Creators of BBC Microcomputer gather (UK)

[Parris]

Ah, brings back many memories indeed. School system was a BBC Master and they almost kicked me out of school for changing personal details of some of the teachers on their files ;-)

Beeb creators gather to pat themselves on the back and enjoy one anothers cardigans: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7303288.stm

Interesting bit for those into old computers about Castle (the current owners of the technology) making Risc OS open source.

[diddydonn]

Ah, brings back many memories indeed. School system was a BBC Master and they almost kicked me out of school for changing personal details of some of the teachers on their files :-)

Beeb creators gather to pat themselves on the back and enjoy one another cardigans: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7303288.stm

Oddly enough, same here! i was banned from the after school computer club for accessing all of the teachers files, changing passwords, looking at the accounts for the schools budget, and least i forget playing repton for hours at a time!, all at the tender age of 13!

[Parris]

Oddly enough, same here! i was banned from the after school computer club for accessing all of the teachers files, changing passwords, looking at the accounts for the schools budget, and least i forget playing repton for hours at a time!, all at the tender age of 13!

And we both end up here? Odds on that happening? :dance:

[diddydonn]

i think most people of our age who used the old BBC micro's exploited them one way or another, with no encryption on them and a basic knowlage of, well, Basic, they were easy to access

[Baseley09]

Great computer, my friend had such a gnarly BBC set up, 2 drives, 2 sticks, rgb monitor, in the home & everything not in school! Repton so awesome.

[Parris]

If your school was anything like mine, the teachers presented with the task of teaching computers were the Maths department! That was a bad move in my opinion, it should have been the Arts department. Would have been much more liberal and fun!

We are talking a few years ago now, but at that time calculators were seriously frowned upon. The view being that you should be able to perform long division in your skull and at a push require a pencil and piece of paper. The thought of their pupils having access to computers must have made their heads reel.

"Work of the Devil!!!" (I went to a very old fashioned school).

In the end, the pupils who were interested in computers and had access at home really were miles ahead of the teachers and would spend most of their time giving the teachers lessons, which meant I got to know them pretty well and had access to a BBC Master rather than the Micro.

Of course, I was caught flitting through files I shouldn't and was almost kicked out, but as punishment I was back on the Micro. Sore indeed!

[Jamtex]

Ah we had the RML 480Z in our school, which were networks and attached to a 10MB(!) winchester drive. It also had the easiest password system available. Flick a dip switch (8 I think it was) on the back, type in the user ID, press Control+Shift+0 to enter the front panel and enter J103 and it bypasses the password. Had fun editing mock exam test results and other files, sadly they got in the RM Nimbus 2 years later and killed my fun.

[Parris]

Ah we had the RML 480Z in our school, which were networks and attached to a 10MB(!) winchester drive. It also had the easiest password system available. Flick a dip switch (8 I think it was) on the back, type in the user ID, press Control+Shift+0 to enter the front panel and enter J103 and it bypasses the password. Had fun editing mock exam test results and other files, sadly they got in the RM Nimbus 2 years later and killed my fun.

But not before you'd passed every exam under the school system and J103'd your way to fame and fortune, right? ;-)

[Tachikoma]

God I love the old Micro, we just used to change the midi files in the games, or the sprites in the splash screens, there was never anything juicy on our machines...

The guys who still program RISC-OS (as in the commercial part) have an office just around the corner from my old house in Cardiff. Always wanted to stick my nose in through their door and buy them a pint.

I still have my Acorn Archimedes propped up against the wall in my computer room and a huge box full of floppy disks... ah the good old days... Ctrl Shift Break...

[limey]

Ah we had the RML 480Z in our school, which were networks and attached to a 10MB(!) winchester drive. It also had the easiest password system available. Flick a dip switch (8 I think it was) on the back, type in the user ID, press Control+Shift+0 to enter the front panel and enter J103 and it bypasses the password. Had fun editing mock exam test results and other files, sadly they got in the RM Nimbus 2 years later and killed my fun.

In my old school, we had a RML 380Z, a Sinclair ZX80 & ZX81 (complete with wobbly RAM-pack) & a Beeb micro. All this was before the school really considered using computers for admin work, so there was never anything really juicy left on them.

Actually, I still possess a Beeb, which is currently hooked up to the RF input on my old PAL 25" CRT.

~Limey~ (also old enough to remember when calculators were frowned upon)

[Parris]

In my old school, we had a RML 380Z, a Sinclair ZX80 & ZX81 (complete with wobbly RAM-pack) & a Beeb micro. All this was before the school really considered using computers for admin work, so there was never anything really juicy left on them.

