Acorn Archimedes – A Technical Introduction (1987) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Acorn Archimedes – A Technical Introduction (1987) [video]

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70 pointspjmlp38 comments

Apart from RiscOS, Acorn also licensed UNIX for the A440 series, RISC iX. 'Selecting Motif, however, causes things to go from "dire" to "apocalyptic".' [0]

Incidentally, the D. J. Braben from the demonstration programs in the end is of course David Braben, of Elite fame. [1]

[0] http://www.typewritten.org/Media/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Braben

part from RiscOS, Acorn also licensed UNIX for the A440 series

Acorn also dabbled with a UNIX called PanOS, for the 16032 second processor for the Beeb.

Panos wasn't a Unix (and ran on the 32016 only). A real oddity! Written in Modula-2.

And Raspberry Pi fame also - which has similar philosophy to the original BBC micro ecosystem that Archimedes emerged from.

You can run RISC OS on the RPi too. We've gone full circle!

If there is one thing besides the excellent version of BASIC that I will remember Acorn for then it was their detailed technical documentation, excellent quality. More than you ever wanted to know or needed, nothing hidden to give the manufacturer an advantage and rock solid software, to the point that there only ever was a single bug found in the BBC Basic implementation.

edit: on reflection, there probably were more than just one, it is just that the others were found much later and did not make it in time for the errata page to be printed.

What was the bug?

Oh good question. Unary minus in combination with ABS. So - ABS 1 would not give you what you would expect, the precedence was wrong.

Probably many more were found later but that one was detected in time for the manual and actually made it to the printer.

It is interesting how our distribution model of software (ROM vs say apt-get or even SaaS) has changed our attitude to bugs. Back then a bug was something to feel bad about, now it is fixed in the next release in 20 minutes and nobody even feels anything about it. The only kinds of bugs that people feel bad about nowadays are the ones that lead to security issues.

I just finished watching it ( again, definitely seen it before ).

Featuring : introduction to programming, GUIs, basic usage and troubleshooting, processor design with Roger Wilson, manufacturing including pick & place, flow soldering, desoldering.

I was lucky to be in a neighbouring country to the UK and was exposed to the Electron first in our local library, then went on to a school which had a classroom full of BBC Micro's with central server.

Just imagine if I had been able to watch this video at the time. This is awesome content and for me in the same league as The Mother of All Demos [0]. Such a pity the UK didn't keep it up.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

This is the origin of the ARM microprocessor, which at the time stood for Acorn Risc Machine IIRC.

Later the ARM architecture had a big breakthrough when Apple selected it for its groundbreaking mobile device: I refer of course to the Newton. :)

It could have been even more groundbreaking, had it used Dylan instead of NewtonScript and C++.

You might be interested in this presentation from ARM to Apple from 1992 https://youtu.be/ZV1NdS_w4As

John Sculley was a visionary who was 20 years ahead of even Steve.

While I don't think I'd go that far, I think Sculley often gets an undeserved bad rap in Apple history, mostly because people think of him only as "the guy who pushed out Steve Jobs" rather than looking at what Apple did under his leadership.

I my sibling comment I referred to the mid-80's.

In this particular library, we had touchscreen terminals to acces the library's index.

Another interesting thing is that Eidos Interactive started off producing non-linear editing and video compression software for the Acorn Archimedes.

If you do musical composition, Sibelius started off on the Archimedes and was one of its killer apps for a long time. I suspect that it was originally inspired by !Maestro, which came bundled with with RISC OS. I can't recall who wrote !Maestro, but I suspect it may have been Sophie Wilson.

If you've ever seen Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the production made heavy use of RISC OS based machine to run everything, including produce the on-screen graphics.

Always wondered why a machine like the Archimedes didn't catch on quite like the Amiga did in the enthusiast/demoscene/etc. space. Both were certainly revolutionary for similar reasons. Was it the more limited reach outside of the UK? The focus on educational markets?

Having gone from The Acorn Electron to the Spectrum to the Amiga and always keeping up with the nerdy magazines of the time, I remember it being about price point and 'cool factor'.

