When I went to comprehensive they had BBC Micro's... I had an Atari ST at home... the school then upgraded to Acorn A3000's. Now the ST, Acorn and IBM PC used very nearly the exact same floppy format (there was one byte difference between the ST and the PC basically, and nothing with the Acorn Archimedes series)....
The teachers, totally no idea how to use these machines. Sure they could run applications in pre-packaged orders, but they never delved into them. The Acorn had a whole host of built-in software, the OS itself came with a RAM disk, one teacher once saw me cache all my work on a 1MB RAM disk and work hundreds of times faster than anyone else in the lab, but they had NO idea how I did it; and didn't want me to explain it to them.
So they often found me in the lab... despite it being locked...
You could get in via two routes, one was to go in through the neighbouring classrooms air vent between the two back-to-back store cupboards... One day I found the grill had been screwed back in place and sealed, which put a stop to that... And no matter how often I asked teachers would NOT let us into the lab without themselves being present, and quite simply they didn't have the will to help encourage learning, it was a dangerous prescient for them in the 90's to admit that there were those with a natural talent in a field the staff had no interest nor experience in.
So what next? Well we had to climb out the window, shimmy along the ledge and climb back in... Usually only one person did this and then unlocked the door for the others, but it was a bit hairy on windy winter days.
But literally, the school didn't want the kids to use the computers, either scared we'd break them, or more likely we'd steal them, ever seen the size of an A3000 and the bespoke monitor? yeah, I can really not imagine how they thought we'd sneak them out the building unnoticed.
Anyway, one day, I'm there with some code in the RAM Disk, playing about with the Basic interpreter and I had a new thing called a "Compiler"... I think it was for Pascal, but it's lost to memory.... The door unlocked and a teacher pounces in Alan Partridge style... "A haaa, I caught you"....
Yes sir, you caught me.... trying to better myself, please put me in irons and take me away. Basically, I can only assume; after the fact; that in this school we're all meant to be preparing ourselves as manual labour, I know! (Top Valley Comprehensive, represent; it's now "Top Valley Academy" or even just part of Red Hill Academy, because you know... We're not allowed our little tribal enclaves anymore).
But this teacher takes a look at I'm doing; I would hazard a guess he expected a game instead he see's code and the dozens and dozens of disks I have, "Come with me, I know what punishment you must receive".... Bit worrying, but we trusted everyone back then, and I followed him to the store cupboard.
And he slaps a brand new unopened packet of 10 disks into my hands then rummaged in a plastic disk box for another grubby one with tippex all over the paper label, which is so tatty it must have been reused until the plastic platter inside was an atom thick.
"Right, I need 10 copies of this disk by tomorrow, else you're in front of the head master"
In hindsight I should have said "Can I go talk to the headmaster about your not encouraging me to learn and explore the machines which are taking over our daily lives".... But alas I said "yes Sir"
I didn't even think about the format issue, I just went home and made an exact sector by sector duplicate on my ST, assuming it was either an Acorn or PC compatible bunch of data, I couldn't tell until the morning, but I made a copy for myself too.
Arriving back I handed him the box.... His stunned face was quite a thing to behold, I think he expected it to take a long time... But I got two drives, yeah baby, rocking the power set up!
But during break, and after scaling the building again, I popped one of the disks into a drive and let it boot....
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