BBC Micro Fixathon & Econet Classroom

TNMOC Volunteer and Acorn curator Tom Camps tells us about the recent "BBC Fixation" where members of the public came to help us repair some of our faulty Acorn computers.
He also discusses the newly expanded and repaired Econet network in the museum's BBC Micro Classroom. Econet is Acorn's early local area networking system and allows BBC Micros (and the later Acorn Archimedes) to share files, disk drives and printers.
Video recorded April 2022.

[@trashmail8]

Many thanks to all of you who are taking such good care of all those BBC machines! 🙏

[@Petertronic]

Glad you pointed out the Rifa issue. Good to see this setup, it looks really great

[@Pearmain2009]

Nice to see somany Beebs, Masters and Arcs in one place. I miss those days

[@jeffross761]

I like this im from the us our classroom in the 1980s used the trs80 model 3 and our teacher had a special one a souped up 3 or a tandy 4 i think it was a bus network i think it shared data from the teachers hard disc or floppies i remember playing empire and something like cannon fodder or pillbox game around 1983 and 84 i would love to have a job learning these old systems and restoring them and setting up these networks

[@gwyllymsuter4551]

Thank God, you're back. I missed this channel so much

[@meh3247]

Good to see the old beasts still chugging along... There's no better machine to learn BASIC on.
Mode 7 FTW!

[@tnmoc]

Thank you. The machines are still used to teach students about BASIC programming. It is still relevant and the Beeb makes it very accessible.

[@tonystanley5337]

I made the first ever phishing trojan in 1983 or so in school saved on the Econet hard drive (a huge Winchester type thing). There was no security and anyone could access anyones files. So I left a program called defender saved in my directory with some basic code that simply pretended to reboot the computer when they would have to put their password in. It then saved it in their area with a colour code that was invisible in mode7 directory view.
As compensation I recovered someones project that they had accidentally deleted using the ASCII editor that came with my DFS.

[@rogergreenwood1536]

I wish I had known this some years ago. After being "stored" for >30 years I pulled my BBC B out, plugged it in and the magic smoke came out, quite quickly actually. It went in the skip. So sorry..... If this had happened today I would have tried to fix. Good job you seem to have a few others not owned by idiots like me.....