BBC Econet Part 1 - The school network of the 80's

In the 1980's the BBC micro ruled the roost in UK schools, but most of those BBCs where not standalone machines, part of their success was that a BBC could be a connected machine. Acorn's Econet was used to link BBCs together, and provide network services.
Acorn Econet gave the BBC Micro access to file and print services, e-mail, viewdata, messaging, chat applications, remote control, databases, and plenty of other applications. The x.25 gateway even allowed an Econet network to be connected to a public network, and connect to universities, VAX and a mainframe systems.
Econet was the mostly widely deployed LAN technology in the UK at one point with over 10,000 networks, all at a point in time when Bill Gates had yet to learn what a network was.
Thanks
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I would like to thank Prof. Alan Macfarlen for his kind permission to use his interview with Hermann Hauser. He has recorded a number of interviews with leading figures, which I would encourage viewers to have a look at. www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancesto...
I would also like to thanks ZombiWorkshop for using his impressive talents on my behalf once again producing some art assets for this video (the Owl I used in the short animated section). He also produced all the channel art you see for me as well. So if you would like to see more of his work (and who wouldn't) have a look at his website www.zombiworkshop.com/

[@RetroBytesUK]

Hi to all of you clicking in from the hackaday article, thanks to the hackaday author (AL Willians) to linking in my video it was very kind of you.

[@javidaderson]

This might be the first time I've ever clicked on an ad on KZbin

[@RetroBytesUK]

I first used Econet at my High School in the late 80's early 90's. For a long time it was the only network our school had, then we got the odd standalone PC, followed eventually by a 1 room network of 186 RM Nimbus PCs running a custom version of DOS and Windows 2.0. Even then the Econet network did most the schools day to day computing tasks with the BBCs. By the 90's the PCs had taken over, but the Econet network stayed in use until 95, when it was removed.

[@samhoward8909]

Living in the states I never had experience with Econet but was blown away by the video. I had no idea it could do tape drive backups over the network and remote networking protocols. For 1984 what a leap ahead of its time. Great video!

[@itchywitchy]

My first teaching classroom was a room of BBC B computers connected by Econet, I learnt a lot from working on it and it was a great system. I wish I had kept one of those computers when they were being scrapped in the 90s.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I picked my filestore and clockbox, cabling and the odd BBC from my school when they decided to get rid of it. I'd taken on alot of the matainace work, and when I left for Uni they found it was too much work to look after for the use they got out of it, so they decided to get rid and it was offered to me.

[@hartpa]

​@@RetroBytesUK I also have a number of BBC micros from school that they were going to throw away. Sadly no Econet hardware.

[@shadowinthevoid]

"It did keep going into late 80's and early 90s" - My 2ndry school was stil using it upto 2002/2003 i think. It took them actually demolishing the building to push them to upgrade. Great video!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Wow that's fantastic, what where they using it for in the end, I assume GCSE IT was probably a no go, but a guess other subject areas could have got use out of it?

[@adslf874yti3q7u4hf83]

The econet wiring was still present in my Australian private school in 2002. The computers were long gone though.

[@alangarde2928]

Loved this video, brought back very happy memories of a room full of BBC B's and a SJ HDFS (that died over the vacation when it was hit by lightning) and was my first experience of the power of networking in the 80's at a comprehensive school. You are completely right about the features of Econet being great for annoying teachers. Many happy hours after I got hold of the programming guide and wrote my own verson of 'view' so we could see what the teacher was doing/who they were watching and warn them. Also, I remember that if you push the Airwolf tune player to 20 BBC B's in the next class room they were all about a second off and were very very loud. I remember some disbelief from the teachers that we hadn't stolen their 'admin' software but I'd just written my own version.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I dare say learning to write view taught you as much about programing as they did. What a sad way for a HDFS to go. They are lucky the did not lose the econet interface in every BBC though.

[@AS-ye8wl]

A college I know of used the econet wiring (in the time before Cat5 was run) as a means to carry audio around the building for an internal radio station over a number of sites...a good idea and worked better than expected!

[@lmlmd2714]

My high school had three full suites of RISC OS machines, that within the same suite were a hotpotch of random models, from A410s through A30x0s right though to A5000s, all linked in via econet to a filestore server, a random mix of shared printers from Citizen 120D dot matrix right up to A3 inkjets and CAD plotters, and shared CD-ROM drives. Weirdly the careers library had it's own mini econet network and despite being used for nothing more than a crappy skills match program was fitted with half a dozen full-bore RISC PCs complete with CD-ROM and even x86 CPU podules that I only ever saw used for running Worms in DOS. The only PCs we ever had were 4 random totally standalone machines in the library which were a motley mix of two Samsung 386 SXs, an generic 286 and an RM 486-33. We also had some random standalone BBCs still kicking around that saw occasional use, and a long abandoned Commodore PET and 8086 PC from Wang Labs shoved in a storeroom. It was a real mishmash of make-do and mend, but was in some ways pretty advanced. Every student had an econet logon and their own personal Filestore quota you could access in any lab, and it was fast and effective. RISC OS really impressed me at school, and I've still got a Raspberry Pi running RISC OS (which is now open source, and amazingly still very actively developed!) today, only it's now on ethernet, heretical, I know!

