From the “things we like, but can’t explain why file” comes the BBC-Micro-bot twitter robot. BBC Basic was a staple in the UK and if you tweet a BBC Basic program to @bbcmicrobot you’ll get a reply with a 30 second video of your program being emulated in all its glory.

As you can see in the above tweet, the code can get a bit terse, but if you look at the bot’s feed you can find some more legible examples. As the author, [@Dominic Pajak] said:

You might want to use fewer and smaller line numbers, fewer spaces and check out the minimum abbreviations for BBC BASIC keywords to achieve this.

The output from the code is a video because you see the emulated machine’s screen during the 30 second run. We know this is a sort of pointless exercise, but there’s something cool about seeing vintage code populating your Twitter feed.

It looks like the ‘bot has some defense against bad words. We assume it is looking at the output so your tricks to pick your bad word out of every other character of a string probably won’t work. Probably. We didn’t feel like risking a ban to find out.

Of course, you can run a lot of old computers in your browser. You might think this was the first 6502 we’ve seen in the cloud, but you’d be really wrong.