BBC Econet Part 2 - Build your own
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ส.ค. 2024
- Following on from the first video covering the history of Econet, this video covers building your own Econet Network with real hardware, and in emulation.
The first section covers building an Econet network, including getting an Econet interface in your Beeb, cabling and the clock box, we then look at building a level 3 server. The video then covers emulation, and an alternative file server for Linux and OS X, Windows.
If you're interested in the history of Econet have a look at Part 1 ( • BBC Econet Part 1 - Th... )
Clock boxes
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CJE Micros
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* www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/ind...
Beebmaster
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* www.beebmaster.co.uk/BeebShop...
Self Build
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* github.com/simoninns/EconetCl...
Econet socket boxes
=================
Build your own
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* www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/...
Y cables
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* www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/ind...
SJ Research Socket Box
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* www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/ind...
Terminators
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* www.beebmaster.co.uk/BeebShop...
* www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/ind...
Econet Interfaces
==============
BBC B Kit
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* www.beebmaster.co.uk/BeebShop...
BBC Master/Compact/A310/A5000
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* www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/ind...
* www.beebmaster.co.uk/BeebShop...
Storage
=======
Retroclinc
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* www.ebay.co.uk/str/RetroClini...
Beebscsi
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* www.domesday86.com/?page_id=689
Tube
====
Retroclinc
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* www.ebay.co.uk/str/RetroClini...
File server software
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awServer
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* mdfs.net/Apps/Networking/FServ...
SoftMDFS
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* mdfs.net/Apps/Networking/FServ...
aunFilestored
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* hub.docker.com/r/crowly/aun-f... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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I used to work at SJ Research in the 1980s and to see all this stuff working - is just extraordinary. Awesome! Thanks too for the praise for our own MDFS. I'll tell the others about this video - most of them are still working together, but I had a career change.
Thank you for the kind words Stephen, and the MDFS. I'm planning on doing something on Nexus in the not too distant future, so if you know any of the people who where involved in that who would not mind talking to me about it that would be great. The more people I can talk to with first hand knowledge the better these videos can be.
MDFS you say. I have a whole MDFS unit with HD and tape that I keep telling myself I'll get going one day. I hope I'll be able to find you all when I have the inevitable questions :D
@@binarydinosaurs 👍👍
Well, thanks for the amazing videos. I live outside UK and never had seen one BBC Micro in my life. But, when in 2009 (approx.) I watched MicroMen I just loved the design behind the whole system and its history. Really, really amazed by Acorn and its valuable contribution to Computer Science area. And thanks for presenting us Econet live!
Haha wish you posted this two years ago when I bought a bbc with no econet and and an a3000 and tried to net them up. I bought the kit from that guy you mention, soldered it in. I have the clock box, cables and terminators . Only the a3000 never worked and life got in the way. You’ve just inspired me to have another go with the raspberry pie cheats . Great video. We had BBC’s and Arcs at our school all networked . Each desk of four Arcs would share a single nexus hard drive which provided temp storage only , the printers would have a bbc under them doing the donkey work. I remember using a command called printq to check printer queues , it was written by our it teacher MR Delaney . I’m now a software and web engineer :)
I've been slowly building up a pile of Nexus kit, so I can do a video on and use the nexus econet bridge to connect my riscpc to econet as I'm never going to find a econet card for it but I do have a nexus card.
We had an econet at our college mid 80's ish, seem to remember it being connected to a dual cumana drive. We 'Hacked' each others work and put lewd messages in documents and images, ah the good old days
Sounds like it was a level 2 they had. Learning to hack them was a big part of the fun of these things, that and the very rude messages.
This takes me back to my school days we had a large secondary school with econet everywhere, in fact it was 4 econet networks bridged together. With a level3 and later level 4 server.
Really enjoyed this video please keep them coming.
Thats one big network your school had.
Yes as a 16 year old we learned everything we could about econet. I even built my a hardware network tester checking for bad termination and line faults
I was more interested in my own Atari gear and the Archimedes machines as a kid... I never really appreciated that the BBCs really were pretty innovative and ahead of the curve on a lot of things. They just visually looked bodged DIY project, but were damn clever!
These videos are so jolly
Thats nice of you to notice Theodric, I'm a fairly Jolly kind of a person, so its what I'm aiming for in the videos.
@@RetroBytesUK Keep it coming. The world needs more jollity right now.