[@HighestRank]

How many PCs are in ‘1 full suite?’ Generic x86s were once called ‘clones’. Nobody recognizes the RM brand any more. BBC stands for British Broadcasting Co. Didn’t know MS had written a DOS for RISC, nor that there was ever a RISC version of Windows 2.0

[@RetroBytesUK]

Our school had a room full of RM's early PC effort the Nimbus. It was a querky thing a not that IBM IBM compatible PC, with a graphics card that seemed to only support a modifies verison of windows 2.0. Their later PCs where much more IBM compatible, but really expensive, and had a version of windows with alot of RM custom software.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I dont think MS ever did port to RISC for acorns stuff. RM (Research Machines) was another school computer supplier who grew significantly after the BBC's hayday the same time as the Archimedes machines where being sold. Later on MS did support Risc for NT3.51 and NT4.0 but that was Alpha and Mips support rather than Arm.

[@rafaelmoralesitcl]

Nice video and info, but the background music is loud and annoying.

[@iamfinky]

Ah, I remember those days. *I am finky and *remote have stuck in my head for decades ❤

[@MikeHarris1984]

Here in the US, the schools started to get computers in the 90's and we had Apple LC2 in the computer labs. When I saw a computer monitor in color for the first time, i was amazed....

[@dazednconfused31337]

5:47 In high school ('97+) I shoved a cable into one of those connectors and a woman came out and said "the network's gone down!". Coincidence? I think it was from a defunct BBC, but at the time we used RM Nimbus' with Win 95. I introduced Winpopup to the class and got banned briefly for unwittingly sending rude netsend * messages to the entire LAN and NT server. I had a used Amiga A500+ (now restored) which impressed a teacher with my homework done in DPaint and printed on a Citizen Swift 24e with dot-matrix awesomeness. In primary school I played 'Table Mountain' on a BBC and laughed at Deirdre who couldn't figure out "0 x 5" as we watched the small red man descend on each guess. The older lads got to use a turtle plotter. I think there was a broken Archimedes and I briefly used a Nimbus with Win 3.11 to write a poem. We copied games on a mate's HiFi for my ZX Spectrum +2 (also restored) and I remember getting laughed at for having an Atari 2600 JR.

[@ctid107]

Discovered your channel and its a joy working my way through the videos and catching up on BBC stuff. I used to work for a company which looked after school computers and once spent a while adding the Econet hardware to the pcbs of 90 BBC model b's.

[@alaricsnellpym]

My school didn't have Econet, but my friend's school did. So I made him a 5-pin DIN plug with all the pins shorted together inside, which he could plug into a socket whenever he wanted to make life interesting for the school IT staff for a while...

[@picklerism]

I used to enjoy using the 'remote' command and interupts (TSR's) to confuse my teacher and fellow students :) Thanks BBC for making computers fun and interesting back in the day.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I may have had some fun with that too :-)

[@tcpnetworks]

Back in the day, I used to 'get back' at our vicious computer studies teacher - I was in Hobart, Tasmania and we had a MAAASSSIIIVE Econet network in the school - about 400 stations and three networks. There was an ECONET hub in the computer studies room.. I used to make fully functional ECONET leads that had a 100 ohmn resistor from data+ to 0V - effectively killing the network everywhere - but not causing a short-circuit to a tester. The idiot teacher would have to spend hours or days trying to find why the bus was down -because the only way to resolve it was to unplug everything and start from scratch.

[@headwerkn]

Lol, that school wasn’t Warrane Primary by chance?

[@KipIngram]

I would so loved to have been a decade older and been involved in the industry during those heady days. By the time I got into it - the mid 1980's, the path had been "somewhat set." It was still a LOT of fun, but I think it would have been even more fun a decade earlier. Obviously I had to get a little experience, so it was really on into the 90's before I got to be a "player" in my little part of the pond.

[@bigdeagle1331]

Back in 92 at school! We used “session “ to talk and send messages on the school network

[@ruthgunstone6162]

Nice video. Thanks. (May I politely suggest the background music is a little over-loud!).

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks Ruth, I will keep that in mind for my next video. Was it a particular section that you it found too loud, or rather too loud in general ?

