Become a BBC BASIC Programmer with a Single Tweet

Back in the 1980s, when you turned on a computer, if it booted to a BASIC prompt, it was considered "user friendly." That prompt is where you would have to type in the program you wanted the computer to run. Without even downloading an emulator, you can experience writing short BASIC programs for a popular 1980s computer. The BBC Micro Bot from Dominic Pajak takes BASIC programs from (just) a tweet, runs them on a BBC Micro emulator, and sends back a short video clip of its output.

10 PRINT "Runs your tweet on an 8-bit computer emulator"
20 GOTO 10

Creative programmers need to stay within the ~380 Twitter character limit. The limit adds a little bit of charm because it feels like the memory limitations of the era. You can gain another 100 characters if you use base2048 encoding for your program. Sadly though, that means others cannot read it in the tweet.

The BBC Micro was a computer sold by the Acorn Computer company in the 1980s. Originally called the Proton, the name changed when the BBC adopted the computer for use in its Computer Literacy Project. The project taught how to program BBC BASIC through a variety of television shows (or programmes.) Which makes a Twitter-based bot an interesting parallel to a modern media platform

BBC Micro Bot is, of course, not running on the original 8-bit computer, but its start did stay in the family. Pajak's original implementation was an emulator running on a Raspberry Pi. Like many embedded computers, the Pi uses an Arm microprocessor. The connection between the two goes back to 1987. That is when Acorn released the Archimedes, which was the first computer based on the Arm architecture!

(As the bot's popularity grew, the BBC Micro emulator had to be moved to AWS to cope with the load. )

You can interact directly with the bot on the BBC Micro Bot Twitter account. If you need help with BBC BASIC or want to learn more about the bot, Pajak's website goes into more detail.

Massimo Banzi recently interviewed Pajak on Episode 01 of Bar Arduino Worldwide (starting around the 27:00 mark in the video above).