More acquisitions include;

• Enigma, a dice game from Chestnut software,
• Zip Stick, a joystick-based drawing program,
• Music Processor from Quicksilva,
• Frantic Fingers, a key re-assignment utility added to Oddments-Utilities,
• Workshop, a manufacturing game from EITB,
• Crossword Puzzler for Microtrust.

Thanks to a loan from the Derby Computer Museum we have added a number of RISCOS educational programs.

• Locate, from ECL, a BBC title adapted for the Archimedes range of computers,
• Phases 1, 2 and Phases 3, simple word processors,
• Our Facts, the Anita Straker database title ported to Archimedes,
• The Cambridge Spreadsheet, from CSH, a program that purports to be a spreadsheet,
• Desktop Stories from Resource, a multimedia authoring package.

Added;

• Keyboard Chord Tutor, from Adby Associates Ltd,
• Numeric Invaders a program of unknown origin,
• The Night Sky from Bridge Software,
• Note Quiz, a simple quiz to recognise notes on the treble clef,
• Superplot, a graph plotting program from Beebug.

Updated the Oddments section with a selection of Econet Utilities and a Diagnostics Disc. Also added a Viewfax demo disc.

Added;

• Counting Game from Clares Educational Software,
• Beetext from Copescroft Ltd, a tape-based text editor,
• Compose from Micro-Mart, a tape-based music program,
• Education 1, a compilation tape of programs for young children. The title has also been converted to disc by the Archive for ease of use.

The archive was contacted by the author of The Forge, Nigel Hunter, who provided an update for the programming language used. Originally thought to be BASIC, it was actually programmed in Assembler - quite a task!

New additions include;

• Home Education from Acornsoft,
• Beta Base database package from Clares,
• Acornsoft Viewdata Econet installation disc and Acornsoft Level 3 Fileserver Utilities disc added to the Oddments section,
• Micro Type from Kansas City Software,
• Adventure Disc 5 a compilation of three Anita Straker adventures.

Several items have been added and various items of documentation updated.

New additions include;

• Time Trucker from ASK,
• Mathematical Games and Activities Volume 2 from Capital Media,
• Tourism from NelCAL.
• The Russian Revolution and The World of Scylla from Spartacus Software

It has been a long time since the last update. Pressures of work and the increasing scarcity of missing titles have been to blame.

A number of missing educational titles were provided by arnoldemu from the StarDot forums. The discs were very old, dirty and fragile. The titles include;

• Hill Sheep Farms, a Geography package from ECL,
• Simple Use of Language form the MEP,
• Numberbond Bomber from Fisher-Marriott,
• School Software, an amateur compilation of primary software,
• School Software 1, an amateur compilation of SEN software,
• School Software 2, an amateur compilation of primary software,
• Tales a simple word processor from Telsoft,
• Volumes from Telsoft,

The documentation for Nuts! from Creative Sparks has been updated thanks to LinuxJedi from the StarDot forums.

Added Checkout from Milleniam Software. The programmer and date of origin are both unknown.

The SEN section of the archive now contains 20 documents kindly loaned by OneSwitch..

A concept keyboard compatible version of Podd has been added thanks to Klintworth from the StarDot forums.

Happy St George's Day

The NAACE section has been updated with a number of "Focus On ..." magazines. It contains issues from 2004 to 2007.

Two new sections in the archive have been created.

• Special Needs documentation from the 1980s and 1990s. StarDot member OneSwitch has kindly loaned these documents for scanning.
• Reviews of equipment the Archive currently uses. The reviews start with scanners.

Following a kind donation of more MAPE related magazines by Rhona Macfarlane the following additions to the Magazines section have been included;

• LOGO special edition 1983,
• Best of MAPE Tapes 1, 2 and 3,
• MAPE magazine issue 6,
• Safety Net, a MAPE special edition about safe web surfing,
• Further NAACE 'Focus On' magazines. These magazines were very glossy and in full colour. They also had undulating pages. Neither of the Archive's scanners could handle these properly. The flatbed scanner showed intermittent reflection patterns and the book scanner found page straightening difficult due to the undulations in the paper. In the end the flatbed scanner was used due to its more accurate rendering of the text and colours.

The Micro-Scope page is being re-organised to present a more coherent archive and many of the previously saved PDFs are being re-saved as searchable PDFs in order to reduce download times.

Other magazines are also being converted to searchable PDFs. This will be on-going and not specifically indicated in the news.

From a kind donation by tomseddon of StarDot, a school produced booklet, The BBC Microcomputer Disc Filing System, was added to the books section. Also the documentation for LCL Micro French was added and the Tracer Turtle package from LSU.

Added the following titles;

• Educational Compilation 1 from 8-Bit Software,
• Translations of Homer's The Odyssey and The Illiad,

Scanned and added the documentation for the Micro Primer pack. This was one of those jobs I had been meaning to do.

Following a question from a teacher about whether a GCSE 2D-platform game could be written, the Archive has added a program that could fulfil this task. Put forward in the style of an AQA Controlled Assessment (before the government killed practical work for GCSE Computer Science), this is an example of such a game, written from the perspective of a good GCSE candidate and in BBC BASIC, just to show it is still alive and well. Yes, there are errors in the program but a GCSE candidate would make these. It works, however, and could be extended to have different levels.

System Delta from Minerva Systems is the latest addition to the Archive. This is a substantial ROM-based card index database package package that can handle up to 2 billion cards, apparently.

Tidied the scans of the Software Catalogue and added two missing pages.

Thanks to OneSwitch from the StarDot forum, an Educational Software Catalogue for 1991 has been added to the Books section. This is very much a provisional scan, made with a Czur ET-24 Pro overhead scanner. The scans will need extensive tidying but, at about 400 pages, this will take a while.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another year and much more to do ...

Watch this space.