
Acorn and Amstrad - mmastrac
http://www.filfre.net/2016/06/acorn-and-amstrad/
======
robotresearcher
The Archimedes' performance was astonishing at the time. It was amazing to see
Zarch [1] in 1987, when games were mainly sprites [2] (with important
exceptions like Elite).

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0T03sFX_yM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0T03sFX_yM)

~~~
contingencies
I remember seeing a spiritual successor of that game (helicopter though, I
think) on an Amiga in the early 1990s. It was still impressive.

Also, just noticed that the UI of _Wasteland_ (1988) [1] in that video looked
hugely like Infocom's _Battletech: The Crescent Hawk 's Inception_ (1988) [2]
but I can find no documented link or engine reference.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_\(video_game\))
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Hawk%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Hawk%27s_Inception)

~~~
mjg59
The helicopter game was probably Zeewolf
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeewolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeewolf))?

~~~
contingencies
Yep.

------
JohnHammersley
This brings back lots of memories - my first computers were the Acorn Electron
and the A3000 (never realised they were the 'posh' end of the market until
now), and I still remember my Dad letting me install the RAM upgrade in the
A3000 despite what was undoubtedly an internal worry that he'd just opened up
what was an expensive piece of kit at the time to his clumsy, all too eager
son :)

I also remember programming my first games (space invader clones) in BASIC on
the A3000 (and the A3020s we had at school) - fun times.

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
I always thought the whatever text editor that was used on the Archimedes had
a very intuitive copy/paste, if I remember correctly you could move a "second
cursor" around and then pressing a key it would paste the current character in
the "copy cursor" at your current location

This would make it really easy to do something like duplicate a line while
changing some things, just move the copy cursor to the line/variable/thing you
wanted to paste and modify, then hold the copy key until you got to where you
had to change something (at your current location the characters from the
other line would appear), type what you wanted, then back to the copy key for
the rest of the line

Seeing my best friend at the time use it it seemed really cool, some days I
think of trying to write a minor mode for emacs that lets you do that...

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
This copy and paste mechanism was also part of the Amstrad CPC (the first
computer I've personally owned), with shift + cursor keys you could move the
second cursor and there was the "copy" key.

[http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/File:CPC_464_old_logo_bilgis...](http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/File:CPC_464_old_logo_bilgisayarlarim.jpg)

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
thanks for the additional data point, interesting that this was so widespread
but ended up more or less disappearing as a copy/paste paradigm

------
paulgrimes1
Our first computer was an Amstrad CPC464. A cousin dropped a jam sandwich onto
it and the E key became terminally stuck down, rendering the entire thing
impossible to use. As a fledgling nerd, I was devastated. Devastated!

------
keithpeter
I saw the PCW as _a different kind of thing_ to the Archimedes, it was an
appliance rather than a general purpose computer. My sister ran a theatre box
office off a PCW spreadsheet (each day's bookings printed out, signed and put
into a ledger and a copy saved to one of the chunky non-standard 3" disks). I
used PCWs in the College library to write handouts and _cut stencils_ for a
Gestetner duplicator.

Later when encountering an Apricot PC running Aldus Pagemaker on Windows (Or
GEM? Can't remember now) I recognised it as the same kind of thing as the
Archimedes. As was the funny little monochrome Macintosh.

I'm a bit old for the Sinclair thing.

Some technical details...

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/)

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/archaeologic_amstrad...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/archaeologic_amstrad_cpc_464/)

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_25_years_old/)

The A310s were built like tanks and were very fast for the time... unless you
wanted to do floating point calculations. You could get a podule with a
floating point extension unit on it.

~~~
digi_owl
Frankly i suspect that most GPC users today would be as well served by an
appliance like the PCW. And to some degree that appliance is what Google has
ended up making in the form of Chromebooks.

------
aidos
I loved my CPC6128 so much. By age 7 I'd hacked my sister's ghetto blaster so
we could feed it in to the Amstrad as a tape drive.

I've actually been considering getting one for my kids to play with - the
simplicity of having basic right there and having physical disks gives a great
way to explore what's really going on.

~~~
Symbiote
I think the Raspberry Pi can run RISC OS, which also has BASIC right there.

BASIC on an Acorn was my introduction to programming.

I was aware that the machine was very expensive. All games played better than
on my friends' computers, and it could even play video and render 3d models
(in 1991!) so my friends pestered their parents, but it was too expensive.
Ours were all second hand, my dad taught students how to use them, but
couldn't afford a new one.

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kolleykibber
This article misses that Sugar lucked out on Mark Eric Jones , Roland Perry,
Locomotive Software and William Poel (Maybe others I missed). The CPC though
cheap had a very clever circuit design and surprisingly good software. He
wasn't so lucky for later products. The AmsEmailer springs to mind.

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bane
If anybody is looking to spend some time soaking in nostalgia, there's a small
community at /r/amstrad /r/acornarchimedes and /r/acornelectron

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mouzogu
In case anyone is interested, there is a really good (imo) film from the BBC
about the forming of Acorn and it's struggle against Clive Sinclair called
Micro Men.

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Micro_Men](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Micro_Men)

------
duncan_bayne
Amstrad development is still very much alive. This is a short demo I prepared
of unit tests running on the CPC:

[https://vimeo.com/69787152](https://vimeo.com/69787152)

[http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/test-driven-
developm...](http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/test-driven-development-
on-an-amstrad-cpc/)

------
zelos
"...didn’t give a sht whether there was an elastic band or an 8086 or a 286
driving the thing"

There actually was an elastic band in the disk drive: I remember replacing it
twice in my dad's PCW9512 when it wore out.

