On 05/03/2017 01:37, John Rumm wrote:
On 04/03/2017 13:40, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Max Demian wrote:
On 04/03/2017 11:07, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
wrote:
Reminds me of the BBC Micro/Computer Literacy Project: we were going
to use our home computers to do the accounts, control central heating
and goodness knows what else: a Model B needed a lot of extras even
to do a bit of word processing.)

It didn't need any extras for that.

Except a printer, I suppose.

The printer (and lead) was the easy part. (You could get "near letter
quality" impact dot matrix printers quite cheaply.)

Then you needed the word processor ROM - I think they called it "Word" -
and someone to plug it into the motherboard - if you didn't want to do
it yourself.

Of course - I remember that now. But it might have been possible to
load a
different wordprocessor programme in the normal way. However, given the
time that would take, plugging in a ROM made more sense.

The BBC disk drives were actually very quick - and given the maximum
size of program, would load a WP in next to no time. The more pressing
limitation would have been lack of RAM, which the ROM based option would
mitigate a bit (by not needing the program code in RAM space)

Then you had to get a proper monitor, as the TV picture is too fuzzy for
80 columns.

Or a TV which accepted an RGB signal.

The Microvitec CUB (at silly money) was the RGB monitor of choice for
many, but the £80 ish philips mono monitors actually worked very well on
them.


The shop which supplied my BBC-B also supplied me with a TV which had
been modified to take a video input - by-passing the tuner. That worked
reasonably ok (by the standards of that time).

I got hold of a redundant daisy wheel printer from work, and could
produce quite good quality printed output. ISTR that connecting it to
B's non-standard serial output was a bit of a challenge.
--
Cheers,
Roger
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