We never supported hard drives on the 380Z - at the point it became relevant, RM hadn't released a product and we would have been building our own interface - but by that point with the Econet card, and adding our own memory (on the Econet card) and adding our own hard drive, the 380Z would be being used as not much more than a box to put it all in, tied down by a slow CPU to boot. So we went off and did the standalone fileservers (HDFS, MDFS) instead.
The main market for the 380Z Econet card was that there were a fair number of schools who had just one 380Z, before computers in schools had taken off and before the launch of the BBC micro. So a couple of years later, these schools were buying clusters of BBCs and it was very handy to re-use the 380Z as a modest fileserver - limited by the capacity of the 40-track single-density drives, but still a significantly better fileserver than the Level 1 on a BBC. Those few places that had splashed out on 8" drives for the 380Z it made quite a decent fileserver - but there might have been only one or two such people in the country!
We thought that there would be interest in using the 380Z as a client machine on the Acorn network - and indeed it worked quite nicely in that role, but it wasn't something schools wanted to do. My main development environment for writing the fileserver software was using that same CP/M compatible OS with all the files on an Econet fileserver, but running on a BBC Micro Z80 2nd processor rather than the 380Z (I could have used a 380Z, but they were less portable than a BBC!).
After a few years, with systems getting bigger and hard disc based fileservers becoming more common, interest in the 380Z on Econet faded away.
A very quick rummage in my old floppy images has turned up source of the program used for formatting floppies on the 380Z into fileserver format, but no binaries yet. They might be on CP/M format floppies, which I can't read easily on modern hardware. The fileserver sources on that floppy still had options to support 380Z (and Nascom 2!), but the build scripts don't seem to build that version; maybe with some effort I can work out how to do it.
The main market for the 380Z Econet card was that there were a fair number of schools who had just one 380Z, before computers in schools had taken off and before the launch of the BBC micro. So a couple of years later, these schools were buying clusters of BBCs and it was very handy to re-use the 380Z as a modest fileserver - limited by the capacity of the 40-track single-density drives, but still a significantly better fileserver than the Level 1 on a BBC. Those few places that had splashed out on 8" drives for the 380Z it made quite a decent fileserver - but there might have been only one or two such people in the country!
We thought that there would be interest in using the 380Z as a client machine on the Acorn network - and indeed it worked quite nicely in that role, but it wasn't something schools wanted to do. My main development environment for writing the fileserver software was using that same CP/M compatible OS with all the files on an Econet fileserver, but running on a BBC Micro Z80 2nd processor rather than the 380Z (I could have used a 380Z, but they were less portable than a BBC!).
After a few years, with systems getting bigger and hard disc based fileservers becoming more common, interest in the 380Z on Econet faded away.
A very quick rummage in my old floppy images has turned up source of the program used for formatting floppies on the 380Z into fileserver format, but no binaries yet. They might be on CP/M format floppies, which I can't read easily on modern hardware. The fileserver sources on that floppy still had options to support 380Z (and Nascom 2!), but the build scripts don't seem to build that version; maybe with some effort I can work out how to do it.
Statistics: Posted by arg — Tue Jun 03, 2025 9:03 pm