BBC Econet Part 1 - The school network of the 80's
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- Опубликовано: 9 апр 2020
- 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/
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.
This might be the first time I've ever clicked on an ad on RUclips
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.
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!
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.
The econet wiring was still present in my Australian private school in 2002. The computers were long gone though.
"It did keep going into late 80's and early 90s" - My 2ndry school was stil using it upto 2002/2003 i think.
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!
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.
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.
Nice video and info, but the background music is loud and annoying.
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.
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Ah, I remember those days. *I am finky and *remote have stuck in my head for decades ❤
Great Video, we had Econet when i was at school to connect BBC Master machines together, always wondered how it worked!
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....
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.
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...
Nice video. Thanks. (May I politely suggest the background music is a little over-loud!).
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.