Stuart Cheshire
Sidney Sussex College
The rough breakdown of time spent on the project is as follows:
2 weeks BBC prototype mid December 1987 } Work prior to 2 weeks BBC prototype mid January 1988 } official start 4 weeks BBC prototype Easter holiday 1988 } of project 9 weeks New BBC version November / December 1988 6 weeks MacTransfer February / March 1989 2 weeks BBC version finished March 1989 4 weeks Macintosh version April 1989Discussion of details of the prototype code will be kept to a minimum except where they are important in explaining why certain design decisions were taken in the development of the final version. In particular, the evolution of the network implementation, and the use of the facilities provided therein, is followed in some detail. Please see Appendix C for more detail of the actual work carried out in the various periods, and for details of the large amount of completely new code which has been added since October.
Appendix D (Supporting software) contains material dating almost entirely from before October, included to provide extra information for the interested reader. Particularly interesting is the section `Booting from Nothing!' which describes how the program itself was transmitted over the serial port, without having to load (or type in) any kind of downloading program on the receiving machines. This is particularly useful if not all the machines have disc drives, such as in the Biometry Room.