[hughrr]

This was probably Econet and network !boot stuff. That was horribly slow. Stand-alone boot was about 5 seconds.

Usually the schools has MDFS filers from BBC days being repurposed as econet servers which could barely cope with the load of a room full of machines coming up.

The IBM compatibles that seemed to replace them from RM were complete dogshit. Fortunately they killed that half way through the rollout when my sister was at school and went full netware instead.

I’m feeling old now.

[mattkevan]

Those RM machines were terrible.

My secondary school was entirely Acorn and we'd had Amigas, Acorns and then Macs at home. I'd never really encountered Wintel until Sixth Form, where the college was full of Windows 3.1-era RMs.

Couldn't believe how primitive they were - compared to Workbench and RiscOS it was like stepping back into some terrible technological past. Don't think I used them willingly once in the whole time I was there. Still never used Windows much.

[micv]

Going from the Amiga or Archimedes to Windows 3.1 would have been painful. I'm glad I didn't get into the PC until Win 95 had showed up and got it to a semi-reasonable point.

[mavhc]

It's still painful trying to use any other GUI

[bencollier49]

Those weren't even fully-compatible PCs though, were they? If I remember correctly, the really popular ones were 80186-based.

[hughrr]

Indeed. They weren’t real PCs. Complete software and hardware lock in from RM.

[longwave]

If I remember correctly Econet was only clocked at 200kbps and sharing that between 30 machines in a classroom doesn't give much for each of them!