Some New Year Nostalgia
January 4, 2008 – 9:14 amThis is my first post of 2008 - Happy New Year!
We are still awaiting the birth of our second child and so I am not in the zone of activity I’d thought we be in. All is well and I see 2008 as a good year to come. Plenty of great new situations.
Over the holiday period I have had the chance to read quite alot. One book I was itching to read (thanks Reubin and George) is Backroom Boys - The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford. This book talks about a range of examples of British excellence in innovation and pioneering science (such as the Human Genome Project).
Two chapters of the book that stand out to me are the first which talks about British Space Program, specifically the story of the Black Knight space launcher. This project ended in 1971 as a real success but unfortunatley did not survive a government cost cutting exercise (not that it was a strain on the exchequer). One sweep of a politicians pen denied Britain the chance of a significant place in the global, satellite delivery market with an excellent, proven, product offering. One of the experts on the history on the UK Space program, Nick Hill, taught at the boarding school I attended (though not at the time I was there).
Another ’small world’ link relates to John Scott-Scott a scientist and major contributor to the British Space Program. The book refers to John’s time as a schoolboy in Doncaster and his early experiments with biro pen casings and Hydrogen Peroxide. More fame for a former resident of Donny :-). I do try and highlight famous Doncaster people and to me this man now occupies pole position for his work in the area of propulsion. John still works in the Space Industry on the exciting SKYLON project.
The second chapter (that really made me sit up) was about something I had first hand knowledge of. In the early 1980’s Ian Bell and David Braben were students at Cambridge University. Restrained only by their imaginations they co-wrote a game for the BBC Micro Home Computer and laid down a marker in the fledgling computer games industry. Elite was an original idea that delivered an amazing virtual world that ran on an early 6502 processor. Bell and Braben overcame computing resource constraints as they used mathematics (such as Fibonacci sequences to generate the 282 million, million galaxies) and their knowledge of assembly language to cram such a ground breaking user experience into the meagre computer memory available (22kb!).
Compared to the computing power of today this number of kilobytes probably wouldn’t even hold a letter typed and saved in Word! Another measure of how paper thin the resources were that these gents had to work with may be illustrated (literally) by the image further down this post which is 44kb in size. I recall many hours immersed in sessions of Elite. The novel, rich experience made me feel like I was Han Solo and blotted out any desire I may have had to understand how the game had been created.
I remember coming home from school in 1982 for the Christmas holidays to find a BBC Micro Model B. This was an early Christmas present for me and my brother and I thought it was brilliant. My first foray into programming involved typing:
10 Print “Shaun Holt”
20 GOTO 10
As time went by I slowly found other people who also had a ‘Beeb’. At school there were a handful of BBC owners and to those around us we were a pretty sorry looking ‘herd nerd’ but I was proud group member and it was an exciting time. As computer ownership gathered pace in the UK the BBC made some noble efforts to increase sales and generate interest in home computers. This weekend I had a sort out of my books to accomodate the usual new books I have received as christmas gifts. I found this (below) in a drawer in the book shelves.
