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Archive News 2024

18/03/2024

The collection of Micro-Scope magazines has now been completed, I think.

The Archive was contacted by Roger Keeling, the editor of the magazine. Roger had the missing Issue 1. He very kindly provided scans which were able to be fed through an OCR program to reconstitute the magazine in its entirety.

   
14/03/2024

The latest updates include;

  • Geography and History Notes in Interword, Wordwise Plus and View format added to the Oddments section,
  • Simple Maths Practice, a collation of infant maths programs,
  • Number Bonds, from ECL,
  • Parmenter Maths, a collection of mathematics programs,
  • Maths Compilation, a collection of infant maths programs compiled by Paul Clucas.
   
12/03/2024

The latest updates include;

  • AVC Turtle Graphics, a simple turtle graphics application,
  • Standard Reading Tests, by P J Rooney,
  • The Executioner, an adult hangman game,
  • Rushden Roy Games, letter and number games for young children.
   
07/03/2024

The latest updates include;

  • Multiple Choice Christian Quiz from John Lyons,
  • A disc of Beatrix Potter illustrations in the Oddments - Graphics section,
  • Games for Children, an amateur collection of four simple games.
   
05/03/2024

A conference publication 2010 Education has been added to the Microscope Magazine Section thanks to the generosity of Richard Keeling, one of the editors.

The 2010 Education conference of 1989 attempted to predict the face of computing in education by the year 2010. The conclusions make very interesting reading and many were quite accurate. This is definitely worth a read by anyone interested in education.

   
04/03/2024

The latest updates include;

  • The addition in the Oddments-Teletext section a BASIC program to decode and display the Teletext pages contained in the BeebFAX disc images. This software will work on any RISCOS machine or a BBC Master and under ADFS, NFS or SDFS or SCSIFS on the Raspberry Pi.
  • AB Maths, a compilation of two Alan Blundell programs,
  • Extra documentation for MAPE Tape 5: Owl Pack and the Owls Special Edition for Spring 1988 in the MAPE magazines section, both courtesy of Richard Keeling one of the leading lights in MAPE.
   
27/02/2024

The latest updates include;

  • Tess from H & H Software. The original disc was physically damaged with a complete ring of surface worn away. In addition the rest of the disc surface was very crumbly. With care, repeated cleaning of the disc heads and a lot of luck the necessary files were extracted from the original disc and a new, working disc was created. This latter was archived.
  • Addition of the documentation for Decimals by Chalksoft.
  • Addition of documentation for Let's Count from ASK.
  • Addition of third party documentation for the South East Railway Game from Longman.
   
26/02/2024

Updates to date include;

  • The documentation for Alpha, a language processor from AUCBE; this needs the ROM which is missing,
  • Microscope Issues 2 and 11 from MAPE. A big thank you to Heather Govier, one of Microscope's major contributors, for the missing issues,
  • Message Scroller, from John Hewes, courtesy of John Simpson, who offered this to the Archive.
   
24/02/2024

It has been a while since the last update. The Flax Cottage Archive room has been redecorated and re-organised. The re-organisation went well with about 50% of the held items being re-homed elsewhere. There is now room to move and concentrate on archiving.

Updates to date include;

  • The documentation for The Micro at Work pack 2.
  • Added Turtle Tales information from MESU.
  • Added an archive of software modified for use with partially sighted students. This archive came courtesy of OneSwitch from the StarDot forums. The whole archive is in the Oddments/Miscellaneous section as much of the software needs hardware add-ons that are not possessed by the Archive.
  • Transform from Chalksoft, looking at mathematical transformations of shapes.
   
28/01/2024

Several educational magazines and other materials have been added to the Archive. These include the MAPE special edition for December 1987, featuring LOGO and a MAPE magazine Focus on MFL.

A new section for NAACE, the National Association for Educational Technology, has been included in the magazines section. A big thank you to Malcolm Ratcliffe, who contacted the archive and donated the materials.

Numerator from Logotron Ltd is archived but the documentation is missing.

   
24/01/2024

This update completes archiving titles from the ScaryBeasts/billcarr2005 HFE/FSD archive of educational titles.

  • From Shards Software, The Adventurer, a collection of 4 Shards adventures,
  • Electricity, from Shell Education, a title that is a starter with electric circuits, etc.,
  • Two titles from the Sulis Grammar Tree series, Sentences and Verbs.
   
19/01/2024

Continuing to archive titles from the ScaryBeasts/billcarr2005 HFE/FSD archive of educational titles.

  • From Pitmansoft;
    • Business Studies Programs, a collection of programs for O-Level Business Studies students,
    • Diary Planner, a diary application for up to 4 different diaries,
    • Email, an email simulation,
    • Hotel, a simulation of an hotel booking system,
    • Simple Information Processing, a look at data storage and retrieval,
    • Stock Control, a simple stock control program.
       
  • Two titles from Quicksilva;
    • Character Generator, which designs BBC micro characters including multi-coloured ones,
    • Teletext Generator, which designs, saves and retrieves MODE7 teletext screens.
       
  • Three titles from Selective Software;
    • The Music Box Adventures, a simple adventure game,
    • Number Investigations B, explores links between sequences of numbers,
    • Quickdraw, a simple drawing package.
   
15/01/2024

Finally recommenced archiving titles from the ScaryBeasts/billcarr2005 HFE/FSD archive of educational titles.

  • From PAVIC Publications titles from the Fun Phonics series - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7,
  • From Pitmansoft Business Documents, providing a simulated Purchase and Sales Ledger.

Also added EduCAD and EduCNC from Edusoft. EduCAD is a comprehensive CAD package and EduCNC allows design of profiles and generation of the CNC programs to create the designs. Thanks to Rasp from the StarDot forums for providing the images.

   
10/01/2024

Another year and much more to do ...

Watch this space.

   
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