A colleague from Cleveratom (Nick) was at the recent science museum event in London which saw the BBC Micro creators reunite to celebrate over 25 years of the machine. In preparation for it Nick created a unique system which uses a BBC Micro to read out the current BBC news RSS feeds! You can subscribe to through iTunes, too. This alone is worthy enough of being called geeky, but in fact also shows the amazing capabilities of this remarkable machine.
Whilst the RSS reading antics do also rely on a couple of other (more modern) machines, the experiment shows the BBC Micro still has enough about it to be used creatively, even now.
In fact, if anyone has a BBC ‘B’ or Master, with or without a CUB monitor, that they want to see used as part of this experiment then I’d love to hear from you. Read on for why… or go to http://www.bbcmicronews.co.uk and see it in action.
You can ask the BBC Micro News ‘Parrot’ to read out your own text, or simply subscribe to the news podcast from the front page of the site. Please note, this is not a commercial or funded project – we are doing it for the fun of it!
Sometimes you may need to refresh your browser, and since there is currently only one lowly BBC doing the processing, you may need to wait in a queue to hear your words spoken out loud. If we have more BBCs, we can shorten the queue times! Please get into your lofts and storage spaces to dig out a working machine – we’ll arrange for collection, and will promise to take good care of it, to. If you have an old ‘CUB’ monitor they are also needed.