Speaking as a long term (and unwilling) PHP developer... qudos for doing anything beyond the mundane in PHP... even if the very concept makes me feel slightly nauseous. ;)
Seeing the "*I AM" command again after all these years filled me with fussy feelings of pure nostalgia.
You will potentially be horrified to know I've been working on that code base a bit more. Its now shifted over to using the react library, has a built in web server to admin it, it suports a native econet interface for connecting to real BBCs. I've also added an IPv4 stack and I'm working on NAT so real BBCs with an IP rom can telenet to public hosts using the fileserver as the router. I think implementing a basic IPv4 stack in PHP might be the thing I've written that will freak the most poeple out.
Very interesting video. i currently run an Econet in my shed. I have nearly one of all the different Acorn machines on it, only missing a Compact, Atom and a R260. Not really of much use but great fun moving files from BBCs around. I use a RPC700 as a L4 fileserver using Ian Stocks wonderful Econet Podule so the machine co-exists ethernet (AUN) and native Econet.
That sounds great, I really need to pick up a podule d0 you know if Ian still makes them?
Excellent work! I was very impressed by the BeebEm emulator as it even makes the disk drive noises!
It's a really good emulator, I love the way it not only does all the BBCs but also most the significant add on hardware.
How on earth does this video not have more views? This was a fun watch :)
Amazing video fella!!!!
Excellent stuff!
Thank you, I'm glad you liked it.
Great video ! brings back good memories of knocking together econet boxes, level 3 fileservers and some bad memories of wasting many many hours swearing at Winchester drives. Yup they were pretty unreliable back in the day, I dread to think of even attempting to use one after ll these years! Things were waaaay more reliable with the SCSI based units. When newer machines took over most of the old Beeb stuff got punted (or stripped for parts) and many of the SCSI drives were repurposed for use on Amiga systems. hard drives were soooo expensive we used a lot of 2nd hand drives sources from educational establishments when they were scrapping the old gear..
Econet is one of those things that I didn't get to experience back in the day when I was at school in the 1980s. I'm pretty sure we had a floppy drive on each Beeb, so it wasn't probably quite so important to the school to have more money spent on that system by then.
I've still not really played with it even now, but I do have two A3020s, at least one Master and two or maybe three Model Bs, so I probably should set an econet up to play with really, but as I'm certain none of the machines already have econet parts in them, I can't currently justify spending out on all the kit to do it.
brilliant, thank you so much for this video
Would actually be really cool to see a history video on Ethernet and TCP, and how different Ethernet standards existed before RJ45
wow me i think bbc computers are amazening so i love wacthing your channel i live and grew up in usa bronx i grew up useing unix stations and useing pc that i and my cuzzin were able to put linux or bsd and im 47 but i wish i could of tryed pc from uk and germany it would be a dream to use one or have one or even emulate one shit iv been trying to save up for a vampire standalone V4 to use a modern version of comidor bkuz i had two when i was young but keep making great vids yorr channel is the shis,it lol
I used to love "hacking" into the schools econet and changing a few things for the programs for math's etc. Good times lol
Great!
This video would make a great drinking game if every time "Econet interface" is mentioned to take a shot.
I'm about to make a video where I make an econet interface for the Rpi, so it you actively hate your own liver it could be the video to start the game with.
Did lander ever have sound ?? On the risc os?
Hello do you know much about the dragon 32? Thanks
14:05 Docker only "kinda" runs on macOS, it uses a Linux VM. On Windows client this is the default behavior for Docker-CE but you can also run Windows containers (either kernel-level or hypervisor-level)
Lovely video thanks, would love to tinker around with EcoNet when I get some time - maybe get my Electron to talk to my Bush SurfSet if I can get it to pretend to be an A7000+ 🤣it still seems like a missed opportunity that UK Businesses didn't use BBC wired up on EcoNet with level 3 fileservers to run a lot of things, it would've been very sensible business setup - nice 80 col displays, robust hardware and networking of data to many users - I could see a lot of the things the company I work for being handled quite nicely with that setup - a little DB for CRM, another for Accounts, some files for documentation and marketting.... Maybe after i've made my SurfSet into an A7000+ I'll invent the Flux Capacotor, go back in time and start promoting that in 80's Britain...
