Beebs Back in Education Again

joefish

Bletchley Park Museum of Computing is running classes for A-Level students in computing using old BBC-Bs:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10951040

ewgf

They should run a course on how to find a BBC outside of an education centre. Even in their heyday, I never saw one at a friends house, it was aways Speccys, C64s, CPCs, then STs and Amigas, never a Beeb or an Electron.

guesser

ewgf wrote: »

They should run a course on how to find a BBC outside of an education centre. Even in their heyday, I never saw one at a friends house, it was aways Speccys, C64s, CPCs, then STs and Amigas, never a Beeb or an Electron.

duh, that's easy ;)

make friends with someone who's parents are teachers :lol:

joefish

I think you're wrong there. My parents were teachers and we had a Speccy. No-one on a teacher's salary could afford their own BBC-B!

I did get to see some right old strange machines growing up though, as my dad brought them home over the holidays. A big old RM 380Z was first, then the ZX81, and the Speccy for that first Christmas when no-one could buy one; an Oric Atmos, the primary school got a 480Z and our neighbour had a very early Mac - first time I'd used a mouse. I still remember trying to find the 'PUT' command on the ZX81 keyboard (in the highly bizarre world of 380Z basic, 'PUT 12' cleared the screen).

beanz

joefish wrote: »

I think you're wrong there. My parents were teachers and we had a Speccy. No-one on a teacher's salary could afford their own BBC-B!

I think the implication was the teachers were nickin' em from school :)

thx1138

yup only the swotty kids with swotty look-down-their-nose-at-you parents had BBC's

and I was the exception, cos I bought a Master Compact with my paper round money

spider

At (primary) school around 82 / 83 I think, there was only one and it was tape based, we wheeled it about on its own trolley.

I do later remember (I left there in 85) there were two in the whole school and one had a discdrive by then.

EDIT... I vaguely remember somekind of fund raising thing (something like ?1 or ?5 per pupil?) to get monies to actually buy it (unless that was the discdrive)

Winston

joefish wrote: »

(in the highly bizarre world of 380Z basic, 'PUT 12' cleared the screen).

It's not all that bizarre when you consider character 0x0C (12) is pretty much the standard terminal sequence to clear the screen. It'll work on a vt100 terminal, it works on the BBC Micro (press Ctrl-L), it works on any modern Unix (press Ctrl-L in terminal session in Mac OSX or Linux or BSD). If you write "putc(12)" in a C program that outputs to a terminal window, it'll clear the screen. I think it'll even clear the screen on a Speccy using the z88dk.

thx1138

I remember having to show some of the teachers how to use the computers.

beanz

My 4th year in High School was the first year the school did 'Computer Studies' We had a Commodore PET......ONE for the whole school.

If I added up the time I actually got to use it during class time over 2yrs it probably amounted to 45mins maybe.

Pen and Paper and a flowchart stencil was what we used...while learning about 'Ferrite store cores' and 'punch cards'.......Sure glad I got that education in early!

thx1138 wrote: »

I remember having to show some of the teachers how to use the computers.

Aye our teacher was learning the week ahead of us I think....I got in trouble once for submitting a program with the INT command we had not used yet, he accused me of copying the program directly from a book/magazine.

I was stood before him and he tried to catch me out by asking 'What does the INT command do then?' I told him....he looked it up in his book in front of me to verify my answer :lol:

thx1138

first term of computer studies were a joke, we didn't get to use a computer, we read dry out of date books about punched hole readers, data processing etc

then we got to use a BBC and mess about with simple databases, so simple and dumbed down it was enough to make you cry.

When someone accidentally pressed BREAK the teacher had a spazz, cos the software was in another classroom across school. :D

thingley

At least the acorn machines had the magic 'old' command. (It usually worked for unprotected stuff)

I must say I really thought that was something special when my older brother got his beeb. After years of typing in long listings on the spectrum where all you needed to do was press a and then enter to lose the lot.

thingley

Hmmm - don't know where that double post came from!
It wasn't there earlier

fog

I finally got a bbc master128 a while ago. ?36 and then added the MMC for it :)

(I have an electron also now)

but yer ?400 in the day = *3 that.

going brent cross shopping centre.. and seeing them in glass cubes so spotty herberts like me couldn't use them.. I did notice a lot of Jewish parents were buying their kids the machine (prolly the sames ones who shopped in lewis / waitrose) , well eduction eduction eduction.

one of the best c64 coders I know had started out on an acorn electron.. = 6502..

but the basic on the machine was VERY good.. and you could code ASM from the basic prompt..

we used BBC b's in college as part of the electronics thing we did for b-tec computing..

I do think it was the best machine sorted for education at the time..

Scottie_uk

One important aspect also crucial to the BBC micro's success in schools, was that in comparison to other computers of the time, it was built like a tank.

guesser

joefish wrote: »

I think you're wrong there. My parents were teachers and we had a Speccy. No-one on a teacher's salary could afford their own BBC-B!

there was a scheme where teachers got a discount/subsidy on the model B. The idea being that if they had access to their own they'd become more efficient using them in the classroom.

Of course in reality their kids just used them to play elite all day :p

beanz

guesser wrote: »

there was a scheme where teachers got a discount/subsidy on the model B. The idea being that if they had access to their own they'd become more efficient using them in the classroom.

Of course in reality their kids just used them to play elite all day :p

..and Revs.

fog

but if you put the inventors of both machines side by side without knowing who made what..

you'd prolly think clivey made the bbc..hehe

(due to looking , well, more boffin-ish)

Winston

We had quite a curious mix of computers at school.