[@ruthgunstone6162]

@@RetroBytesUK HI. In general, I think. Maybe I'm getting old! :-)

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks for get back Ruth, it’s hard to judge these things when it’s just me working on them, as I don’t have another person to get a second opinion from. So constructive feedback like this is really helpful, and gives me a chance to tweak the audio levels in the next video.

[@HighestRank]

Politely no, but you may SHOUT OVER THE MUSIC!

[@SiGoesRetro]

Great Video, we had Econet when i was at school to connect BBC Master machines together, always wondered how it worked!

[@binarydinosaurs]

Nice one John, and it's great to see another SJR MDFS box, I hope you've taken the VARTA boardkiller out of it. I was lucky with mine and it still even has a 3.6V charge. Should've bought a lottery ticket when I discovered that 😄

[@RexxSchneider]

Having started teaching in 1973 and moving to another school for promotion in 1976, I bought a Tandy TRS-80 in 1978 and used that to start teaching Computer Studies that same year. I returned to my old school in 1980 with a remit to create a Computer Studies department and was backed by my very forward-thinking headteacher who agreed to purchase a dozen Acorn Atoms and an Acorn System 3 as the fileserver. That was one of the earliest, possibly the earliest, Econet installation in a state school. We managed to get some of the earliest BBCs as they became available and I remember having to upgrade some of them from A to B spec. By 1982/3 I was teaching a group of 80+ students as well as two other teachers in an open-plan room equipped with 30 BBC micros. Sharing up to 3 pupils per micro was less than ideal, but such was the enthusiasm of those pupils in the early days, we managed. During the course of the next decade, the school acquired over 100 micros, both BBC and Archimedes and all of them were networked with Econet. We also used several SJ Research fileservers, which lived in a small office adjacent to the main computer lab, an early example of a "server room". For the keenest students, I was able to teach programming in a dozen languages from BASIC to BCPL and from Forth to Lisp, as well as 6502 assembler, all running native on BBC micros. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it became increasingly clear that business was moving toward PCs as standard and we eventually started to add a few PCs in the Business Studies department to run the standard wordprocessing, spreadsheet and database applications of the day. That allowed us to use modems to connect externally for the first time and soon after, the ability to connect to the internet, and that signalled to me that the era of the Acorn machines was over. Those were heady times and we rode the crest of a wave for a long time. The IT revolution was perhaps the most important revolution of our lifetimes and I'm glad I was there to see it all happen.

[@SolarLantern424]

I love how networking was invented by Acorn over an Italian meal. How very civil. It must have been really difficult to come up with the idea of serial based networking because nobody else had the same idea at all. Really glad you at least mentioned Apple Talk which was one of the most obvious other examples. 🤯

[@AndrewRoberts11]

FYI: Xerox Ethernet 1974/5, ARCNet 1976, ITU X.25 1976, Acorn Econet 1981, IBM Token Ring 1984, AppleTalk 1985

[@AndrewRoberts11]

@@SolarLantern424 AppleTalk was RELEASED in 1985, IBM's TokenRing was RELEASED in 1984, ... . I'm ignoring the years of development, as the "Andy" mentioned in the video is Prof. Andy Hooper, who with Prof. Maurice Wilkes, of microcoding fame, and industry partners like Ferranti, with their ULA's, developed the experimental 10 MBit Cambridge Ring network in 1974, that both Acorn's < 2MBit and IBM's > 4MBit efforts derived from. IBM independently recreating from the published papers and their own research a similar token ring offering, while Acorn received a cheap and cheerful design for the price of a restaurant bill, in either 1979 or 1980, depending on which source your believe, that they RELEASED as a product in 1981, for their System 2 and Atom computers.

[@dreambyte7926]

Great video! And very interesting! Thank you very much for sharing! :) Judging from what I see, you had a lot of interesting computers and concepts over there. In addition to the BBC Micros, also Sinclair and Amstrad with the PC1512 or the PCW series. Makes me kinda sad that my school needed ages to built a working network.. Until a few years ago, the old computer room had no ethernet at all. (Also, the CEPT/Videotex system "we" had in the past, BTX, was very advanced but expensive. It never got that same love that Minitel in France had gotten.) Best wishes from Germany.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I know the CPC was popular in Germany, as was the Amiga later on. Was there a particular system that was big in schools in the 80's in your part of Germany.

[@tiberiusbrain]

My experience with econet: this video. Yet another thing to come out of acorn to appreciate. This is from before my time, i came from the day chernobil melted down, and i never heard of this yet

[@tiberiusbrain]

Also, im dutch, so no bbc micros here.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Saddly they did not see much success outside of the UK, they did ok in Australia, and I am told there was some success in India. The US version was a flop however, by the time it went on sale it was far too late to introduce a new platform in the US.

[@HighestRank]

My experience with econet: this comment to the video from someone else. I didn’t understand what was said in the video, and though enabled, even Closed Captioning hasn’t been able to process any of it, either. I suspect an overbearing audio track made it impossible.

