Just to introduce myself on these forums, I have been working abroad for the last 8 years in China as a Design Engineer for a Automotive company, now working for a American one. After coming back to the UK, with with the extra time on my hands working from home, i have been getting out my collection of retro hardware. My history i started with a ZX81 back in 1981 aged 10, then the parents bought me my first Acorn which was a Electron of which i still have. This was upgraded with a Plus 1, Plus 3 various Slogger cartridges and Roms, I have a Projects Expansons Sound Expansion which still works with the orginal letter from them apologising for the delay in the late 80's for sending to me.
Back then, showing my age here half century next year, doing Computer studies at school the goal of the lesson for us was first once the teacher of which we had 2, both women had decided it was going to be on the BBC's. This was located in the Computer Room the other side of the School, was to sprint as hard as you could to get to the front of the queue to get the one with the disk drive on!, all the machines were on the Econet which ate up memory, i think the server was using a 10mb Winchester, was to try during the lesson was to get games to run, we would do the course work on our machines at home!. One of our class was a bit of a assembly whizz and wrote a program to simulate the login process and then save the login and password to his account then log the user in without them knowing. It was fun for a while having teacher access
, they where struggling a bit keeping up with us, they did cotton on to the program and state that if they caught us we would be in trouble... The good ol days ... The whizz also had a Eprom programmer and we copied a few Roms at the time...Moving on i then bought, once i started work was a A3000 when they first came out, then moving onto a A420/1, A5000, and a RiscPC, of those the only one i dont have is the A3000 as traded it in at Beebug for the A420/1. Unfortunatly the A5000 and RiscPc have caught the battery corrosion issue as leaked onto the motherboards, hope to resurrect them soon. Currently working on the A420/1 cleaning it up, battery's leaked but not soldered to motherboard so should be ok, not sure of the issues with the A305/310/420's with common faults like the beebs and caps's....
Also just got a Master working after the Cap's went pop.. thanks retro clinic btw. In the collection i have 4 Electrons at the moment just bought one off of Ebay to convert as a USB keyboard to use for work but it works ok!, so loathed to convert it. Also bought my school mates BBC Micro some years back and has some unique homemade boards in looks like a sideways ram board, issue 7 board picture below, will recap it before switching it on!, as the master went pop and smoke
. In the collection all 4 Electrons work, i have 3 Spectrums but only one works the Acorns seem to be better made with better components, the Spectrums seem to me anyway to suffer more, these where given to me over the years.Always been interested in computers, have many raspberry pi's too, 3D printer, work in CAD all because of those first computers i had many years ago, taught us much about how things work, which the modern generation i don't think have these core skills, planning on getting my 2 year old son programming as soon as possible, and my 4 year old daughter likes to play hopper and blitzkrieg on the electron
.Mark
Luckily I was a lot better and craftier than my students and managed to lock down the computers pretty well on our network! It didn't stop them trying though.
Write a program to send keypresses over the cassette port, use a microcontroller to pretend to be a USB keyboard, and send the keypresses through that. There's a project there, I think... 