The older I got, the more I appreciated how cool the Archimedes could be (especially after seeing Zarch which I think was more technically impressive than anything on the Amiga 500 at the time - I might be exaggerating), but it was a rare and strange beast mostly seen in school IT departments, and the teachers even then tended to be quite protective of the expensive machines.

Being as it was a relative of the BBC Microcomputer, it would always have been an uphill struggle to win the hearts of school kids wearing their parents' wallets down at Christmas time, and was anyway a lot more expensive.

Everyone had Amigas because there was a very healthy Euro/Global trade in pirated games from crackers on BBS' - Amiga had an ecosystem useful to schoolkids, Archimedes did not.

That said - I too would love to have a peek at an alternate timeline! I distinctly remember sitting as an UnMin in Gatwick airport reading some Acorn computer magazine heralding the new age of the Archimedes and getting quite excited. Oh well.

- ed

additionally - I think the demo scene tended to be very tightly wrapped into the cracker/pirate scene, ie. they were pretty much one and the same.

Zarch blew me away at the time (in my high school computer room) as well as Conqueror, built on the same engine. Most home computer games at the time were inferior to arcade games : it was only years later that arcade games were surpassed at home, at least where I grew up in the UK.

I had the demo version of Zarch many months before it was released and a pre-production Archimedes to play around with. The power of that box compared to anything that I'd been using up to then was unbelievable to me. It wasn't just a quantitative difference, it was an entirely different realm of possibilities.

Written in BASIC Too.

Source? Surely not.

Wasn't the Amiga perhaps also popular because the C64 was such a hit? ( in the EU at least )

I'm sure that helped, but as a Spectrum owner, I'd be breaking code - decades old as it might be - to suggest that anything positive could arise from the existence of that machine.

Looking back now, the C64 was clearly a better machine than the Speccie, haha.

As a c-64 owner I envied the more featureful basic of of every other machine of the time!

C64 BASIC was terrible but better BASIC interpreters were available for it.

For instance, this one was excellent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC

Price point, perhaps? The Amiga only became a big success for bedroom coders once the Amiga 500 was released, after all.

And being a natural upgrade from the super hit c64.

I feel like that was actually one of the reasons the Amiga didn't catch fire as much as it could have-- it wasn't a no-brainer upgrade.

If you were a serious user of a 64, there was no forward upgrade that didn't consist of chucking all your software and data. Yeah, you could get a 128, but that was frankly close to obsolete the day it launched. If you have to abandon your existing investment, the bargain-priced Atari ST and the collapsing price of PC clones made them reasonable shortlist competitors against the A500.

It would have been interesting to say "here's a $100 module that lets you connect your 1541 and read the discs, and run your 64 software in a window."

The real question is how RM elbowed their way into the UK education market, displacing Acorn, with their shonky Nimbus machine. To this day I believe it must have been backhanders.

RM was the main education supplier before Acorn had any products at all. Schools could get 380Z [1] machines at reduced cost and some were given away in a competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z

> shonky Nimbus machine

Ah, Nimbus.

In my teens I was briefly root on our school's Nimbus network after tampering with a boot floppy on a server that wasn't physically secured...

Was a great feeling for a few hours ... then I felt very guilty and 'fessed up to a teacher :)

IFIR the Archimedes was marketed in Germany only after the Amiga was already established, and by then it was too little too late. All the games and productivity software was on the Amiga.

There wasn't even a place as the "underdog alternative" for the Archimedes, since that position was already taken by the Atari ST.

Too expensive and Amiga owners were generally coming from Sinclair/Commodore/Atari 8-bits. Usually Archimedes owners were invested in BBCs already.

The amiga had already been out for a couple of years already as well; I remember seeing ads for the Amiga while I was still on BBC stuff and thinking I'd like one.

> Usually Archimedes owners were invested in BBCs already.

This matches my experience, I knew the founders of LVL Rocom, Radio Rotor and several other companies close to the Acorn eco-system and typically the Archimedes was an upgrade path from the Beeb.

My first real computer after my BBC Micro B - oh those were simple times :)

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