[@BenRattigan]

Great video, I remember we had EcoNet with the Acorn Filestore across two labs, one with BBC Masters the other Archimedes machines. *I am benrattigan 😅

[@marksterling8286]

Awesome video really enjoyed it. Please keep them coming

[@steveparker1466]

Love your videos, just found 1 niggle in this one though, the PET used IEEE 488 to connect to it's floppy which was an 8 bit parallel system, the weird part was that until the 4032 disk loading was a real cludge where you had to first open a channel with the OPEN 1,8,15,"I0" (or I1 depending on the disk you wanted to use) then use the LOAD "FILE",1 to load your file by the time the 4032 hit someone finally added a DLOAD command. Yes I went to school just prior to the BBC becoming available and we had a room full of PETs!

[@clivepacker]

Spent my last summer in high school reverse engineering the level 2 file server software for fun. You could get a hex dump of messages on the network and I used that to figure out all of the protocols for all the commands (no encryption in those days). I recreated the file server in BBC BASIC. One useful side project was being able to remotely trigger all 14 machines in the computer room to play the Broadway Boogie in perfect sync. Since the computer room was directly above the staff room and none of the teachers had a clue how to stop the machines, this could prove annoying for them.

[@simmo1024]

My GCSE Computer Studies project in 1989 was a menu program that allowed you to run all the commands on the Econet network. We have a room of I think 20 BBCs and one in the corner with the floppy drive and a massive 40Mb Winchester Drive. Wish I could remember how it all worked now, but back than I was the only one, in the school, who knew. When our year finished, they scrapped the room and replaced them with Amstrads, dropped the computer studies course and replaced it with 'business'. Sad.

[@jester6856]

Loved this video, glad I found it..and subscribed.. got myself a beeb and recently a master 512... I feel a wee project coming on to network them up.... Can you still get the clocks..or is there a modern way. Keep up the great work.😊

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thats nice of you to say Billy. There are modern implementations of the clock box available, CJE Micros have some for sale, and if you feel like breaking out your soldering iron there are a few designs on github too. You will also see original clockboxes from SJ Research and Acorn come up on Ebay too, as well as poeple making and selling their own.

[@MrComputerRetro]

Nice video Retro Bytes! Well made and enjoyable!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Kind of you to say Mr Computer.

[@joeharley1423]

Loved this, I’d almost certainly be interested in a video on Apple/LocalTalk! 😉👍

[@AndyGraceMedia]

I first remember an Econet network of BBC Model Bs in a classroom at Haileybury College in Melbourne, Australia. This would have been really early on too - about 1982 it was in operation and by the mid 80s I'd progressed to writing development packages in assembler for the UK magazines and a couple of software publishers. The thing I hated was that *NOTIFY so that was the first thing I requested to be password protected as it inevitably was sent right when I was debugging some code which locked up the workstation. It must have been about the era Barson were testing and implementing it in Tasmania - the weird thing was it based around a "gigantic" Winchester drive running off an Acorn Atom with an amber monochrome screen in the "back office" and took AGES to get boot. There was also a VAX in there too.

[@hld14]

Your content is so detailed i dont know why your channel is so underrated

[@RetroBytesUK]

That's very kind of you to say. It's a very new channel so it's more difficult to get content where people can see it. The more people who are kind enough to subscribe the more KZbin suggests videos from the channel

[@HighestRank]

It caters to the British English crowd.

[@yannalaplageable]

I love the tone of your texts

[@michaelcarey]

Great video! My High School in South Australia had an Econet/BBC-B setup in my final years there. It didn't take long to work out how to message others via Econet and generally create havoc. I was a Commodore 64 kid (I've still got my original 1993 machine) but I did like the expandability of the BBC machines. Prior to the BBC Model B machines there were a handful of Apple2 machines plus a Microbee or two but these weren't really used actively for classes.

[@Mr.1.i]

I remmember a bbc micro dialing up ,you had to listen for the software to start that high pitched screetch before you would place the phone onto the modem and it loaded text pretty quick it was as fast as boot disks

[@hartpa]

We had SJ Research equipment and I recognise that fileserver well. I lived for computer club and *Notify 🤣

[@chrisearl2217]

Great video

[@user-lw4on9vv1i]

wow, great video! would love a filestore and winchester one day but now properly hard to come by.

[@RetroBytesUK]

At most a high school would have had 1, so there where not a lot to start with. Then you have to factor how many where saved, and did not just get skipped by the school. So there are not alot around now, and if you have one, you would not be willing to let it go in most cases.

[@BitQuest]

For a first video, this was very well researched and you have a super energetic and engaging voice. Well done man! I get the feeling you have prior experience?

