Professor Steve Furber on the BBC Micro's Legacy (Extra Edition)

30 years ago a small British company called Acorn Computers launched the BBC Micro. This computer was nothing much by today’s standards. It had 32 kilobytes of main-memory and a 2Mhz processor. In every way this computer was many thousands of times less capable than the phone in your pocket. And yet without the team that built this odd-looking machine, you probably wouldn't have that phone - many of the inventions which are critical to today’s digital consumer technologies are the legacy of the BBC Micro project and the team that originally built it. I’m joined by Steve Furber who is a who is a professor of Computer Engineering at Manchester university. He was the co-inventor of the BBC Micro - I began by asking how he became involved with this amazing project: The BBC Micro - the project from which we’ve derived so much value was a fairly modest government collaboration in order to improve computer literacy. It’s clearly paid for itself many of times over. Were we to do something today the computer systems required could be built for a tiny fraction of the original price - it’s not unreasonable to expect that investment in real computer literacy might continue to yield huge dividends