The image above is the first of two BeebMaster official 10th birthday photographs, although it shows not my original BBC micro from the early 1990s but my 2013 "US Beeb" setup. Sadly, I don't have my first Beeb any more, nor any contemporary photographs of it!

I first used a BBC micro at primary school. Like many primary schools during the era of the Beeb, there was a single machine shared between a classful of little people. I only really remember two things about using Beebs from this time:

One is a game where you had to build a medieval castle by allocating workers to different tasks, and the castle appeared on the screen gradually as the weeks or months went by, depending on how well you were doing. This was a class effort with the teacher operating the Beeb, and would have been in my second year of primary, so 1985/86.

The other memory is Granny's Garden, which was more of an individual effort as far as I can remember. If you were lucky, two or three at a time got to play on the computer away from the rest of the class, but you had to keep the noise down, which meant holding a cloth or duster over the speaker grille when the famous Granny's Garden tune came on! This was during junior 4, so 1987/88.

At senior school, we got to study IT as one of our options for the third year. Curiously, it was only for that one year that you could learn IT. This would have been 1990/91 and was my introduction to the school computer room scenario of a room full of networked Beebs. In the case of our school, these were principally Master Econet Terminal machines, with a few Master 128s and a single BBC B. The networking was all SJ Research kit but the school had an Acorn Level 3 file server with Winchester disc at station 254 and a printer server with dot-matrix printer at station 235. In fact, there were two Winchester Discs because the computer room was shared between the Boys' and Girls' schools. As I recall, the Boys' Winnie was 30MB but the girls only had 10MB!

During my time studying IT at school, I bought my first very own Beeb. Some of the details I can remember very well: it was in response to a classified ad in the local evening paper, and it was a lady schoolteacher selling a BBC Model B, Viglen single 40/80 track switchable floppy disc drive and utilities disc, and the asking price was £200. I know that I paid £180 in the end. This would have been between September 1990 when I started IT at school, and April 1991 when I started writing to Acorn and other Beeb-related companies, but I can't be more specific than that. Despite extensive research, I haven't been able to turn up the exact date that this happened. I thought my bank book would help, but there aren't any withdrawals during this period which would help to narrow down the date.

I used my Beeb with my Fidelity Colour Television Monitor, which I've owned since about 1983, connected via a UHF lead. I never had an RGB/SCART monitor lead in those days, even though the TV set was a perfectly good computer monitor as well!

Please click on the picture link above to see more!

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