[@RetroBytesUK]

I'd never done any video or voice over stuff prior to this, however I do stuff on stage in the folk world where I talk to the audience so that probably helped.

[@SamFirthDesigner]

It does :)

[@MrRhar75]

Loved this video, thank you. great memories of computer club at school during the late 80s, writing remote programs to type on other peoples screens... I'd love to get all this file server stuff up and running on a modern pc, then I could be the manager >*I AM MANAGER :

[@Remogeus]

I usually don't comment, but this is the first time I've actually clicked on a KZbin ad (this vid was advertised to me by that) and oh man, really good job. I knew a bit about BBC Micro and other Acorn products (thanks to Micro Men and mucking around with RISC OS), but somehow I've never heard of Econet. Here we had only things like IQ 151 that had some rudimentary network capabilities using its extension modules, but that was a bygone era for me, so I can't say anything from my experience. You have a new sub and a like on this vid, good work.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I've only ever seen pictures of the IQ 151, I've always wondered what that keyboard was like to use, it's looks like it would be quiet unpleasant.

[@Remogeus]

@@RetroBytesUK It really was, was able to try it once - it's similar to ZX Spectrum's, but a bit mushier. The machine's PSU also liked to overheat, so much so that there was a joke that it's a perfect tea heater

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@Remogeus I bet that did wonders for the failure rate :)

[@JenniferinIllinois]

I had a C64 as a kid and of course at the time had no idea I was getting the slowest floppy disk drive performance ever! 🤣 I mean it was still faster than loading from cassette.

[@98of99]

Good content but my god that music just blows and it is nearly as loud as the commentary!

[@SatsJava]

Yep

[@FilipiVianna]

You see... I liked the music.... It brings a nostalgic atmosphere...

[@MostlyPennyCat]

Weird, all BBC's at our schools had disks, all on Wheely desks. Didn't see an Econet until secondary school at which point they are all A3000s With built in drives. The Econet and master server was for network file storage and print sharing

[@MostlyPennyCat]

'raaay! That's our one at school, the MDFS, I remember the lights looking really cool and wanting to muck around with it.

[@alistair1978utube]

Great video, let down by the random apostrophe in the title. Apostrophes are not used to form plurals, even for decades...

[@nmosfet5797]

Hi! What a great video, and so much information I haven't seen anywhere else. Great job, but can I offer a tiny bit of constructive criticism? You see, I don't have terribly good hearing, and the background music made it very difficult for me to hear what you were saying. I ended up muting the audio altogether as my heart rate started to go up and just looked at the subtitles. That was a bit of a shame. Similarly, the wormhole style visual overlay really didn't add anything informative to the video, did it? All it did was make it just about impossible to see what was on the pictures under the wormhole twirl. I would have liked to see the ICs, I can recognize most of them, having used them back in the day. But anyway, thanks for the video! I'd love to see more!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks for the feedback, I need to look at autoducking to really take the background music down further.

[@HighestRank]

Stop blaming your inability to bodge any understanding from someone’s foreign accent on your bad ears and their corny music selection.

[@HighestRank]

@@RetroBytesUK autoducking is bullshit. People interested in hearing a spoken word on telephone conversations do not tolerate continuous wall-of-sound guard tones and reverb in a wet audio room as comfort noise while talking, they use the sound of the human voice, specifically their own.

[@KipIngram]

I never used a BBC Micro, but yes - it really does look like it was a nice, solid machine. Certainly visually it has way, way more appeal than the Sinclair contender, which looks horrendously cheap by comparison. I have to say I have a lot of respect for that whole move by the British government - getting the public generally "up on top of" the computer learning curve was clearly a wise move and a sound investment in the future.

[@bmacpher]

If there's anyone reading these comments from Western Australia, do you remember the Education Department's software bundles for the BBC? There was a very early multimedia game with a sort of alien and riddles to solve, a biorhythm calculator, and a solar house design programme. I'd love to track down a copy, or even just a list of titles.

[@markorollo.]

I remember these at school but don't remember using them much, most of my computering was done on the one thing that can make me nostalgic for school. The Amstrad 8256 word processor.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I think Amstrad must have made a fortune off those, as they where not cheap to buy so they must have made a good margin on them, and famously they got a really good deal on the 3" drives.

[@markorollo.]

@@RetroBytesUK ive never thought about the cost, we had several, including one classroom just for lessons on how to use them, must have been around 30 of them just in that one room. thats probably why the rest of the school was just a 60's built breeze block dump, no money for anything else lol. Those 3 inch disks caused the one & only time i got in trouble at school, left one with my English work in one of the computers once, my English teacher went mental, but she was always moody anyway

[@HighestRank]

@@markorollo. 5”, 3.5”, 3” size doesn’t matter. If you didn’t clean the ceramic read-heads, oxide would build up and scratch the media. Belief that leaving a disk in the drive is what damaged them is probably what made teachers and everyone else neurotic. Good bye and good riddance!

