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Comment by Lio | Hacker News Reader

An “Acorn Workstation clone”? That sounds interesting.

Do you mean one of their Unix workstations (basically an ARM based Archimedes running a clone of Unix) or a third party clone of some other Acorn kit?

Using either would be unusual and interesting to hear more about. Thanks.

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One of these: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/33101/Acorn-Cambridge... with a TI 32016 processor & using a BBC Micro for UI - except that my housemate Colin thought it was a bit expensive, so reverse engineered the board, redesigned it to be a little smaller (this was in the mid-80s & chip specs were changing rapidly), wire-wrapped a prototype for testing, then etched five proper PCBs, of which only a couple were populated.

An article about that board in some computer magazine of the time (probably PC World) was the first time I had heard of Unix and C - I was amazed at the same of C code they gave - no line numbers!

Edit: This was probably 1983 when I was 17 and my programming experience was based on Apple II and Sinclair machines.

Rather than Unix, our Workstation ran Panos, the only operating system that I know of named after a Greek restaurant.

I never got nearer than a magazine review to one of those beasties so I am probably getting the OS part wrong - but I do vividly remember wondering what #include did.... :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panos_%28operating_system%29

And this is the (now defunct) Panos restaurant, on Hills Road:

https://i2-prod.cambridge-news.co.uk/incoming/article1345494...

That's fantastic. 4Mb of RAM in 1983 was pretty cool.

So the end product was somewhat like a homebrew second processor unit for a BBC?

e.g. http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/8bit_Upgrades/Aco...

There were things I could read about in magazines as a kid but never got to see in the flesh. That Cambridge Workstation is still a mythical beast to me.

Note to self: go and visit the http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/897/Acorn-Computers/

The Centre for Computing History is a great place to visit - lots of machines up and running you can actually use (mainly from the 8-bit era, but other interesting things too).

Still have any of the PCBs? It would be interesting to make one up now, or duplicate one to make up.

I don't (it wasn't my project) but I've emailed my housemate (seemed polite, since we are talking about him).

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