It all speaks of a more innocent time! As you leaf through the functions in the Econet Advanced User Guide it gets increasingly more worrying as you turn the pages. These are all things I was going to cover but deferred til part 2, since I think there are lots of amusing things I could demo in a video there!

Yeah Econet was a game changer for Me as a kid shout out to SJ's MDFS which I had also along with Rob Cowell's Dudley Blue Screen Menus ahhh yes, not sure about the tape backup program in $.SYSPROGS? you could set time for tape backup in it that's all I can remember big thanks to ARG and the gang @ SJ for what they did (they set the standard for econet in schools ..

@@acornandy Teachers realised we had the admin password so they changed it and we just looked at the code in the backup program and found it again, the login credentials were just stored as plain text in the BBC Basic backup program. This happened multiple times, they couldn't figure out how we kept getting back in. Security was such an afterthought back then, security by obscurity seemed to be their approach. That aside it was a pretty good file server for its day and we had hour of fun with it.

Yep. I had a game of pong that used to bounce the ball, and sound across all the screens between the two players in the library. Fun for annoying people. The tricksiest part was dealing with all the screen modes.

Me too - the head of Computer Science at my school didn't trust Econet as he was concerned the students were going to hack it. Instead, all our machines had disc drives individually and there were boxes of discs with the software on a table at the side. Now, as my job is networking, it's interesting to look back at what I missed out on!

Indeed - it got all the upgrades that other manufacturers never delivered on. There weren't many 8-bit computers with floppy disc, hard disc, networking and second processor support! And it all worked fairly seamlessly with the operating system.

The BBC Micro was an excellent machine and one of the few that actually delivered on everything that was promised. It did have the advantage of being 3-4 years later than the Apple II and gained from a lot of input from University people with experience of mainframes and early networking. I don't think I appreciated how good it was, back in the day. My focus was more on things like graphics and sound and computers like the C64 did that better, with the BBC being considered fairly expensive was often only bought as a home computer by teachers. Looking back now, though, it has a really well-designed operating system and lots of clever stuff in the architecture. Apple viewed Acorn as competitors, although it didn't work out that way, with the BBC being a flop in North America. They were still concerned when they wanted to licence the ARM chip for the Newton, though, and we have them to thank for asking Acorn to spin out ARM as a separate company.

BeebMaster has a lot of stuff about this on his website - www.beebmaster.co.uk/Econet/IWantanEconet.html - including a lot of screen-by-screen walkthroughs of things. If you get stuck, asking on StarDot is a good place to start, or I can answer simple questions here, but they're much more the experts!

Oh, I think with that 2022 Pi Bridge/Fileserver, I might just have myself a network a bit sooner...!

For the Master you'd need the ADF10 module - you can buy vintage ones from various places, including often on eBay. Or you can get a remake from Ken Lowe (which is now the PiEconetBridge hat but with only some parts fitted, so it physically fits in the Master - see here: stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=364685#p364685 For the Model B, you'll need an upgrade kit, which you can get from BeebMaster: www.beebmaster.co.uk/BeebShop/Default.html#NetModule or Ken does a simplified kit to minimise soldering but I'm not sure what the state is: stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=25087 You might also need some cables, hubs and terminators, depending on what else you have but BeebMaster sells all those (and will help you out). Once you've got the PiEconetBridge running on the Pi then it behaves as a file server, with its own station number, but it's not a full BBC: you have three hosts on the network but one is the dedicated file server, meaning your two real BBCs can be the clients.

Yes, you can do this - the feature is called 'Trunking' and is built into the PiEconetBridge software. See here: github.com/cr12925/PiEconetBridge/blob/v2.0/docs/README.HPBRIDGE#L669 I use this to run two segments and link the 3B+ and 4B+ bridges together, linked via Ethernet (which also has a Pi running RISC OS on it). One of the segments has the Master and B on it and the other the Electron - the Electron needs a slower clock and this lets me run the two Econets at different speeds. The only downside is that the bridge won't come up if the remote end of the trunk is up. This is annoying if you don't need the trunk up but just want to use the local bridge as a fileserver. I keep meaning to report this to Chris (although I'm sure he knows about it!).

Yes and the PiEconetBridge software can establish tunnels (using AES encryption) between each other to link them across an IP network.

@@lsbyte So... an Econet spanning London to Sydney would be possible...

A big problem, but I think the protocol was pretty screwed to begin with!