[@NealNelson]

I keep hearing about the BBC micro's in UK schools, but I was in school in the early 80's and I never saw one. We had an RML380z, a PET and a TRS-80. One teacher brought in his own Dai, a fancy colour computer, which I was allowed to use. Maybe my school was a bit behind the times, as the only computer lesson we had was one I gave at the request of my maths teacher while I was in the 5th year since I knew a bit of BASIC.

[@SolarLantern424]

I think the BBC micro's in schools thing was largely a myth, I'm sure a few schools had them but I certainly never saw any in any school or college at the time. I think the whole BBC micro's in schools thing is mostly a load of revisionist history like so many things seem to be.

[@ColaSpandex]

In 1988 I hacked the school econet, locked out all the staff, changed their names, changed the name of the school and got up to all kinds of mischief. Do not try this at home. It did not end well. 😔

[@nutsnproud6932]

The background music is too loud hard to use with a speech to text reader.

[@stephencoombes6496]

Great video. Still play with econet in BeebEm - multiple instances on running on one PC allow a virtual econet for experimentation where real hardware is getting hard to come by these days!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Beebem is a really good emulator, love how they included econet support using AUN. There is a very strong possibility it will come up in part 2 :-)

[@stephencoombes6496]

@@RetroBytesUK ooh, I do hope so! :-)

[@squeeby2]

Great video but the music is horribly distracting

[@computer_toucher]

Did I just spot the trumpet what was sampled for White Town's "Your Woman" in the background there?

[@RetroBytesUK]

You did, the original is called "My Women", by Lew Stone

[@computer_toucher]

​@@RetroBytesUKAh, cheers! Love your choice of background music.

[@ThePoxun]

We had a two room econet at our school with around 40 BBC Bs and a few BBC Masters (we also had other rooms with BBCs just not on the network and a room with 8 numbuses) with a level 3 server and a whopping 40MB wincester disk. It was also hooked up to a tape drive (no idea what the hardware actually was) and while we had access to the rooms over lunchtime thursday was backup day and the first 30 minutes the rooms were closed. Also econet was terrible for security... you could read and write direct to the memory on any computer on the nextwork which meant you could steal or wipe someone elses programs and could easily find the master account password and get at anyones files. There were also only 4 BBCs on the network with floppy drives which was a problem for those of us that were more into computing as it meant a queue to get your program on and off the network onto a floppy to work on elsewhere

[@SolarLantern424]

Sounds like your school had a staggering amount of computer equipment, especially the 40mb hard disk. Consider the price of an Apple Lisa in 1984 which came with a 5mb hard disk which people thought was incredible. 40mb back then really was whopping, especially when schools were having to share a single floppy drive on a server across all the students.

[@10p6]

Nice video, even though I hated the BBC computers at school.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I'm glad you enjoyed the video. I take it your schools lessons based around the BBC where less than inspiring ?

[@10p6]

@@RetroBytesUK I was born and used the BBC during its prime. This was also at the prime of the Atari range and C64, and home game development too. I wished for the BBC price it had hardware sprites, scrolling and better sound chip in it, as then it would have made it a candidate for home use too (as it was it was way to expensive for most homes), instead of having an Atari and Spectrum at home and BBC at school.

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@10p6 Hardware sprites would have been nice. Acorn did do a bunch of sound hardware add-ons for it (like the music500) which did make it sound incredible, but they where all aimed at music professionals, and did not receive alot of support as they where fairly pricey add-ons for what was an expensive machine.

[@10p6]

@@RetroBytesUK if it had 8 hardware sprites, hardware scrolling and sound all accessible in basic it would have been a huge hit. Even better if they had made the Electron to have been a fully compatible BBC B without all the expensive connectivity and just made as a cheap home computer. Can you imagine all the bedroom coders then.

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

Good stuff sir!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Why thank you Mr Snorkers, nice of you to say. I was enjoying your guess performance as the Judge over on Yesterzine earlier this week.

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

@@RetroBytesUK It was on my "watch later" list for a while. I have some Beeb type-in action tomorrow! :)

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@WhatHoSnorkers oh cool branching out from Uncle Clive's machines or a one off special ?

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

@@RetroBytesUK I bought a book on Comets that turned out to be BBC Micro only. I'll do some more, but mainly on the Speccy!

[@integralhighspeedusb]

Well, the ad worked.

[@RiksVids]

I first came across econet with BBC's when I went on a 2 year YTS Course at an ITeC in 1987. I think we had at least 20 BBC's connected to a Winchester drive thing like you showed...no idea what the storage capacity was though. Didn't have it at school, from what I recall at school we only had 2 BBC's and 3 RML 480Z's, and one RML 380Z. Our school sounds like it was poor on the IT front

[@RetroBytesUK]

The school I went to had one 380z tucked into a corner, it had a very solid looking case, but it never got used when I was there, same with the 1 Commodore Pet. When I started at high school the BBC's where the mainstay, after a couple of years the school got its first RM Nimbus machines, by the time I left the PCs had taken over.