Actually, I still possess a Beeb, which is currently hooked up to the RF input on my old PAL 25" CRT.

~Limey~ (also old enough to remember when calculators were frowned upon)

At school I was the person out hustling at lunchtime, selling people cheap computers I'd buy and tapes of various games. I actually bought the schools supply of ZX81s and sold them to school mates. The first thing I did when I left school was start buying & selling old Amstrad computers and tills, which I'd sell to local businesses. Funny how I ended up in a sales management position and promotions. God, I loved those days! I always had plenty of extra cash, no bills, no responsibilities and a genuine copy of most games (hey, they were mostly £1.99 Mastertonics or Codemaster titles lol)

I still fondly remember Arkanoid II on the Amstrad and Alien 8 / Knightlore. Those 3 titles gave me endless pleasure.

[retro]

Nice to see this making the news.

My primary school had a BBC Micro, which we seldom got to use. They also had a couple of RM Nimbus machines. Sadly, they were pretty much only used for the standard educational games (getting the people across the river etc, maybe Granny's Garden if you were lucky!), although they also had some nice expensive motor control interfaces that 'talked' to Lego technic and the likes. Only two people knew how to use it, I was one of them!

My secondary school had one surviving 380Z by the time I got there. I think they still had a printer for it, too - apparently they had a tendency to blow up! They also had a few networks of RM Nimbus machines. I too got banned from the computers for 'hacking' - in reality, I was looking on the public drive as opposed to our user area, at programs I shouldn't have had access to, apparently! Yeah, they really knew how to run a secure network! We weren't even given login passwords on that original network. I had one, though! heh.

[limey]

At school I was the person out hustling at lunchtime, selling people cheap computers I'd buy and tapes of various games. I actually bought the schools supply of ZX81s and sold them to school mates. The first thing I did when I left school was start buying & selling old Amstrad computers and tills, which I'd sell to local businesses. Funny how I ended up in a sales management position and promotions. God, I loved those days! I always had plenty of extra cash, no bills, no responsibilities and a genuine copy of most games (hey, they were mostly £1.99 Mastertonics or Codemaster titles lol)

I still fondly remember Arkanoid II on the Amstrad and Alien 8 / Knightlore. Those 3 titles gave me endless pleasure.

Is Parris the Arfur Daley of early UK microcomputing?! :110:

I remember Knightlore on the speccy - Ultimate really managed to do some nifty graphics on the Sinclair hardware.

Does anyone remember the BBC broadcasts where you'd plug a tape cassette recorder into the radio (possibly the telly, too - can't remember) and 'download' software off the air?

[smf]

Oddly enough, same here! i was banned from the after school computer club for accessing all of the teachers files, changing passwords, looking at the accounts for the schools budget, and least i forget playing repton for hours at a time!, all at the tender age of 13!

One of the teachers at my school got me to deprotect some beeb software as they had only bought one copy for the entire class.

It had the classic weakness of just being bolted on after the software was written. These were the obstacles:

1) A bad block stopped you from doing a straight disk copy
2) The bad block also stopped you doing a *COPY *
3) The name of one of the first files in the directory contained a VDU sequence that disabled the screen & so stopped you using *CAT to find out what files were there.
4) The disk autobooted a machine code program & I had no machine code monitor ( and at that time to be honest I had no exposure to machine code ).

I think it took less that an hour. The protection was thwarted because we had access to a printer. Obviously the people who made the protection didn't think of printers, because their VDU sequence could have easily stopped us.

The weakness was: VDU 2, this makes all output on the screen go to the printer. The printer output a few dodgy characters on the first line, which was the file with the vdu characters in the name. Other than that we had individual file names to copy by hand.

So we now have a backup of all the files we can get. This caused a problem because there was a check for a bad sector in the boot code & that code was in machine code. Now I can't remember at this stage how we figured out the next bit.

It's possible that we hex dumped out the boot code and looked for a file that it would then chain. I can't remember if we had a hex dump available on the BBC. The printer could probably have done it, but I'm not sure if I knew that at the time. I'm not even sure I had seen a hex dump. As it's 20 years ago and the evidence is long gone, this part of the story might remain a mystery for ever.

I have a feeling that we did know what the boot loader did next but it might have gone to more machine code. One that we couldn't easily figure out.

