Subj : age required for classic
To   : Sean Dennis
From : Bob Worm
Date : Sun Apr 06 2025 20:12:18

  Re: age required for classic
  By: Sean Dennis to Bob Worm on Sat Apr 05 2025 20:42:17

Hi, Sean.

 > I enjoy reading about the variety of systems people still use today.

Oh, I could bore you for hours about my Acorn :)

Barely anyone knows about the Acorn Archimedes systems, even in the UK where Acorn is from and where most of the systems were sold. Mine is the A3020, which is a wedge style system from '92 (ish) which has a few claims to fame:

1) The Archimedes line were the first systems to use ARM processors - yes, *that* ARM, but it stood for "Acorn RISC Machine" before the processor arm was spun off on its own.

2) Apparently the A3010 / 3020 systems used the first "system on chip", which is everywhere these days.

3)  For these reasons the Archimedes systems are often considered the grandad of the Raspberry Pi (although the A / B / B+ naming convention of the Pi calls back to the BBC micro which Acorn made before the Archimedes).

I love this thing - I had no involvement with this type of computer when they were current and only really discovered what it was like to use about 2 years ago when I finally got around to powering on this one, which I saved from a skip 20 years ago.

The RiscOS windowing system boots from ROM in about 5 seconds and is full of quirky stuff like a button to send the current window to the back. Windows move with the contents visible (not like the contemporary Win 3.1). If you drag windows with the left mouse they come to the top, if you drag with the right they stay behind whatever they're behind. RAM disc (yes, with a "c" for Acorn), text editor, bitmap and vector graphics editors plus BASIC all on the ROM... 800x600x16 top res or 640x480x256. Weird file system with file type attributes rather than extensions.

I wrote my own terminal for it (Worminal, of course) since I couldn't find one that does CP437 / ANSI properly. I used a ROM dump from a VGA card to get the font 100% accurate, which would really upset the Acorn people because they love their (IMHO rather ugly) compact font. It's almost entirely in ARM assembler, which is *lovely* and you can assemble it straight from the built in BASIC. It's now my daily driver for BBSing.

BobW
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