[Leaded Solder] took on an interesting challenge. The BBC, apparently, produced a game console known as the BBC Bridge Companion that connected to your TV and helped you learn to play Bridge back in 1985. At £200, we doubt many were sold new, but there were nine ROM cartridges available, presumably at an additional cost. [Leaded Solder] doesn’t care about playing bridge, but decided to teach the computer itself to play Tetris.
Inside is what you might expect for 1985. A Z80 and TI video chip, although naturally enough, it is the PAL variant. With 16K of VRAM the machine would have been very capable for its day. Unlike some game systems, the Bridge Companion runs its own code before launching what’s on the ROM cartridge. That required a few evenings of reverse engineering to figure out the correct header. Meanwhile, the surplus real hardware needed a quick repair on its cartridge slot before he could test it with real metal.
There were more hurdles, including adapting the PAL output for a composite monitor. Don’t miss the second part of the series for more technical details, and we’ll be interested in following the posts to their conclusion later this month.
Oddly enough, we think this is the first time the BBC Bridge Companion has made an appearance on Hackaday. However, we’ve had no shortage of card shufflers.
Something happened this morning which will have been unnoticed by many, but which for a certain breed of radio enthusiast marks the end of an era. The BBC stopped broadcasting Radio 4 on their 198 kHz Long Wave frequency, ending over a century of transmission in the band. For now the transmitter carries a recorded message telling listeners that the service has ended, but it’s expected that this will soon be turned off.
The main 198kHz BBC transmitter, at Droitwich. Bob Nienhuis, Public domain.
American readers may be unfamiliar with Long Wave as it’s a band not allocated in their region. Covering 153 to 279 kHz, it’s a relic from the earliest days of high-power broadcasting in the 1920s, used because of the enormous distances that could be covered with its lower frequencies. The main long wave transmitter for the BBC is at Droitwich, and its demise comes because there are no more spares for its high-power transmitter tubes. It joins many Medium Wave, or AM, as it is commonly known, stations in leaving the airwaves, as increased interference from switch mode electronics and the availability of higher quality alternatives took away their listeners. It’s fair to say that there will be few whose lives are inconvenienced by the switch-off in 2026, but it’s worth taking a moment to remember.
The first BBC Long Wave transmissions in the mid-1920s were on a 1600 metre wavelength, or 187.5 kHz. A series of international agreements saw them move to 193 kHz, and then 200 KHz or 1500 metres in 1934. They stayed on that frequency until another shift down 2 KHz to 198 kHz in 1988. They were atomic-controlled, and thus usable as a frequency standard. The programming started with station names redolent of their era, first the BBC National Service, then the Light Programme you’ll see on the dial in the header image, and finally the more modern-sounding Radio 4. A famous BBC programme tied to Long Wave is the Shipping Forecast, a weather bulletin for deep-sea fishermen which became cult listening on land and now features on FM and digital services too, and there’s even a probably-apocryphal tale that British nuclear submarine captains would once use its presence or absence to judge whether nuclear war had occurred.
In an Oxfordshire farmhouse not far short of fifty years ago, a young child who would later become a Hackaday writer heard a radio show like nothing before, which made an impression that continues to this day. The show was one of the earliest airings of the original Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy radio series, through a 1970s ITT radio tuned to BBC Radio 4 on (then) 200 kHz Long Wave. So long, Droitwich, and thanks for all the fish.
There comes a point in everybody’s life when things that they were a part of are presented as history, and for the 8-bit generation, that time is now. It’s interesting to see the early history of 8-bit home computers presented as history, not from a 2026 perspective but from the early 1990s. The BBC archive has recently posted a retrospective from 1992 looking at ten years of the Computer Literacy Project, a British government programme intended to equip the young people of the 1980s with the skills they would need to approach the information age. It’s a much more immediate history of something which was largely still in place at the time, making it a time capsule in which this past isn’t quite the other country we see it as today.
The Computer Literacy Project was run by the nation’s broadcaster and included a raft of TV programming about computers, as well as the commissioning of a machine specifically for the project. You know this machine as the Acorn BBC Micro, and aside from eventually providing the genesis of what would become ARM, it remains one of the most high-spec 8-bit machines in terms of built-in hardware. We hear from the luminaries of Acorn about the development of this machine, and then the film moves into some of the wider cultural effects.