I think the next bit involved going back to the list of files and LOADing each one and LISTing it. When we found one that looked like it was part of the software then we just had to create a new boot loader that CHAINed it.

The lesson 20 years on is as relevant as today, your protection is worth nothing if there is a hole. They had two. Not only was the software only protected at boot time, they had a simple way of preventing us from looking at the directory and they missed it ( a VDU 3 in the file name with VDU characters would turn off the printer ).

Admittedly even if they had stopped us LISTing the directory, we could have written OSBYTE calls to read the directory but that was outside my knowledge at the time. But someone else could easily have done that and had I had the time and motivation then I would have learnt too.

If the program had been written in machine code then the investment required to hack the program would have been way outside what I'd be prepared to put in to it.

Thinking about it, maybe we used a different way of printing the directory. I can't recall if there was another way other than VDU 2 which they might have protected against. I had to google to find out that it was VDU 2 that turned printing on :-)

We used to use this at work for writing systems for MSDOS: http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic.html
I see they have finally moved into the world of windows too.

[Parris]

One of the teachers at my school got me to deprotect some beeb software as they had only bought one copy for the entire class.

It had the classic weakness of just being bolted on after the software was written. These were the obstacles:

I think it took less that an hour.

Had they been using Amstrads, Spectrums, Acorn Electrons, Commodore C64s or Atari 8 bits it was just a case of walking over to your Dad's stereo, putting a tape in one side and a tape in the other. Hit play & record and wait...

[Parris]

Does anyone remember the BBC broadcasts where you'd plug a tape cassette recorder into the radio (possibly the telly, too - can't remember) and 'download' software off the air?

No?! Blimey, I missed that one? Sure you didn't just dream that one up or read a short story about it where the world is covered in cameras, a guy goes out for a walk at night and gets bundled into the back of the Electro Police van? ;-)

[limey]

No?! Blimey, I missed that one? Sure you didn't just dream that one up or read a short story about it where the world is covered in cameras, a guy goes out for a walk at night and gets bundled into the back of the Electro Police van? ;-)

No, I remember sitting with a tape recorder.... wait a mo - why are there men with white coats heading this way?....

Proof below! At least some of the programs were in 'basicode', which could then be interpreted on several different makes of computer (Beeb micro, Sinclair speccy etc).

http://bbc.nvg.org/history.php3
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/024/news.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

[Shadowlayer]

Oddly enough, same here! i was banned from the after school computer club for accessing all of the teachers files, changing passwords, looking at the accounts for the schools budget

I had to take shit from the principal and some teacher for making a dumb BASIC that said:

I'm Mario Bros, I'm a Virus

I'll delete all your files

Haha

Crappy I know, all my classmates were doing some stupid assignment in the computer lab so I decided to mess around with the notepad and did that. The problem was when one of the 1st grade teachers brought the kids to play some edutainment game (one of those from the 90s) and she found it.......and went batshit crazy over it.

I got all the blame almost instantly, basically becos they knew I was the only kid in the entire school who could do that kind of stuff.

Nothing fancy, is just that most kids there barely knew how to use Netscape and some games, nowhere near of doing programming.

[Taucias]

I had an Electron at home, a bit dire compared to the C64 and Spectrum/48K kids, but at least it has some games and you could program BASIC for it. I remember trying those code listings in magazines and changing them to work on the Electron. You always had to change them anyway, even the Electron specific code. I'd also borrow books from the library with game code in them, then pay the big fine because you were only allowed the books for 1 week and I would get stuck into a project.

At school we had 5 BBCs with dot matrix printers and a disk drive. We ran Folio and would actually type up and print assignments on them. Of course, this was primary school. We had a few games and would be allowed to play them on 'Toy Day' (the last day of term). I forget the names of most of them now, but Chuckie Egg was the best!

In secondary school we had 2 Archemedes A3000 workshops, about 30 machines in total, networked to printers using NEXUS boxes. I soon worked out how to access the hidden higher level directories etc, but there was not much to be done there thanks to it not being a 'proper' network.

In hindsight the Archemedes was pretty crap, but perfect for school. The BBC was always the rich kid's home machine and usually those owners were ridiculed in the playground during the C64 vs Speccy wars.

[babu]

Does anyone remember the BBC broadcasts where you'd plug a tape cassette recorder into the radio (possibly the telly, too - can't remember) and 'download' software off the air?

That's pretty cool :D

I have a vinyl at home with a C64 and a Atari game on it. never tried to transfer it to my C64 thought. (http://www.beigerecords.com/products/beg-004.html)