[HN Gopher] A technical history of Acorn Computers
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A technical history of Acorn Computers
Author : xyzzy3000
Score : 76 points
Date : 2025-03-10 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mcmordie.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mcmordie.co.uk)
| amiga386 wrote:
| Ah, the delights of a page that covers 26 years of history and
| hasn't been updated for 21 years
|
| I can at least say that in the meantime, RISC OS is still alive
| and now open, available from https://www.riscosopen.org/, and
| most people will know the ARM company and its architectures went
| from strength to strength, even if the RISC PC faded away.
| dcminter wrote:
| Some time when I have some spare time I must fish out a Pi and
| try it out - I was deeply envious of the Archimedes owner I
| knew back in the day!
| xyzzy3000 wrote:
| I'm not sure what the state of Pi 5 support is, but RISC OS
| seems to work on the Pi 1, 2, 3 and 4.
|
| ArcEm is a decent emulator for the Archimedes series, and
| RPCem is the equivalent for the RiscPC which succeeded it. OS
| ROM images are available from a variety of places.
|
| For floppy disk emulation, ADFFS is what you are looking for,
| and some games have been released in this format with the
| consent of the copyright holders.
| jlarcombe wrote:
| Don't think Pi 5 can run 'supervisor code' (in old ARM
| language) in 32-bit mode, so RISC OS surely won't run. The
| bulk of it is written in assembler so reworking it to
| AArch64 would be an epic task. Probably take no longer to
| rewrite those bits in a higher-level language, for much of
| it.
| skissane wrote:
| DEC had a similar problem when porting VMS from VAX to
| Alpha - significant chunks of it were written in VAX
| assembly.
|
| They came up with a rather ingenious solution - a
| compiler from VAX assembly to Alpha. And that was carried
| forward into the Itanium and now x86-64 ports, so even
| latest OpenVMS for x86-64 still contains some VAX
| assembly code, but it is compiled into LLVM IR and then
| the LLVM backend converts it to x86-64 ELF binaries.
|
| No reason in principle why someone could not do the same
| thing with the 32-bit ARM assembly code in RISC OS.
| Likely would be easier than rewriting it all in a high-
| level language
| chasil wrote:
| IIRC there was "macro32" which could compile VAX machine
| code to Alpha, and also VEST, which was a virtual
| machine.
|
| I've used neither.
| sammyteee wrote:
| A good read!
|
| I like that all the sites linked in the banner, no longer exist!
| https://www.mcmordie.co.uk/public/apeople.shtml
| xyzzy3000 wrote:
| I particularly liked the tiling background, which may well have
| been created using Texture Garden https://texturegarden.com/ by
| Tim Tyler (of Repton fame, for the BBC Micro fans)
| dcminter wrote:
| Someone will be along in a minute to tell you to watch Micro Men,
| an amusing and fairly accurate BBC dramatization of the
| Sinclair/Acorn rivalry :) but I'm here to recommend that you
| watch the Computer History Museum's interview with Hermann Hauser
| the erstwhile director of Acorn - he's very charming:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0sC3lT313Q
|
| I'm fairly sure they've got one with Chris Curry too, but I can't
| spot it just now.
| amiga386 wrote:
| It would appear you can watch Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser
| watch _Micro Men_ : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaonVYOTSsk
| -- and then have a post-viewing chat:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4I2ktcWdJM
|
| "I saw the first five minutes and had to run away, because I
| couldn't bear to see myself portrayed by Martin Freeman" --
| Chris Curry
| timthorn wrote:
| Which was hosted by the Centre for Computing History!
| xyzzy3000 wrote:
| It's an entertaining watch, although a fair bit of dramatic
| licence is taken when depicting various anecdotes that would be
| well-known to readers of The Micro User and similar magazines
| of the time.
| westi wrote:
| Some great memories here.
|
| Somewhere in my parents attic is my RISC PC 600 and 486 Co-
| Processor card. Not sure if they also have the A3000 we had
| before that.
| xyzzy3000 wrote:
| If possible, get the batteries removed from the motherboards -
| the leaks cause immense damage.
|
| Rechargeable AA batteries in a battery holder are a sensible
| replacement.
|
| If the hard drive has packed in then a SD to IDE/PATA adapter
| is available.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| My secondary school was full of these in the computer labs.
| Great bits of kit :) The dual boot between architectures blew
| my mind at the time, and frankly is still pretty extraordinary.
| And unlike most boxes of the time, they even looked good!
