Today's news read by a BBC Micro.

I'm struck by how comprehensible the speech is, considering how incredibly limited the hardware is. Makes you wonder what could be possible with today's hardware if we wrote code as tightly and efficiently as they had to back then. IMO some of the great marvels of software were developed during that era - perhaps most striking of all was the chess program for the ZX81 that fit a graphical chessboard with AI into 1.5kB of RAM.

The best (ok, Amiga fans, maybe second best) personal computer ever made still has some life in it, that's nice to see.<p>/me longs for the days of user ports &#38; tubes<p>16K of tight code will get you a lot of bang for your buck, especially if the OS is as clean as what Acorn stuck in to the beeb. Iirc there was exactly <i>one</i> bug found after release, sheepishly admitted to in the errata.

The about page is great:<p><a href="http://www.bbcmicronews.co.uk/main/about" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbcmicronews.co.uk/main/about</a><p>They use a messaging system with a "cluster" of Micros to generate the spoken news articles. They even convert tweets too:<p><a href="http://www.bbcmicronews.co.uk/twitter" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbcmicronews.co.uk/twitter</a>