When I was ~10, my parents spent £129.99 (a lot of money for them at the time) to buy me an Acorn Electron (a cut down version of the BBC Micro).
One thing that was frustrating for me at the time is that I had no one to answer questions. For example, I was writing some 6502 assembly to do something simple (I don't remember what) and the book (either the user guide that came in the box, or the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide) said I had to provide some value using two's complement. I had no idea what it was or how to find an answer. So I wrote a letter (yes, with a stamp, in the mail) to a Teletext page where these things were discussed, and a few days/weeks later they actually answered my question on one of the pages.
So the Acorn logo was on the back of the BBC computers, the Electron and on later Archimedes lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_System_1
And this was the breakthrough Acorn Atom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom
The lessons learned there all went into the BBC Micro.
The manual was exceptionally good as well, with the catchy title "Atomic Theory and Practise". I taught myself to program using that.
I do remember from the time that referring the Electron simply as The Acorn (due the prominent Acorn logo on the top) was very common so my reading it as such in the parent post didn’t seem unusual.
I always assumed it was because the BBC Micro had such strong branding that people didn’t realise it was an Acorn product. The logo was there on the back but very small.
I never tried it. I'm not sure whether acoustic coupling would have worked well enough to load successfully.
I think they broadcast every program multiple times, though.
Same issue when I got a BBC B. No reference beyond the simple user guide, and I couldn’t find anything out about other books that might be available by asking at the library, because they didn’t understand what I was asking about.
Getting onto the Internet in 1994 made a huge difference!
I don't recall actually having classes there so perhaps I only used them at lunch hours. We did also have a BBC Micro-on-a-trolley in my form room though, and I do remember vaguely impressing my classmates by "hacking" some BASIC Lunar Lander game to start with -1 lives, ensuring the "decrement, check against zero" game over condition would never trip. Though in reality that just gave some of the kids licence to never relinquish control, since their game never finished.
By the time I left primary school, we had three or four!
In primary one, I remember some very simple `cat and mouse' game.
Later on, a text adventure game, possibly something to do with a frog. And then Granny's Garden, and The Flowers of Crystal.
At some point, I got permission to basically mess around on one during some lunchtimes.
There is so much more I could say!
Never saw a Concept Keyboard though, it looks both forward thinking and antiquated (reminiscent of the ZX81). But as it happens I read about an Amiga version of this keyboard just the other day. It was expensive: https://archive.org/details/amigaformatmagazine-026/page/n13...
I remember there was a Part 2 for Granny's Garden, but it wasn't there when you did the default load key combo. You had to *CAT then CHAIN the second file.
I recall being 7/8 years old and a student fetching me to go to the other classroom to load it for another class!
Only just in 40s here so I was a bit late for the TV programs, but the Acorn computers (Micros and Master Series on trollies in school, and an Electron then later a Master at home) are essentially why I've ended up as a senior-developer-come-DBA.
A large part of that is BBC Basic. Compared to anything else available at home at the time it was magical. Instantly accessible (10 PRINT "Expletive" 20 GOTO 10), had proper sub-procedures & functions and long identifier names (so you could create usefully structured code), build-in multi-pass assembler for when you started to need/want lower level access, many of BASIC's parts could be accessed in a documented manner from assembled code too and not just those where it was providing a thin wrapper around other ROM functions, ...
That and many type-in examples in magazines of the time to try, learn from and modify: from "frivolous" one-liners (usually producing something pretty on screen), through little "ten liner" games and other demos, to much larger projects. Heck, they fuelled some of my interest in mathematics too as those examples sometimes explored concepts such as fractals, strange attractors, 3D transforms, and so on, while making the pretty display (the explanations were fairly superficial, but usually had the right keywords for me to go lookup more detail in the library when my interest was awoken).
There were a handful of us who had parents who worked in the computer/tech/software industry, it was hilarious cause some of us were already ahead of the teachers by 10 or 11. I had taken my first BASIC class in 4th grade at a local college.
The teachers were reading from a script teaching us about how to switch between insert and delete mode on the keyboard and giving us assignments that amounted to writing out a sentence and then editing it in a word processor and there were a handful of us kids ready to do BASIC, etc..
Me? I know we had a BBC at our school, but I did my coding on the computer I had, a rubber-keyed 48k ZX Spectrum. That's what my friends had too. Nobody I knew owned a BBC, so it was wheeled out now and again and somehow a class was supposed to share it in 45-minute windows. Didn't really work.
I have fond memories of GG, and some kind of game where you were Prime Minister and you had to raise taxes, and handle unemployment. I guess a text-based sim-city, of a kind!