It could have been made much better use of. They could have made so much more of the x25 gateway, using that they had a solution so BBCs could act as terminals to main frames, and minicomputers in a very cost effective way. As well as allowing for local applications using filebased db. I did see it still in use in a hotel in Scotland, where the whole system for reservations check in/out was all done on BBCs with Econet. It was still in use in 2009 when I visited, when we arrived I heard the distinctive Beep Boop of at BBC getting switched on behind the reception desk. As the receptionist said "Hang on I just need to wiggle a cable at the back, its saying no clock again."
I'm also going todo a update video for this before the years out, as things with building your own econet have moved on a bit. We can now bridge AUN and physical Econet, as there is now a USB econet interface. I'm working on adding IPv4 support to my econet gateway code, as there is an IPv4 stack for the BBC that dates back to the early 90s. It will let you telnet from BBCs over econet.
@@RetroBytesUK ha haa, thats brilliant, it would've been worth a visit just to have a peek behind the counter. I can see how accessing mainframes would've been very useful to serious business in the UK also. The Spectrum Show did a great little series on using a Speccy to run a fake business, I'd love to see the same experiment with the BBC.
The delicious irony to this video is that in June 2022, it'll be easier to find original BBC kit on ebay than to buy a new RasPi zero!
Things sure have changed since I made that video. I've got a couple of video ideas I cant do atm due to not being able to get hold of a pi zero.
if the BBC Model B can support SCSI that a SCSI LVD to SATA adapter will let you make use of 256GB SSD drives or if it can handle a 1TB SSD then that should work.
How do you emulate dragon py on pc?
whats the emulator php github link?
it's actually quite simular to the functionality provided by isdn ta hdlc controller chips. as in, the whole thing. just that that motorola chip got there before it was just called isdn lol.
Haha when you could type *remote 26 (or something similar) and take over another kids machine, pressing delete while they were typing.. fun times!
It's probably neater to use a ReCo6502Mini as the internal coprocessor.
That is a nice board you've made there John. I know a few people used your retula.
aun-fileserver is cool, you could make it so it can automatically serve floppy images in a directory in from archive.org
You could write a vfs layer todo that, but it can be done. I keep meaning to write a webdav vfs module for it. I would need to check the dfs and ADFS vfs layers support opening a URL rather than a file, in theory they should but it would need testing. The other part is the http/webdav vfs layer would need todo some caching to local disc or it would be really inefficient, as it would download the disk image each time it pulled the catalogue, or a file, as it opens and close the file handle with each use.
@@RetroBytesUK had anyone written a FUSE driver for some of the BBC micro filesystems yet ?
@@stuartaxon2898 The kernel directly supports some ADFS disk formats used by Risc OS, but not dfs or the network filing systems. Up until not so long ago the kernel had support for econet interfaces and AUN, but it was removed.
I did knock up a very simple econet (nfs) client, which I think is in the repo for the server, but I only ment it for testing. In theory most of what you need for networking part of a fuse filing system is in there, but I've not implemented any fuse bits.
Great video... Would have been nice to see you hands on with it... You know..using it.. I'm thinking about doing something like this.. when I know how to lol !! Is there a way to use both emulator and physical hardware together??. 😊
The second release of the L4 server came with a service called !gateway, that bridged econet and AUN. I've tried to get it working but it just kept crashing my A5000, its somthing I've ment to come back to. There was a chap working on a USB econet interface, which I was planning on supporting in my file server, which is why there is a bunch of gateway code in there. I've not heard much more about the development of that for a while, but I've not made it to the last few wakefield's.
Hi Well I never knew there was an econet adapter for the Electron. Can you say more about it?
Yep, so it was created by Barson Computers who was Acorns distributer in Austrailia. You needed a plus1 expansion as it went in the cartridge slot on the top of the plus1. There was a close relationship between Barson and Acorn, with Barson's main Econet person (Brian Cockburn) moving over to Acorn and being placed in charge of Econet. Alan recently did a presentation about his time at Barson and how he came to move over to Acorn at aBug last month if you're interested (abug.org.uk/index.php/2020/09/05/brian-cockburn/)
Oops replied from the wrong account there.
This is fabulous when you’er stoned
It was not the state of mind I had in mind when creating it, but I'm glad it hits the spot 🙂
Super interesting, but the loud music makes you very hard to understand, and is totally distracting from the information. Better not use music at all, or make it very very soft (2%).