Looks like an Acorn Archimedes A420/1 -- I had the same model!

Nice identification! Reminds me of https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/294403/

Blimey, wonder a computer was last made in the UK, especially by a UK company!

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK company and most (although not all) Pis are manufactured in Wales, although no doubt almost all the key components are sourced from overseas.

Forgot all about them! Point taken, there may still be a few independent PC builders around too using imported components but I meant proper commercial producers such as Acorn, ICL etc.

To be fair, Tony. Any British person in their late 30’s and up with an interest in computing (which could very well describe a good number of people on here) would be able to identify that.

British schools were full of them in the 80’s and 90’s.

I still have my RISC PC, complete with StrongARM upgrade and USB produle.

There were none of them in my school. We had BBC Model Bs, RM 380Z/480Z and then a room full of RM PCs.

The only place I ever saw a computer with an ARM init was in Dixons, where we never sold a single one in the time I worked there...

At my school if you were "clever" you were forced to learn Latin. Only those who weren't "clever" enough to do Latin got to do Computer Studies !

Guilty as described! My first school computer experience was the BBC Micro, then I moved to a school that used the RM Nimbus range (incidentally, that company, Research Machines, may be a contender for tahir's query -- apparently they manufactured desktop and server systems in Oxford until 2014).

Then it was back to Acorns in secondary school, lots of the cheaper A3000, some of the A400 series as pictured above, and a couple of A5000s that were noticeably faster. Eventually they got some Risc PCs towards the end.

Then University was mainly Unix pizza boxes, mostly but not exclusively Sun systems like the SPARCStation 20 and Ultra 5. (Also pictured above, as it happens!)

I must be a bit older than you lot. I left school in 1981, the only computer in our school had a printer attached, a bit like a telex machine. It was connected to Queen Mary in London, I was never good enough to be allowed to play with it but it must have been the machine that got Mike Lynch (later of Autonomy) into computers. He was a very clever lad.

University for me to start with was lots of dumb terminals connected to a a couple of PRIMEOS minicomputers.

I played my first multiplayer online game via those dumb terminals, MIST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lawrie at Essex University (it only ran in the early hours of the morning).

I also spent a lot of time on a popular JANET bbs, can't remember the name of that ? I'll bet someone hear remembers.

My first use of the Internet was via those dumb terminals. Connected to the Prime, then a terminal session over JANET to Imperial College, who had some sort of bailing twine and wax setup to give you gopher/ftp access to the Internet.

Then we did some CAD on Sun pizza boxes (I think we also used some graphical dumb terminals for CAD on the Prime), though it mainly gave me access to playing around with Unix for the first time.

Later came lots of Viglen 386sx PCs, which with the janky Imperial College link and a very convoluted chain of tools allowed us to actually download stuff from the Internet.

Those Viglen PCs where the first time I booted Linux, though if I remember corrected I had to track down one of the few 486 machines that were randomly sprinkled amongst the 386sx ones, as Linux needed a matches coprocessor to boot back then.

I found the JANET bbs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_BBS

And it still exists

http://www.mono.org/?app=userson

Primary school in the late 80's was BBC B's and Master series. Then, in my final year, we got a bunch of A3000's. Since I had one at home, I was tasked with the job of unboxing and setting them up. I then had to come back one evening to show all the teachers from nearby primary schools how to use them.

My secondary school started out with BBC Micros etc. plus a load of Archimedes and A3000's. But they ended up getting sidelined by PCs and Macs as the UK GCSE IT curriculum started to move away from programming skills, and more towards how to operate word processors and spreadsheets. The Acorns were retained as they were the only machines that had BASIC built in, which was still required for A-Level work. I don't think they wanted to pay for a development environment for the other machines.

For me, Uni was entirely PC based (NT4 mostly). The only people that got anywhere near *nix were some of the civil engineering lot, who needed access to a minicomputer that ran some simulation tools. But this was driven from a PC on a remote X windows session.

I wonder how much IT EUC provision universities have to offer nowadays? Surely all the students have laptops? I would've thought my cohort were among the last kids to get their first ever email address at university. I can certainly remember being quite amused at my old school friends suddenly 'discovering' email since I'd had once since I was 14!

Never had a Viglen, used to have plenty of Elonexs though. Our first PC at work was a Tandy DeskMate running Dos 3.3, bloody indestructible that thing. We then had a huge failure with a Nixdorf mini computer where the software didn't work. Our first proper computer was a Xenix machine made by Mission (the speaker manufacturer) it had a 20 Mb HDD and 1 Mb RAM, 5.25" floppy drive too!

Just checked and the Tandy 2000 ran a special version of Dos 2.11. Dos 3.3 must have been on our first Elonex (a 386sx25).

The PC that took over from the Mission was an AST (lovely machines) 386DX40, was RedHat around then or was it still Xenix? Not sure.

RedHat was 1994/95. I started with the basic root/boot floppy combination (from the guy who built libc ?), before moving onto Slackware, then RedHat, then Ubuntu.

I was never able to actually install Linux on a machine until the math coprocessor emulation was added, because my machine was a 386sx. Until then it was the tedious boot/root floppy combination on the university 486DX machines just to get a taste of Linux.

Oh, you youngsters. I never even saw a computer of any kind, hell, not even a photo of one, until I was well out of school and in my 30's.

tanstaafl.

The first computers I used were at primary school. The headmaster had in 1980 the remarkable idea that the best thing to do for our future lives was to take the three or four eight-year-olds that were best at maths, and teach them BASIC programming on a Nascom 2 he'd built himself from a kit. Also logic gates and (74 series) digital electronics. Once the ZX81 came out we switched to using those.

Peter

Teachers with vision, not enough of them about!

My primary school headmaster hated the idea of computers. The BBCs that were allocated to the school were deliberately locked away in a cupboard until he retired two years later.

During my final year of high school in 1978, I took a newly created "computer programming" course along with half a dozen other adventurous souls.

The computers consisted of some very elaborate layered poster-board devices, which operated with sliding bits and rotating paper wheels. I have now forgotten what they were called, but wish that they had allowed us to keep them afterwards.

They were truly ingenious devices that showed how computers work at the micro-code level. Most "instructions" took perhaps four or five hand operations ("cycles") to "execute".

After a few months of machine code on these, we were shown how to program in FORTRAN, and made twice-weekly trips to a nearby university campus to use the punch card terminals and readers to have the programs executed on a remote IBM mainframe in another city, with the results banging away on a local (remote) line-printer. Yes, a real "line" printer. Bang, bang, bang.. each single "bang" producing a full line of output.

While everyone else in the group competed for the punch card stations, I noticed two massively oversized things that looked like IBM Selectric typewriters, except somebody had pasted little greek symbol labels all over the keys. These turned out to be APL (A Programming Language) workstations, and warped my view of computer programming forever.

Later, when I attended that same University, they put me in charge of "modernizing" the computer room, helping configure and program a new DEC computer, printer, and terminals. But the two APL teletypewriters (tty's) remained there long after I left.

Good fun!

I've got to be honest it took me ages to get the idea of PCs, I came from a background of handwritten ledgers and invoices I used to do most of the calculations in my head, couldn't see how a computer would help me. Hard to imagine that now.

My high school (late 70's) somehow had a Basic Timesharing Inc system (BTI 4000 IIRC) - about the size of a (US) washing machine. We had a dozen or so terminals connected to it.

It was far and away the most powerful computer in the school system - the comp sci teacher also ran the school system payroll on it, printing the checks in the computer lab every couple weeks (under a carefully trimmed cardboard box for privacy).

It had various compilers/interpreters on it. I helped get Adventure ported to it. Different era!