| callumprentice wrote:
| I purchased an Acorn Atom in 1980 (the prebuilt one - a friend
| opted for the self-assembly and regretted it) and I still
| remember the thrill of setting it up and turning it on for the
| first time. It feels like I didn't sleep for a week but I suppose
| I must have.
|
| When you entered a line of their BASIC, it would check the line
| for errors. At one point, I kept getting error XX (I don't recall
| the actual number) and couldn't see the error in my code.
| Eventually figured out it meant I was out of RAM. There was only
| 2K and I think the 6502 took some and the screen too so there was
| only about 500 bytes left over. What a joy it was after I saved
| up for the 6K upgrade.
|
| And then there was the local computer club presentation that
| ruined any chance of a public speaking career.... :)
| andrehacker wrote:
| O man, good times. I remember soldering RAM chips "piggyback"
| style, then upgrading to 64K of RAM, and adding 8 special-
| purpose ROMs (from utilities to a spreadsheet program). I even
| installed a color video board-- all of this inside the Acorn
| Atom itself (which was a keyboard-style computer, similar to
| the C64).
|
| The Atom also brought together a community of hardware and
| software enthusiasts through Atom Computer Clubs. These clubs
| were doing amazing things, including the development of Z80 co-
| processors and even running CP/M. While Acorn moved on from the
| Atom to the BBC Microcomputer, the clubs kept the Atom alive
| well beyond its prime.
|
| It's fascinating to look back and realize that the same team
| behind the Atom went on to create the ARM processor, which,
| interestingly, shares a striking similarity in its instruction
| set with the 6502.
| callumprentice wrote:
| Good grief - 64K - what on earth did you do with all that
| storage :)
| chasil wrote:
| Do you have more details on the striking silarity?
|
| All the wiki mentions is optimized memory usage.
| lproven wrote:
| Quora has some informative responses:
|
| https://www.quora.com/Is-ARM-RISC-derived-or-inspired-by-
| the...
| roywashere wrote:
| I bought an Atom second-hand, it was my first 'own' computer.
| My father first had a TRS-80 model III and then an IBM clone
| XT. So the Atom was definitely less capable, but it was my own.
| I read all the accompanying manuals front to back and I read
| the computer magazines that came with it and this is how I
| learned English. I was 9 years old at that point. It came with
| schematics and of course I opened the case. I could not get the
| thing to load or save data on my dad's tape recorder. And it
| was only so much fun trying to type in a program from a listing
| which I could not save, especially taking into account my
| limited typing skills at the time and the fact that I had to do
| this while the Atom was attached to the TV in the living room.
| Still, it was a worth wile and forming experience and surely
| worth my pocket money.
|
| Later on in life, end of 90s, I was re-wiring the building of
| my students union, with a friend. Many amps main board, 380
| volts, 40 circuits or so, kind of big install. We had to create
| plans and supply them to get approval from the city or the
| utility company or the architect or such. For this we used the
| Archimedes of some guy that helped us. At this point the
| Archimedes definitely was dead as a platform, Windows 98 was
| just out. But it was still possible to use it to create
| drawings and schematics and quite capable.
| jefc1111 wrote:
| For me, all this ... computer life stuff ... started with an
| Acorn Electron around 40 years ago. At first it was just fun, and
| then I played Elite and it feels like a lot of my future was
| defined in that experience.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| Ditto. Electron and Elite with a voltmace joystick that (memory
| may be hazy) had like 20 buttons on it was mind blowing to
| child me.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| That's how I started as well. Much nicer to program than the
| spectrum, and taught me about parsing in the worst way when I
| discovered my text adventure couldn't have a variable called
| torch because it was. Parsed as to rch.
| tolien wrote:
| Same, and now I'm still playing Elite but just with slightly
| better graphics :-D
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| My first computer was an Acorn System One. I spent a summer
| picking fruit at an orchard to pay for it.
|
| 1k of RAM, 512 bytes of ROM, a seven segment calculator display
| and hex keyboard.
|
| I spent hours hand assembling 6502 code for it. I even created a
| stack based language for it in an attempt to teach my younger
| brother how to program.
| Lio wrote:
| So much history here for me.
|
| One landmark buried in there was the ARM 250 chip based machines.
|
| I think they were some of the first system on a chip desktop
| computers.
|
| They lacked the glamour of the Arm 3 based machines launched
| around the same time but really they were ground breaking.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| A nice note of recognition of the contribution of the Acorn made
| BBC Micro model A and B to millions is that the Raspberry Pi
| Model A and B were named in honour of them.
| draazon wrote:
| If the page author is reading this: hello Rob!
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(page generated 2025-03-10 23:00 UTC)