticipation as my dad and I drove to Watford Electronics to buy the fabled machine. The journey home took a lifetime but finally we plugged it into the telly, wrestled with a tape recorder lead which seemed to have far too many connectors, and finally flicked that reassuringly solid black switch on the back of our very own BBC B. What followed was a perfect introduction to computers that has been with me ever since. It didn't work. The machine powered on OK but it took a while to realise that loading the 'Welcome' tape required a superhumanly sensitive touch on the tape player's volume control. Finally I managed to get it to load and enjoyed such pleasures as Biorhythms, which told me exactly what phase of physical and mental health I was in. Strangely it never understood the fact that I had a dead leg from sitting on the floor for too long and a headache from a combination of tape recorder grief and irradiating my brain for six hours in front of a 24-inch TV screen. Almost a year later, I had pleasured myself to the delights of Killer Gorilla, Defender, Arcadians, Escape from Moonbase Alpha and of course the text-only and insanely hard Acornsoft adventure classic, Philosophers Quest. But now it was time to quite literally take the lid off the true potential of the BBC Micro. We spent a small fortune on a double disk drive from Viglen and an Opus Disk Operating System. Once back at home, the lid was off, and my dad and I were sawing away at one of the main circuit board chips after realising it was only 'plug and play' if you didn't mind cutting processor legs and soldering wires to them. This was computing at its most raw and I will be forever thankful for the experiences it gave me. It didn't just give me computer games, it gave me my first steps in BASIC, Pascal (we bought the Computer Concepts chip) and machine code programming. And now, looking back almost 20 years, I can still hear that special symphony - the unbelievably noisy 5 1/4 inch drives competing with the hammering of the Epson LX86, only bettered by the reassuring 'ber... beep' of the good old Beeb powering up (which, incidentally, took approximately 1.5 seconds - quicker than your monitor took to warm up - PC makers please take note). The BBC B was followed up - somewhat belatedly - in 1985 by the BBC B+ and eventually the BBC Master, which both added extra graphics and extra memory. However, despite the fact these both achieved healthy sales, the zenith of the Beeb's influence had undoubtedly passed. Acorn tried to combat falling sales by launching the high-powered Archimedes in 1987 but this also floundered because of lack of software. However, the RISC chipset it had spent millions creating for it became the basis for another great success, ARM, which was spun off in 1990. Acorn itself was bought by Olivetti and limped on until 1999, nearly two decades after the first BBCs were built. For many who remember the original BBC machines it was an ignominious end for the company that created the most influential UK computer of all time. I dare you to disagree. Next week: The Americans are coming - Commodore stakes its claim