I am very interested in all these letters in Random Access, as well as your article on educational software, because I am at the receiving end of many of the educational pieces at school. My school (although it is a public school) has seven or eight BBCs, some model As and Bs and an antiquated 380Z. We have also had two of the Bs "diskified" - one with the Torch Disk Pack and another with a dual drive Cumana. The educational BBC packages we see are all of a very high quality and significantly do not come from Heinemann, Griffin etc. but from other schools and colleges via MEP. The only exception is Edword from Clwyd Technics, but it is MEP-approved as an educational word processor.
Aside from this, we have found the Torch to be alright after sorting out some trouble with the fuse in the disk pack, but it is noisy. The Cumana seems to be much more temperamental and the error messages "Drive fault" and "Disk fault 0E at XX" are annoyingly frequent. Also disks seem to get corrupted easily.
Lastly, I am tasking GCE AO Computer Studies and agree with many points of David Wild's letter (Issue 41), but some are, in fact, covered in the course. The only problem is the syllabus would have to change monthly or so, to remain up-to-date. The AO course does desire a project (i.e. a program) and though low-level language programs are accepted, the aim is a structured easy-to-follow program which means high-level programming is useful.
14th January 1984