[@SolarLantern424]

Never saw a single BBC micro in any school or colleges during the 80's I think what you are describing must have either been a regional thing, a class thing or possibly both.

[@hamad9068]

yes

[@mitachu]

My school was one of the first in the country to implement an Econet network. The wires were installed in the walls and the sockets all nice and tidy. Was it used? Hardly.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I'm suprised it was hardly used, in the school I went to it seamed we used it for everything. All most every subject area seemed to have some specialist software that we used, all loaded off the econet network. It was also the pirmary way of printing anything.

[@mitachu]

@@RetroBytesUK I don't think our teachers really had a clue about tech in any way shape or form, unfortunately. Bit of a waste really!

[@mitachu]

BTW, really enjoyed your video on it. Excellent stuff. Hadn't heard that Pis could work as a co-pro. That's just genius.

[@Wokculture69]

BBC micro was so common but it is pain to find one today

[@RetroBytesUK]

There are a fair few to be had on Ebay in the UK but prices as starting to go up a bit. If you don't mind fixing one up there are bargains to be had.

[@Wokculture69]

@@RetroBytesUK I don't mind fixing one up ,that is basically the way I acquired most of my vintage hardware. Nice video by the way

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@Wokculture69 Thanks nice of you to say. It's mostly the capacitors in the PSU that blow in the BBC. I have had to replace the odd via timer chip too but not much else

[@Jimbaloidatron]

Why does watching a video about Econet in UK schools some 35 years later make the hex values FEA1 and FEA2 pop into my brain?! 😉

[@RetroBytesUK]

You're clearly someone who knows where their HDLC is 😀

[@robertsmith1434]

Gotta be honest I found the background music to be... distracting. Perhaps a lower volume of it compared to the voice? Otherwise very interesting.

[@RetroBytesUK]

It was too high in the mix for that one, I've dialed it back in newer episodes.

[@PaulaBean]

@@RetroBytesUK Oh that's nice. Especially when there is singing, it's really hard to understand what you're saying - as if two people are talking simultaneously.

[@jonshouse1]

Our school had a pile of BBC-Bs with an RM380Z running CP/M as file server.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Do you know what software the CP/M machine was running ?

[@jonshouse1]

@@RetroBytesUK No sorry, I remember it had a text display divided into boxes (I assume one for each station) and some sort of external box with lots of connectors (might even have been wired star, not sure). The 380Z had two floppy disks, no HDD. The CP/M machine would boot, then the server was started manually.

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@jonshouse1 Must admit I am intrigued I was not aware of any CP/M based networking systems for the BBC. I may do a little digging see what I can find.

[@jonshouse1]

​@@RetroBytesUK I can confirm it was CP/M though, the server always had the same two floppy disks in it, one with the server code, the other disk was the BBC'B files. My desk position was the one closest to the 380z. This is the only reference I found so far: lists.cloud9.co.uk/pipermail/bbc-micro/2007-August/001615.html

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@jonshouse1 I see the post is from Jonathan, he was the first person I was going to ask :-)

[@TheManThatCan1002]

Up to 17k one day later.

[@theantipope4354]

Barson! I remember those pricks! The reason why the Beeb never took off here in Australia was because Barson had the exclusive rights to sell them here, & they jacked up the price so high that hardly anyone could afford them, so we all had to make do with much crappier competitors.

[@UncleFeedle]

My high school had Econet around 1987. One time (not sure how) I managed to get a list of all the passwords up on my Cub monitor. For this heinous crime I got 1000 lines, which I didn't do. 😄

[@RetroBytesUK]

There was a program that would just list out all the passwords if you had the right access level. I may have run that program once or twice while at school.

[@jeffreypomeroy6173]

Wait, so they essentially used the rs-422 like a rs-485 with a clock?

[@RetroBytesUK]

Yep that's basically it. It was all based around a Motorola hdlc with Acorn doing some circuitry for collision detection etc.

[@tech-ryze]

Basically the UK's Apple II

[@RetroBytesUK]

That a very good short hand way of think of the BBC

[@tech-ryze]

@@RetroBytesUK 6502, Education, Expandable, Expensive, Colour, Iconic games, beloved by children who are now 40-60 years old...