If you were there, you’ll doubtless remember some of the TV programmes featured, and you might have used a BBC Micro at school. If you weren’t there, it’s an encapsulation of the promise on offer in that era, an optimism that seems sad when you reflect that educational computing descended into learning Microsoft Word during the following decade. It would be another two decades before the Raspberry Pi and BBC micro:bit picked up that fallen torch.
It is a safe bet that nearly all Hackaday readers like to at least imagine what it would be like to build and live in an orbital station, on the moon, or on another planet. Moon bases and colonies show up all the time in fictional writing and movies, too. For the Hackaday crowd, some of these are plausible, and others are — well — a bit fanciful. However, there’s one fictional moonbase that we think might have been too realistic: Moonbase 3.
View of the base from above.
If that didn’t ring a bell, we aren’t surprised. The six-episode series was a co-production between Twentieth Century Fox and the BBC that aired in 1973. To make matters worse, after the initial airings in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the video master tapes were wiped out. Until 1993, there were no known copies of the show, but then one turned up in a US television station.
The show had many links to Dr. Who and, in fact, if you think the spacesuits look familiar, they made later appearances in two Dr. Who episodes.
The BBC wanted to show everyone how a computer might be used in schools. A program aired in 1979 asks, “Will Computers Revolutionise Education?” There’s vintage hardware and an appearance of PILOT, made for computer instructions.
Using PILOT looks suspiciously like working with a modern chatbot without as much AI noise. The French teacher in the video likes that schoolboys were practicing their French verb conjugation on the computer instead of playing football.
If you want a better look at hardware, around the five-minute mark, you see schoolkids making printed circuit boards, and some truly vintage oscilloscope close-ups. There are plenty of tiny monitors and large, noisy printing terminals.
You have to wonder where the eight-year-olds who learned about computers in the video are today, and what kind of computer they have. They learned binary and the Towers of Hanoi. Their teacher said the kids now knew more about computers than their parents did.
As a future prediction, [James Bellini] did pretty well. Like many forecasters, he almost didn’t go far enough, as we look back almost 50 years. Sure, Prestel didn’t work out as well as they thought, dying in 1994. But he shouldn’t feel bad. Predicting the future is tough. Unless, of course, you are [Arthur C. Clarke].
Long before we had internet newsfeeds or Twitter, Ceefax delivered up-to-the-minute news right to your television screen. Launched by the BBC in 1974, Ceefax was the world’s first teletext service, offering millions of viewers a mix of news, sports, weather, and entertainment on demand. Fast forward 50 years, and the iconic service is being honored with a special exhibition at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.
At its peak, Ceefax reached over 22 million users. [Ian Morton-Smith], one of Ceefax’s original journalists, remembers the thrill of breaking stories directly to viewers, bypassing scheduled TV bulletins. The teletext interface, with its limited 80-word entries, taught him to be concise, a skill crucial to news writing even today.
But Ceefax wasn’t just news—it was a global movement toward interactive media, preceding the internet age. Services like Viditel and the French Minitel carried forward the idea of interactive text and graphics on screen.
The BBC has a long history of teaching the world about computers. The broadcaster’s name was proudly displayed on the BBC Micro, and BBC Basic was the programming language developed especially for that computer. Now, BBC Basic is back and running on a whole mess of modern platforms.
BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 will run on Windows, MacOS, x86 Linux, and even Raspberry Pi OS, Android, and iOS. Desktop versions of the programming environment feature a BASIC editor that has syntax coloring for ease of use, along with luxury features like search and replace that weren’t always available at the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, the smartphone versions feature a simplified interface designed to work better in a touchscreen environment.
It’s weird to see, but BBC Basic can actually do some interesting stuff given the power of modern hardware. It can address up to 256 MB of memory, and work with far more advanced graphical assets than would ever have been possible on the original BBC Micro. If you honed your programming skills on that old metal, you might be impressed with what they can achieve with BBC Basic in a new, more powerful context.
