
Acorn Archimedes is 25  - ukdm
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_25_years_old/
======
gaius
I sometimes wonder what the world would be like today had the UK govt decided
that our computing future was too important to be left to anyone else, and had
just bought a few million Archies for the civil service, MoD, NHS etc. Of
course given that critical mass/economy of scale, and the obvious superior
power compared to PCs of the time, the private sector would have adopted them
too. We'd be 10 or 20 years ahead of the state of the art now.

The untapped capabilities of some of those old systems were quite astonishing.
It would have been cheaper to replace every dumb VT100 type terminal with an
Atari ST (which had a built-in terminal emulator) and given every user a
powerful machine on their desktop. The Amiga just _destroyed_ the contemporary
Mac in terms of not only price/performance but raw performance - to say
nothing of the PCs of the day! It makes you realize for all the numbers of
gigabytes and gigahertz, just how little actual progress has been made, since
the world settled on x86 as the lowest common denominator. Windows, OSX and
Linux have far more in common than Archie, ST and Amiga, where is the radical
thinking in systems design now?

Of course what would actually have happened is that obsequious little weasel
Alan Sugar would have foisted his word processor abomination on us, but it's
nice to dream.

~~~
gouranga
Actually, it died not because of Sugar (who didn't produce a product that was
even considerable), but RM PLC who chucked out a load of cheap, unrelaible
pile of shite clone PCs and took the contract away from Acorn basically
through lying, cost cutting and cash backhanders.

Mr Weasly Weasel (Sugar) is just an asshat anyway though.

~~~
rwmj
Never a truer word was spoken. I remember RM "PCs" from schools and they
absolutely sucked. It's a wonder kids didn't go blind from looking at those
horrible curved 14" monitors that they probably charged £100s for.

------
ralph
A few errors (corrections sent) but worth a read. It was the first computer
shipped containing an ARM, the ARM 2. Ignore the crummy looking screenshots of
Arthur; the WIMP was usable in Arthur for single-tasked applications but a
very-nice co-operative multi-tasking desktop came with RISC OS 2.0.

It had features I still miss today, e.g. drag a scrollbar thumb with Adjust
(X's Button3) instead of Select (B1) and you were panning that scrollbar and
its partner in the other axis. Adjust often did similar to Select but with a
tweak, e.g. the pop-up context menu with Menu (B2) could have an item selected
with Select and would disappear but use Adjust and the menu, possibly several
deep, remained opened. How often today do you have to re-navigate to a nearby
place to select a second item? Select on a scrollbar's up arrow scrolls up,
Adjust down; no need to move to the other end of the bar. Same goes with
paging by clicking to the side of the thumb.

~~~
fidotron
I always thought the special thing was the way file saving was done,
especially if you had something like ArtWorks and Impression up at once and
wanted to save between them.

Definitely miss mine - and it still amuses me how things it handled so easily
like having a common vector file format or decent anti aliased text took so
long for the rest of the world to get near.

Zarch/Lander was impressive, but seeing Sibelius running for time was
astounding.

~~~
ralph
The drag-and-drop of the file icons with the sender not needing to know
whether it was going to another running program or a filing system? Yes, that
was nice. You know of the ROX Desktop? RISC OS on X.
<http://roscidus.com/desktop/>

------
draegtun
Makes me walk down memory lane! Here is my list of all the computers that I've
owned:

    
    
      ZX Spectrum 48k 
       -> Camputers Lynx 48k 
        -> BBC Micro model B 
         -> Acorn Archimedes A420 
          -> Some bog standard PC (initially put SCO Unix on later Slackware Linux 95) 
           -> iBook (clam - came with Mac OS 9 but I upgraded to OS X) 
            -> Custom built PC (with Redhat Linux 9 + Windows dual boot) 
             -> Powerbook G4 
              -> iMac (first 24 inch and now 27 inch).
               -> Macbook Air
    

Definitely fond memories of the _Archie_. I think I bought it via Beebug
(<http://8bs.com/beebugmags.htm>) and I had them put in a Midi card (though
never got to use it!).

Sorry for the _overindulgence_ :)

~~~
gouranga
Thanks for the nostalgia trip. Mine was similar upto the iBook and I had a
couple of RiscPCs...

I actually lived down the road from the Beebug store in St Albans in the
1980s. I remember getting a demonstration of Econet and SJR MDFS back in the
late 80s and seeing the FIRST retail Acorn A310 demonstration. I also bought
my copy of E-Type[1] in there!

At the time, the A310 literally cocked a leg and wee'd all over anything else
on the market.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwWXloIzqAg>

------
jiggy2011
I had precursor to this at home , the BBC Micro. I remember using the Acorn
Arch at school, we had a lab of about 20 of them.

From what I remember no crashes, viruses or anything of the sort on any of
them.

I remember at the time the pressure on the school at the time to switch to IBM
PCs "because that is what business is using", which in hindsight feels like a
shame.

Were these things popular outside of the UK?