[@CB3ROB-CyberBunker]

guess what. essentially all floppy drives 'connect serial' as the head only reads out one bit at a time. the ones in your pc have just 1 dataline. :P

[@RetroBytesUK]

That data line is not serial IEEE-488 though, and the control signals also don't use the data lines. Also the computer actually just reads disk blocks, and the OS running on the main CPU understands the FS and the file data that sits on top of that. The c64 (and pet) had a every unusual disk solution where effectively the drive is its own computer with cpu and ram connected to the main machine via IEEE-488 serial to create what must be the slowest and least help floppy disk implementation of any of the common 8bit micos of the time. Common transfer speed where 400 bytes per second for the C64's drive, compare that to the speed of Ethernet at around 700 kilobytes per second and you start to realise just how slow it was even for the time. We've all owned dialup modems that could out pace that c64's disk system.

[@dennislindqvist5461]

The music is annoying...

[@jimadams7765]

music is too loud.

[@damianbutterworth2434]

I`ve got an Acorn A3000 with Econet board. Lincoln UK if anyone wants to try a network out.

[@CrisPearson]

I went to a state school in Tasmania. We had BBC Micro’s and I think, Econet. I was pretty young then so not 100% sure about econet. We had a C64 at home so I wasn’t that impressed with their graphics and sound. I remember playing Podd and Logo/turtle on it. Podd can JUMP!

[@davidchamberlain2162]

Great video apart from the bloody music.

[@flapjack9495]

Seriously! I found it very difficult to understand the narration when the music had lyrics.

[@felenov]

I only have a Archimedes and a Micro master

[@RetroBytesUK]

Which Arc have you got ?

[@philmainwaring5160]

Great to see the Herman Hauser interview spinet by Alan MacFarlane included ... He also interviewed the network design legend Andy Hopper here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fmfTnZl9i9Z_pdk Also wonderful to see the SJ fileserver was supplied by Clwyd Technics (where I worked) :)

[@andrewgordon4353]

I don't know where this story about "Barsons did Econet on the BBC" comes from, but it's completely incorrect. The 'port' of the Econet from Atom/System to the BBC - actually a re-write to produce V3 Econet for all three platforms - was done by Brian Robertson, (assisted by Jez Wills and Joe Dunn) at Acorn's Fulbourn Road, Cambridge office in late '81/early '82. This was already in at least some UK schools by Easter 1982. There's also a minor error where you say that the "passive terminator" was just a pair of 50R resistors. Terminators require power to bias the idle state of the cable, provided in the original terminators by a mains power supply. The 'passive' terminator received phantom power from the clock, and therefore contained 5 resistors and a capacitor.

[@RetroBytesUK]

The part about Barson comes from Alan Cockburn talking about his work at Barson before he moved over to Acorn.

[@andrewgordon4353]

@@RetroBytesUK Yes, and if you watch that video, it makes clear that he wasn't doing this. They had to develop their own hardware method of installing multiple 8K EPROMs in the BBC micro to hold 16K images, but the software came from Acorn. In the same video he says that they wouldn't even give him the source code of the floppy format utility.

[@johnbrown3155]

@@andrewgordon4353 There was a print interview which originally had it in (sorry can’t find a link). I’m guessing your talking about his abug presentation?

[@andrewgordon4353]

@@johnbrown3155 Yes, the ABug talk was what convinced me this Econet story (which I first saw in the Wikipedia entry) was just a misunderstanding of Brian's work with EPROMs. I know for absolute certain that the Econet software used in the UK had nothing to do with Barsons (as I was there at Acorn when it was being written and deployed). It's not totally impossible that Barsons did something that never came back to the UK, but it seems vanishingly unlikely, especially as it would have served no purpose since the real thing was available before any significant quantity of BBCs had been built (and none with Econet factory-fitted at that stage).

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@andrewgordon4353 from what I remember from the article, barson produced a verison so they could get on the list of allowed suppliers for tasmanian schools, and Acorn did not have a verison yet. Its possible they just cobbled somthing together that subsequently hit the bin once they got on the list.

[@StoianAtanasov]

Oh, the music. It is so tiresome :(

[@encorespod2135]

You say getting and teaching, getting maybe but teaching? That would have required the teachers to already know what they were teaching, I remember "being exposed to" computers in that era but it was pretty much up to us to work it out for ourselves. If an adult was any good with computers, good enough to understand it to the point they could explain to someone else... well they weren't working as a teacher were they?

[@RetroBytesUK]

We had a few good teachers at the school I went to that really did understand at lot about computers and where able to teach us quiet alot. For exmaple one of our teachers did a reasonable job of teaching me the basics of 6502 asm. I suspect there was very much a postcode lottry when it came to the quality of teaching in this area.

[@coolvideos8864]

* WHO AM I

[@edgeeffect]

That "green tunnel of data" effect in the video is a bit... erm... migraine inducing.... it'd be better if you just showed the pictures that are being ghostly-overlaid on it. ... ... sorry...

[@BF4pawntard]

Really enjoyed this video …but the music really needs to go