Metropol

(blushes)

Ah well...*hugs miss hellfire*

Beat ya

This was basically the workhorse of most of my IT facilities at school

That taskbar brings back memories

I used to write out simple basic programs on the BBC Micro at primary school, and get stickers and praise for it and they'd think I'd just discovered a cure for a disease.

1996 was when I tried that particular experiment, and programming had been off the curriculum for years, hence the furore. I'm just an anorak.

Were BBC computers actually made by the BBC?

The BBC computer was born out of the BBC's computer literacy project of the early 80's which was designed to get people interested in what computers could do. The two main elements of this were a TV series, and a computer on which you could try out the things mentioned in the series. As there was no real standard at the time for home computers (the project was devised in the same year that the original IBM PC 5150 came out), the BBC comissioned one which would be allowed to bear their name and the 'owl' logo. The BBC would then base their project around this machine.

The eventual winner was Acorn computers who produced the good old BBC Micro. As complete as the machine was, it's developers now admit that the prototype shown to the beeb was hurriedly developed and certain features were not completed until the very morning that they had to demonstrate their machine.

The Acorn BBC Micro was initially released in two versions, model A and model B. The model B was £100 more expensive than the B. Rather than the model B being an improvement on the model A, the A was actually just a cut down version of the B with 16KB of RAM and a smaller ROM which could not support all the graphics modes.

Althouh the A offered a significant price advantage for home users, almost all commercial software require a B. As the price gap between the two closed, the model A machine was quietly dropped in time. Almost all surviving machines are model B - I've never actually seen a model A.

Interesting point - holding down an undocumented key sequence (which i've since forgotten) when turning the machine on would make a model B start in model A mode, saying 'BBC Computer 16K' at the top and all. Quite what the point of this was I don't know.

Although the model A/B were the only machine officially supported by the BBC, Acorn's right to use the BBC name was exploited. The original machines were followed by the BBC Master Series of machines. The most common of which was the Master 128 which was most common in schools in the late 80's/early 90's (this was the machine with a separate numeric keypad and two cartridge slots on the top which was very common in schools in the late 80's/early 90's). Although these machines bore the BBC name, they actually weren't entirely compatible with the original machines. The Master 128 practically was, but others were much less so (one of them was actually a basic PC running MS-DOS, but it was still marketed as a BBC!).

The last machines to bear the BBC name were early versions of the Archimedes which did so until the mid-90's.

At Primary School we had those BBC Computers, with the CUB monitors, at the time they were top notch, but I later realised it was like Teletext, plus the Floppy disk's were rather huge. Then 1992 arrived and we got several Acorns, which were an improvement, plus we were given plenty of software that was made by Yorkshire Television.

The Microvitec Cub still is a respectable RGB monitor today - I still have one on my attic. It's interesting that people always attribute 5 1/4" floppies with the BBC Micro. At the same time they were the standard format for PC's too! I also always find it interesting that the 5 1/4" format is considered 'huge' - they were actually called 'mini floppy' disks as they were developed from an even larger 8" format!

1996 was when I tried that particular experiment, and programming had been off the curriculum for years, hence the furore. I'm just an anorak.

This would have depended on your school. As bizarre as it sounds, IT was not actually put on the national curriculum until 1999! There was no requirement to have it at all until then, and the details of any provision would have been down to individual schools to decide (possibly some forward thinking LEAs had a policy on it). This is why although most schools had facilities comparable to other schools of the same type, the actual use of those facilities varied hugely from school to school. My school thus still had BASIC programming on their curriculum in 1996.

I can't remember whether we ever got as far as an Archimedes in school... ironically we had a much more powerful computer at home anyway because my dad got an IBM PS/2 pretty much as soon as they came out.

Mmmmmmmm... PS/2.

During my years at secondary school, we had one room full of BBC Micros. How I use to remember paging Ceefax on those things! We had another room full of Archimedes. We had to design the school magazine on those things although a lot of people decided to play a game that was not too similar to this...

http://www.lemonamiga.com/?mainurl=http ... Fid%3D1165

..I can't remember the title (the link is from an Amiga game called Zeewolf) but came free with the computer and had the same priniciple as the screenshot above.

By the time I left in 1994, they suddenly had money from no where to refurbish a department and put wall to wall PC's in there. Never was keen on them then, always loved my Amiga and Sensi Soccer!

[nerd]
http://toastytech.com/guis/
[/nerd]

It took until 1998 for my primary school to retire the acorn livery, and replace them with identikit pc clones.

My secondary school had PCs as standard when I joined in 98, but the technical drawing/graphics room was full of Archimedes, presumably so because of the specialist software they used.

I was rather sad to see Acorn's demise, I preferred using them as they were British designed (plus the ribbon cables that every peripheral for the BBC Micro had that sprawled everywhere)

Ahh memories!

I remember an Acorn being delivered to my primary school one morning in the early 1990s.

If I remember correctly, it was the first time I remember seeing a computer mouse, and thinking it was amazing that I could push this arrow around the screen!

Then in 1995, I was off to secondary school and was greeted every friday morning with a room on the top floor of a glass-fronted south-facing building (yes, it was blisteringly hot in there, but freezing cold in winter) filled with RM computers, and we each had our own computer, with our own username.

3 years later, I was officially banned from using school computers except in supervised IT lessons after I unwittingly downloaded a virus onto the school network which knocked it out for 3 days. I was nearly suspended after that incident, but I pleaded ignorance and they just gave me a massive bollocking instead. Oops! :roll:

Then a year later in 1999, I got my very first home computer. It was a fairly bulky Packard Bell with an 800x600 screen resolution, running Windows 98 and came with some bundled games such as Redline Racer, Adiboo (for kids), Total Anihilation (which I've still got!) and Gary Rhodes CD-ROM. It only had 64MB RAM and a 6GB Hard Disk!

I guess I'll be laughing at the shittiness of my current computer in a few years time. Although, I do think that Widescreen monitors are the way foward. I could never go back to 4:3... Websites feel much more spacious and easier to view in Widescreen, although the BBC site does seem awfully lonely chucked into the left of the screen. It would look better if it was centred such as Ananova.