The Microbee was my first computer, bought by my mother from the school she taught at when the school was replacing them with Apples.<p>I came home one day and there it was on a little desk just high enough for me to sit at, and I was so excited that we finally had a computer of our own. Mum knelt before it typing incantations on its clicky-clacky keyboard, and suddenly it began to play "When The Saints Go Marching In", and I don't need to describe the sense of wonder I felt because everybody here has had that same wonder at some point in their lives.<p>I asked her to tell me how she'd done it, and she just smiled and handed me the BASIC programming guide and gave me a hug, and from that moment onward I was hooked. I read that manual back to front a dozen times over, got my hands dirty poking around CP/M, and wrote hundreds of little games and tools and silly programs in the years that I owned my little 'bee.<p>I'm not exaggerating when I say that the Microbee (and my mum's ability to engage my sense of wonder) literally decided the course my life would take.<p>Thanks, Microbee, and I love you, mum.
Soft cores, processors (gpu/cpu/etc) that you put onto an FPGA, are quite an interesting beast. The way it is now is that you can flash whatever physical hardware that can fit - if you had access to Intel Pentium 1 source code, you could theoretically flash on, and it would work.<p>This is kind of off-topic, but what's more interesting to me, conceptually, is the potential for real-time re-flashing. For example, you've got space for 10 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores. When, say, running a web server, you can erase the GPU cores, and use 20 CPU cores instead. When running a game, you could drop down to 5 CPU cores and 15 GPU cores. Or, when doing single-threaded apps, you could opt for a beefy single or dual core.<p>Also, you could have CPUs that re-wire themselves as part of their workflow. Or, if, for example, a new CPU design comes out - you could upgrade to it without buying new silicon. Hybrid FPGA approaches even exist today - some high-end FPGAs actually come with a hard-wired CPU inside them.<p>The FPGA Microbee project is only scratching the surface of "FPGA=cool" factor, I think.
Good stuff! Reimplementing old hardware on an FPGA is a really fun and enlightening exercise that I would highly recommend to any CS people with some extra time and patience. I've been working on an FPGA based GameBoy implementation in my spare time (with no prior FPGA experience) and it's been a blast.<p><a href="https://github.com/trun/fpgaboy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/trun/fpgaboy</a>
For anyone feel nostalgic about Microbee, check out:<p>1. The brand new Microbee Premium Plus Kit (sold out but very cool) <a href="http://www.microbeetechnology.com.au/premiumpluskit.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.microbeetechnology.com.au/premiumpluskit.htm</a> and
2. The Microbee Software Preservation Project (MSPP) <a href="http://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/" rel="nofollow">http://www.microbee-mspp.org.au/</a>
Is the source code available for download somewhere?<p>(20 years ago or so, the computer lab in the Swedish jr high school I was attending was filled with Microbees for some odd reason. The memories...)