Mastodon is a social media site that seems to survive by the fact that Twitter has been trashed, but many popular former bluebird accounts have moved to this platform where they can spend their days relatively free.

One such account is BBC Micro Bot (via The Register), which plays an interesting role: give it BASIC via toot (yes) and it handily outputs the results to a gallery, often with the final photo or video created post featuring the file is attached.

The BBC Micro Bot operates as an 8-bit computer emulator that interprets BBC BASIC, a BASIC coding language, the native input for the BBC Micro personal computer manufactured by Acorn Computer Corp. It was.

It was fast and powerful for its time, and thanks to the introduction of thousands of BBC Micro's into UK schools, it provided a platform for many coders to take their first steps into the wonderful world of code.

Many users of the site, now in mastodon form (a phrase that sounds like it would be used in an 80s children's cartoon), have thrown suggestions at the bot and praised the results:

Someone has certainly tried it, but what I find most impressive is that the entire Internet level of genuine creativity on display, not the expected level of goofiness that is often created when crowdsourcing input from the

Perhaps that says a lot about the users of Mastodon, and perhaps there is censorship somewhere in the process to uncover inappropriate creativity, but there seems to be a respect here for both the concept and the end result.

For those who are not familiar with BBC BASIC and would like to try it themselves, I have heard that there are many online tutorials that are excellent.

I keep telling myself that I'll get around to it soon, but for now I'm content to pore over the results displayed here, secure in the knowledge that the only computer knowledge I was taught in schooling was how to create a movie theater reservation system using an Excel spreadsheet I am.

Yeah, thanks. I had no idea that you'd be making a career out of the local Odeon theater, did you?