Mostly BBC Micros (on an econet network), and later, the ARM-based BBC Micro (or Archimedes) - but we were also donated some Commodore PETs around 1986 or so (terrible machine once you'd used a Beeb, abysmal BASIC and molasses slow disc drive, but with an interesting "car bonnet" prop up the top kind of thing for accessing the hardware. There was also an (I think) 80186 based Apricot "yes it runs MS-DOS, no it's not PC compatible" machine which wasn't really useful for much (donated I think), but it did have somewhat better graphics than a standard PC of the day and we had some fun writing a program to transfer graphics from an Amiga to it.

We had another donated machine, a Honeywell CP/M-86 system with a 10MB hard drive (it also had an MS-DOS emulator that sort of ran a few PC programs). Later on there were a couple of original Mac Plus, and an 80286 based PC. There was also a BBC Master Compact, and a TORCH system that was built like a tank (donated) which had a BBC Micro compatible half and a Z80 based CP/M half all in one box (and the loudest BBC Micro loudspeaker you've ever heard). The Torch had an odd keyboard layout so no one used it, but it did have Econet so we used it as our server for the MUD we wrote.

joefish

I'd forgotten about Apricot computers. My secondary school had a smaller room full of Commodore Pets just off the main room of networked BBCs. The PETs were gone after the first year though. We did all the tricks for mucking about with the Beebs like remote-launching noisy applications. We even wrote a BBC BASIC emulator on the BBC itself, in BASIC, which would appear to work like the ordinary command line for a while. A friend had his version start logging any passwords that you entered into it, which then earned us both a bollocking and my elder brother was drafted in by the staff to track and clear out all traces of our program (no-one had heard the term 'computer virus' at this point).

There was a Spectrum in the maths department, and a VIC-20. I converted a treasure-map educational thing from the VIC to the maths department's new BBC on a trolley, though having special access to that machine meant a lot of Repton 3 got played.

Winston

Oh yes, viruses :-) In the sixth form I was writing in asm on the BBC Micro a piece of self-replicating code that would live in a user's home directory (copy itself to the !Boot file, set *OPT 4,3 (IIRC), and then execute whatever the user originally had in their !Boot file). The sole purpose was to replicate.

While I was writing it on a PR in the 6th form, I realised the teacher who ran the computer lab was in his office, and I hadn't done a *PROT, meaning he could be watching...and I was just about to embark on the code that did the actual replication.

So I saved what I had done, and typed *PROT. No more than 15 seconds later, he had quietly entered the computer room and was watching over my shoulder. Busted! (Him, not me. Just after doing *PROT, I went and started doing something innocent).

I don't think I ever got around to finish the self replicating code, but a healthy paranoia was installed amongst all the users after I left a resident word changing program in memory (how much fun it was to see Wordwise introduce deliberate spelling mistakes into a document), there wasn't one person who didn't *FX 201,1 then CTRL-BREAK (those two things do a complete wipe of memory) before logging on :-)

dm_boozefreek

We knew the *PROT command in school, but never needed it, the BEEBs in all the schools I went to were never networked.

My secondary school had BEEBs in the maths department and funnily enough the Design and Tech dept which I found a bit odd. The progs the D&T dept was using were very primitive almost completely useless for designing things.

....and the PCs in secondary school were shite and running winloidz 3.1. The teacher now that I think back didn't actually teach us anything, infact I didn't even turn up for my IT exam at the end of school.

The mocks had questions on that hadn't been covered by the curiculum, or at least by the teacher infact I learned more more in a week of trial and error messing with my mates ancient compaq back in 1995, than I did in the 3 years of compulsory IT we got rammed down our necks at school. What I did learn at school I learned also by trial and error and from the other kids. The teacher really was useless he was a blatant homosexual with a sham marriage and 2 kids, a private numberplate on his car, who seemed more concerned about his floppy blonde curtain hairdo than actually teaching us anything. He always wore a green velvet type suit jacket blazer type thing as well....what a twat! If the prick had've actually done his job, I may have bothered turning up for the exam.

There was one good IT teacher who actually taught you how to do stuff, but I never got him. He was also a History and a Geography teacher as well. I didn't get him for either of those subjects either. But he was toss at those apparently :D

ramble ramble.....

fog

joe we used to use something similar at my old uni.. basically you'd be logged into a vms or unix account.. but it'd be a fake frontend.. say .. sorry incorrect password.. in reality it would log out of your account, but save the password in your account , and return to the normal prompt... well it was fine until someone left it running as a job / task called "hack" hehe

joke is, one of the people in my year went onto be uni computer admin, so knew all the tricks users would get up to.

joefish

The easiest way to grab a password on the BBC was to press CTRL+F8 and cursor left (I think that's right) then watch and wait. That would set ink to black, then move the cursor left, leaving an invisible copy cursor.
Someone would inevitably sit down, type '*I AM ...' then bash in their password, without realising that their logon hadn't worked and their password was being typed in plain view.

thx1138

turn the power on whilst holding down the R key caused chaos in my school

Winston

As it happens I need to turn the power on and press R on my A3010 to reset it to a sane state :-)

BloodBaz

Have you seen this?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/25/commodore_name_bounces_again/
I can't imagine trying to fit a PC into the cassis of a rubber spectrum!

We have BBC computers at school and then RM Nimbus PCs.
Loved them both. But still spent half of my time on the PCs running the BBC emulator!

Winston

Ah, the good old RM Nimbus, another "yes it runs MS-DOS, no it's not IBM compatible" machine. Running DOS but not being IBM compatible was always a serious Achilles heel (just like for the Apricot we had). I'm so glad we had BBC Micros instead.