Topic: My Solar System

[Clive]

My Solar System is a fun little physics toy that will do 2-, 3-, and 4-body 2D gravity simulations.  I made some spectacular collisions!   

LINK

[Rik]

There used to be an app like this on the BBC Micro, Clive. You can spend many happy hours with it.

[Clive]

Yes, I had that!  It was on a 5.25" disk    I never thought they would go out of fashion!

[Rik]

Happy days. Green monitors and 32k of RAM.

[Clive]

Mine was a 128K Master series complete with matching beige Teletext adaptor.  Gosh -  real state of the art!   

[Rik]

I had a second processor, both the Z80 and a 6502, the Teletext adaptor plus an external 10MB hard drive, and a pair of floppies. Oh, and an expansion board full of ROMs.

[Clive]

Were the floppy drives an external unit?  I had one from Watford Electronics so perhaps I had two drives for copying purposes.  I also had a dot matrix printer to go with it but that was my lot.  Oh, I had the BBC wordprocessor.  Was that built in?  What was it called?   

[Clive]

View!   

[Simon]

I thought Hyperbolics were... something else. 

[sam]

Happy days. Green monitors and 32k of RAM.

we were worrying about some code not running efficiently the other day then we looked at the size of the array and realised it was only taking up 32k ... we have 30GB of RAM on that machine..

[Rik]

Were the floppy drives an external unit?  I had one from Watford Electronics so perhaps I had two drives for copying purposes.  I also had a dot matrix printer to go with it but that was my lot.  Oh, I had the BBC wordprocessor.  Was that built in?  What was it called?   

They were, Clive, the BBC Micro was pretty good on expansion with the external 1MHz bus. I had both dot matrix and daisy wheel printers. There was no built in WP, but many available on ROMs, I used the Inter suite from Computer Concepts.

[Clive]

I wish I had taken a photo of my setup to remind me what it looked like!  I remember that it was aesthetically pleasing to look at in the matching beige colour but that's about it.  If it didn't have an internal drive then I probably only had the Watford Electronics external drive.  How was View plugged in?  I know it was on ROM but did it fit inside the computer or did I have an expansion board like yourself?  I don't remember having such a unit.   

[Rik]

The expansion boards fitted inside the computer, Clive, so were quite elegant.

[Clive]

In that case I must have fitted one.  I also had a spreadsheet but that may have been part of View.  It was easy enough to open up the machine and, as you say, it was very neatly laid out inside. 

[Rik]

I've always thought the machine was ahead of its time, Clive, with multiple options for expansion and add-on units to make it more flexible. It was also a delight to program.