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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

i remember seeing "Chocks" (a flight sim) on the Archimedes at school when i was about seven. It was the most amazing thing i'd ever seen. There was only one Archimedes at school and everyone crowded around it, but there was a load of BBC Micros, so I sat down and started (very slowly) typing in pages and pages of printed out basic programs to see what they did. I'd probably never have become a programmer without that.

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That was Chocks Away, a video that doesn't do it justice is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0x5JbmU6HU. The dog fights were good and the missions had you shooting up balloons and moving trains too. You could link two machines with a serial cable and fly in the same airspace. A friend that worked at an Acorn dealer and I used to visit the shop after hours, he had keys, to play it until early morning, day after day, until we had completed them all. Great fun shouting at one another about who was taking on what in a dogfight. If the machine had an ARM 3 then the graphics had a bit more detail.

Ah barrage balloons! Hours of fun.

I preferred Interdictor 2: http://www.apdl.co.uk/riscworld/volume3/issue6/disc/index.ht...

Oh, apologies, I was forgetting Arc's whitec doesn't handle Unicode things like U+2002. The youtube URL needs " The" removing from the end.

Weirdly I don't think I'd have become a programmer without BBC Micro's in primary school, we even had some vague 'formal' lessons on BASIC and after that we were encourage to try and write stuff ourselves.

We also had a TURTLE, programming and robotics for primary school lessons was awesome.

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