~~~
greendestiny
I remember a composer I knew had one because of Sibelius, this was in
Australia. They weren't unknown here but were certainly rare. I do remember
that RiscOS was a thing of beauty though, very very sleek.

~~~
pja
I used to sing with one of the authors of Sibelius, who was a very talented
guy. I remember him bemoaning the cost of an Apple dev kit when they were
looking at porting Sibelius to the Mac back in the early 90s.

One of the great advantages of the Acorn hardware was that there was no
barrier to entry if you wanted to program them. Perhaps because their initial
focus was computers for use in education everything you needed was always
right there. You could sit down and start typing code.

If you wanted to write C (there was a C++ compiler based on CFront too IIRC)
then you had to buy a compiler, but people achieved a huge amount with the
tools available on stock machines.

For a number of years, Acorn had the most powerful desktop computers in the
world at a reasonable price, but they failed to capitalise on that advantage &
were eventually overtaken by the MS/IBM/Intel juggernaut.

~~~
greendestiny
I still remember being in awe of the effortless full screen scrolling of
scores in Sibelius on RiscOS, so far ahead of the offerings on PCs of the
time. I remember thinking the concept of RISC was a bit of novelty though,
yeah I may have been wrong about that.

------
adrianhoward
I remember helping install a stack of these into my old school the summer
before I went to university. They were _so_ impressive at the time.

I remember having to go around and swap the ROMs in a lab of machines when the
new Arthur came out. Sigh. Good times.

~~~
lucaspiller
Same here! I remember in 1997 (maybe) my school finally got an ISDN connection
and I helped upgrade the machines (mainly A3000s and I think a couple of
A5000s) with ethernet cards.

------
beseku
What a walk down memory lane. I built my first website on one of these 14+
years ago as a coursework component (it was a fan site for the UK dance band
The Prodigy). The browser (Fresco?) was awful and didn;t support frames, which
was a huge bug-bear when Hotmail begun using them in its new mode.

I also remember playing Lander for _hours_ at the back of computing class. And
upgrading our home system to 2MB RAM and adding a HDD so we could install a
game instead of swapping between the 12 floppy disks (it was a flight sim
called Birds of Prey/War I think).

------
phpnode
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.

~~~
ralph
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.

~~~
gouranga
Ah barrage balloons! Hours of fun.

I preferred Interdictor 2:
[http://www.apdl.co.uk/riscworld/volume3/issue6/disc/index.ht...](http://www.apdl.co.uk/riscworld/volume3/issue6/disc/index.htm)

------
btbuilder
I remember playing around with that lander demo!

These machines had BASIC in ROM, and you could write WIMP programs with it.
Lots of fun.

~~~
aerique
The lander demo is also know as the game Zarch (or Virus for other computers).
David Braben (of the Elite[1] fame) wrote that in three months[2] for the
release of the Archimedes.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%29>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch>

------
nigelsampson
This was the first computer when I was eight, thanks for the trip down memory
lane.

------
bonaldi
Was the GUI really written in BBC Basic? Coo ur.

~~~
pja
It was really easy in BBC Basic to drop in some inline assembler whenever you
needed to. It wouldn't surprise me if Arthur was really a mix of Basic and
inline ARM assembler. Anyone ever seen the source code?

~~~
ralph
There's some confusion here. The Arthur OS ROMs, starting with 0.2 on EPROM,
that's why Acorn wanted them back on the upgrade to 0.3 on ROM, were written
in assembler, including `modules' like the filing systems, BASIC, and the Wimp
that gave SWIs like Wimp_CreateIcon. More as a demo of WIMP rather than
anything useful there was a Desktop program stored in the ROM, written in
BASIC, that used the Wimp module to present a crude selection of calculator,
etc. Nothing like the later drag-and-drop RISC OS desktop; no other programs
could run with the Arthur version. So there was some BASIC in the OS but only
as one stores sprites and other data files too.

The source of RISC OS was opened up.
[https://www.riscosopen.org/viewer/view/castle/RiscOS/Sources...](https://www.riscosopen.org/viewer/view/castle/RiscOS/Sources/Programmer/BASIC/s/Lexical?rev=1.6;content-
type=text%2Fx-cvsweb-markup) shows part of the BASIC module which has pedigree
going back to when Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, wrote
it.

