It seems to be an unwritten rule of antique computers that they will work for 25 years without a hitch, until you need something in a hurry. Then they break down. Here's the scene at BeebMaster Towers on the Friday, just before departure. I had already abandoned the Beeb I was hoping to take with me, as it was giving me similar disc problems, and the replacement decided to play up as well!
One of the ideas I had was to take a Teletext Adapter and aerial and give people probably their last ever chance to see Teletext being received by a BBC Micro.
This Beeb is an Issue 2 BBC B with disc and Econet and also an Acorn User sideways RAM module, which I thought would come in handy. At the point this picture was taken, I had already had to toil with my Acorn Winchester Disc which didn't spin up until about the fifth attempt. I needed it because it has my master archive of ROM images, copied from my FileStore E20 which is where I used to keep the archive until I formatted it in 2008 or even 2007 with the idea of mapping out all the bad sectors, until I discovered that the Acorn FileStore formatter doesn't know how to deal with bad sectors on an E20!
I needed my ROM archive for the Teletext ROM, which I put on disc, except the disc interface wasn't working in this Beeb, and when I finally got it to work the Teletext ROM image didn't seem to work either. I eventually discovered that this was because I had been using TFS 2.50, which only works with the Master, and what I needed was TFS 1.00 for the BBC B, which I had never used before, and which (I discovered) has a completely different set of function keys when in Teletext terminal mode!
My PC also decided on this very same morning that it was going to join in the fun and also refuse to work, although after only 6 years rather than 25, which meant that I couldn't copy the Econet game "Arena" which I had downloaded earlier in the week, onto a BBC floppy disc.
Not an auspicious start to Byte-Back!