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UK museum seeks BBC Micro experts to help maintain its classic ‘80s PCs

Sticky keys, power supplies, and other smaller components in need of some love.

A bank of BBC Micros at the National Museum of Computing
A bank of BBC Micros at the National Museum of Computing.

Think you know a thing or two about the classroom classic BBC Micro? The UK's National Museum of Computing, based on the Bletchley Park estate in Buckinghamshire, is having trouble maintaining its stock of the once-ubiquitous 8-bit machines, and is looking for people familiar with the computer and its peripherals to help keep them running.

Around 80 BBC Micros are in use at the museum, forming part of an interactive exhibit that recreates a 1980s classroom. In an interview with the BBC, Owen Grover—a volunteer at the museum who helps maintain its computers—described the Micro as "pretty robust," but also said that capacitors within its power supply had a tendency to pop and smoke, which isn't exactly ideal when you're leading tour groups around.

"The main problem we need to sort out is the power supply," he said. "There are two capacitors that dry out, and if we do not replace them they tend to explode and stink the place out. So we change them as a matter of course."

Popping capacitors are a common problem with the Micro, and there are several tutorials online explaining how to replace them when they do eventually die. But the museum faces other maintenance issues thanks to the Micros being in daily use, including replacing sticky keys, and other smaller components that might fail.

Grover noted that thanks to the use of largely off-the-shelf components, spares for the Micro are easy to obtain, while the small number of custom-built components can be cannibalised from broken or faulty machines. "The good thing about them is that they are repairable," said Grover. "We are not going to be repairing power supplies in modern equipment in 30 years' time because they are not designed to be opened up and replaced."

Those interested in sharing their BBC Micro skills with the National Museum of Computing can contact the museum via its website.

BBC Micro keyboard
Enlarge / BBC Micro keyboard

The BBC Micro has been enjoying something of a renaissance of late, thanks to its use in educational environments in not just the National Museum of Computing, but also The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, and The National Video Game Arcade in Nottingham.

"A lot of the students are used to using Python and they know how fussy that can be when you do not put your indents in the right place," said Chris Monk, learning coordinator at the Museum of Computing. "But BBC basic does not care as it was designed to be quite tolerant of spacing and it tries to give them sensible error messages."

David Braben, developer of the legendary BBC Micro game Elite and co-founder of the Raspberry Pi foundation, shared a similar love for the Micro's development chops in an interview with GameSpot:

"The thing that was brilliant about the Acorn Atom [the Micro's predecessor] and the BBC Micro was that they came with everything you needed," said Braben, "which, from a kid's point of view, is brilliant, because you don't have to then say, 'Oh, I need this compiler, or I need this sort of thing.' You could write a game in machine code; you had everything you needed."

"A lot of people probably wouldn't have learnt programming, had the BBC Micro not been around," continued Braben. "You could abuse the Micro, you could send programs to all the machines in the classroom if you knew what you were doing, but the point was that it was brilliant from a classroom point of view. If a kid had a problem, they pressed break to restart the machine, and they were back to square one. It's a very, very good teaching aid."

The BBC Micro directly inspired the broadcaster's recent Make It Digital campaign, part of which involves getting a tiny programable computer called the Micro Bit into Year 7 (age 11-12) classrooms. Like the Raspberry Pi, it's aimed at getting young students ready to code from an early age.

Channel Ars Technica