Hi from Dorset

[jdenson]

Thought I'd best start with an introduction post - I first got into acorns back in primary school, we had a BBC B in the school we used to play Granny's Garden (and probably more) and a group of us attempted to write a game in BASIC.

A couple of years later my parents bought us a BBC B for home, and I generally used this for playing Repton, SimCity and the occasional bit of schoolwork on Wordwise.

Secondary school bought me to a whole network of BBC B's, a econet network and fascination at the blinky lights box titled "Winchester". One of the game writing friends from primary school got an A3000 and I was forever jealous, but fortunately my mum bought one home during holidays from the school so I had one then.

Eventually I ended up saving up and buying a A3010, which I traded a couple of years later for a RiscPC, which went with me to uni and was used for some proper work with the easy C compiler to avoid having to go into the lab. I then got dragged into the PC world through work and as the internet became more of the thing the RPC became less of a thing sadly. I did buy a whole other SA-110 RPC on a whim but this was long after I'd stopped using these daily.

All of these went into long term storage in my parent's loft where they remained until very recently due to them deciding to move.

I'm grateful for these early computing experience, they've set me on the career path I'm on today which amusingly now includes working with embedded ARM systems. It doesn't include the assembly I learnt at one point though!

Still have:
BBC B - unsure on model, need to remove it from it's original box and assess how much works. It hasn't been attempted to powered on since about the 90s
Cumana 40 track SS/SD drive for the above.
Some random disc drive which I think might be 80 track. It has a track slider on the side but is missing any chassis.

My original RiscPC 600, now has a 710, OS 3.6, 32mb ram and 16bit upgrade. I booted it for the first time in many decades at the weekend and much to my surprise it worked! I do need to try and get a drive working in as whatever is in there is giving an error and there's no sound so there might be some work needed. The battery was slightly crystallised but couldn't spot any board damage so snipped it out and washed the area with some IPA.
It did have an Oak scsi card then an Alsystems scsi card but sold both back in about 2002 along with my collection of PRMs.

The SA-110 I bought in 2005. This came to me with 64Mb ram, 2mb VRAM, a 16 bit upgrade and 3.7 roms. Sadly the battery is a bit more crystallised than the 600 and it doesn't boot. At some point I'll work through seeing if I can work out why.

Also a whole pile of 5.25 and 3.5 floppies, various manuals and random bits of software. And some of the original boxes - the RPC600, the BBC and one of those Cumana's still have boxes for them!

[Multiwizard]

Hi,

welcome to this great Forum...


Greetings from my little Dutch Atomic Attic, Wim...

[tricky]

Welcome, any B is a good B
I also learn arm assembler and have never used it !

[flaxcottage]

Welcome, jdenson.

[daveejhitchins]

Welcome to the Forum, jdenson . . . Enjoy . . .

Dave H.

[lovebug]

Welcome to the forum

I used to live in Lyme Regis back in the day, I miss Dorset

[SunbakedinWA]

Hi jdenson,

I'm a newbie here too and although I now enjoy much kinder weather, I actually started my computer journey in Blandford.

I was a student at the Upper School when I first laid hands on a BBC B....
They also had two PETS, one original calculator key one with the tape deck, and the 2001 series with the IEEE488 double disk drive and printer
There was also a Video Genie which was also sold here in OZ as the Dick Smith System 80.

Many a lunch time spent "learning to program" outside the maths office trying to not give the teachers an excuse to tell us off for playing games...