Christmas is a time for...
Expanding the Econet!




For a long time, the idea had been to add the MDFS, the mainstay of my ad-hoc "weekend" Econet to my main upstairs network. In 2010, I moved the majority of my MDFS boxes, shown here, from the back of the BeebMaster Workshop (i.e. dining room) under the window, to the hallway just in front of the radiator.

The back of the dining room was much too cold for kit as precious as the MDFS, so I thought this temporary home would be an ideal location till I could move the MDFS upstairs. The original plan had been to put the MDFS in place of my FileStore E01 and E20, which have been more or less defunct since Station 200 became a Level 3 Econet file server with CF hard drive during 2009.

However, the MDFS seems to quite like its current location where it's nice and warm and in regular contact with people. I knew it would be a lot of upheaval to move the FileStores and transplant the MDFS up a flight of stairs, so I guess I kind of lost interest in the idea.

In the meantime, the new MDFS home has become a bit of an unintentional Beeb enclave. In addition to the six MDFS boxes seen here (the bottom five being the component parts of my main MDFS; the top one being the 2006 Domesday Expansion Box), there are also four 5¼" dual floppy drives, two issue 1 Master 128s at the very top of the MDFS tower, Station 114 of my weekend Econet to the right, and at the bottom of the right-hand pile my issue 2 "Teletext" BBC B which did all the Teletext decoding at Byte-Back in 2009.

You can also see a dual 3½" floppy drive: this is in fact the BeebShop dual drive protoype which usually lives upstairs underneath Stations 200 and 201, but was brought down here in December 2011 and connected to the MDFS as I needed to make up some 3½" MDFS floppy discs for the BeebShop.


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