Date   : Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:59:27 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: The Beeb BBs Project

Littlefield Aaron wrote:
> Sounds great to me!
> 
> I have a bit of a fetish to see just how many Beebs you can connect together
> via Econet (was it 250 of there abouts?). We could do a Guinness World
> record for the largest Econet ever done...

Well 255 networks of 255 stations each, I believe, presumably with each bridge 
taking a couple of IDs. So theoretically, upwards of 64000 beebs. Practically 
it must be a lot less, and you can guarantee that long before you got 
everything booted, some scoundrel will have unplugged the network cable 
somewhere along the line ;-)

I'm sure I read somewhere about Acorn themselves doing some tests to see how 
many machines they could get on an Econet - can't for the life of me remember 
where or how many, though :(  I bet some schools were running with several 
hundred, but they probably never got much larger than that out in the wild.

 > Good luck with the BB, I remember these in the 80's but my school boy
 > budget wouldn't stretch to a modem and phone bills :(

I didn't get my first modem until the early 90's, and that was a 2400 baud 
one. I thought nothing of having to watch the screen contents slowly assemble 
themselves when reading email. Then, yesterday, I had cause to use Yahoo's web 
interface to their email. I had to sit there, watching the screen contents 
slowly assemble themselves when reading email. And they say we've made 
progress :-)  The information doesn't arrive any quicker these days - there's 
just more cr*p encapsulating it...

cheers

J.