We took delivery in September 1998 of 30 Acorn NCs together with a Fujitsu server running Microsoft NT Server 4.0 (Terminal Server Edition) and 'TOPCAT' software which enables the whole system to boot into RISC OS. The NCs were a straight replacement for a room of ageing A3000s and 3020s, and when booted up into RISC OS the new NCs run all our existing RISC OS software (with very few exceptions e.g. Teletext software, though in fact we believe that this might now be possible), enabling compatibility with our existing Acorn machines.

All our existing teaching programmes are proceeding on the NCs in the same way as they were on the A3000s. One of the new Applications is the Citrix client software to enable the machines to run a Windows NT session (this looks very similar to Windows95), so that all 30 machines can be running Windows applications, such as Word97 or Access97. These applications run fast, as they run on the powerful server, rather than on the client NC, and installing new applications requires only a single installation on the server, rather than 30 installations on 30 machines. Many of our 6th form groups, and individuals, choose to run the NCs like this in Windows mode rather than in RISC OS, but both are available and both equally effective.