Acorn Archimedes A3020 – Refurb and Mods | Hacker News Reader

Acorn Archimedes A3020 – Refurb and Mods

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82 pointssohkamyung36 comments

For those not in the know, the Archimedes was the computer that the ARM processor was originally made for - in 1987. The A3020 was the 1992 version.

Fastest home computer in the world in 1987 in terms of mips. Wildly underappreciated at the time but then obviously ARM came into its own later on ...

edit: no wait I'm wrong about Intel 32-bit, I took that bit out

I'm afraid with the 32 bit bit your're wrong, the 386 was released in 1985, and the Compaq Deskpro 386 was in 1986, so 32 bit Intel PCs were available before the Archimedes (of course 386+ PCs weren't common for a few years after that).

cripes you're right, I had always assumed that Pentium was a big deal because it was 32-bit, and that the previous 386 was 16-bit. In the late 80s I'd heard of IBM Pcs but didn't encounter one till the pentium era.

The 386 was a full 32-bit processor: the 386SX was a cheaper variant with a 16-bit data bus. In that sense the SX wasn't a million miles removed from the 68000 and 68010 processors, which similarly operated with 16-bit data buses.

You may be confusing the operating system with the processors. Windows 3.x and earlier were 16-bit operating systems that were run on PCs well into the 32-bit era. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was, I believe, the first full 32-bit version of Windows. 32-bit Windows only became widespread, at least amongst consumers, with the release of Windows 95.

The Pentium was a big deal due to the incorporated FPU (which was separate and comparatively slow on 368 and 486). With the Pentium high-end PCs were nearly as fast as, but much cheaper than, Unix workstation, even for typical workstation workloads, which was the beginning of the end of those.

486DX CPUs had an integrated FPU. Only the SX version didn't.

Right, of course. I had a DX in mid nineties and should have known ;-} Alas, it's been a while.

They ran DOS and most had monochrome monitors.

The Archimedes was way sexier: it booted straight into a GUI and also had BASIC in ROM.

I ran UNIX with X11 on my 386DX/25 PC in 1987.

Nice. Which flavour are we talking here?

Real UNIX - SysVR3.2 from Interactive Systems Inc. The X11 server was my own, used an NEC TMS34010 graphics card for 2d acceleration.

Amazing machines at the time. It's just a shame they launched in the UK and not the US. Acorn didn't really have enough money, or production, or understanding, to market it in the US successfully, and it was probably missing a decent office bundle at the time, plus anti-competitive WinTel behaviour through the 90s. Microsoft used decent PR, smoke and mirrors, to sell MS-DOS and Windows, Windows pillow cases in every Las Vegas hotel around Computex and so on.

Can't blame them, even systems from US based companies often sold in UK/Europe better than they sold in the US without any involvement from Microsoft (I'm talking, of course, about the Commodore Amiga).

Yes, I was the only one on my gang with a PC (a 386SX) everyone else was on Amiga, and I got to learn about Amiga thanks to our weekend meetings, having access to books and magazines and trying to replicate demoscene stuff on the PC.

In Portugal, until around 1994 PCs were pretty much something that one would find at the office, not home computers.

Magazines like Computer Shopper (UK), Solo Programadores and Spooler were multi-platform.

With Commodore it was not lack of money, though, but profound incompetence that saw them burn their US retail network to the ground by antagonizing them. Most notably an infamous incident of announcing a large retail price drop of the C64 without first lowering the price to retailers, and without warning.

Commodore only lived as log as it did because it's international subsidiaries had a lot of independence, and some of them were far better at selling than the US team.

The A3020 (and the consumer version, A3010, with green function keys!) was notable for having the first ARM system-on-chip; the ARM250 contained the ARM3 core (though cacheless) together with the support chips used on the earlier Archimedes systems; MEMC for memory control, VIDC for video and sound and IOC for I/O.

We had loads of these old Archimedes computers at school until the late 90s when IBM-compatibles took over. I remember them taking absolutely forever to boot up for some reason. They were fast enough when they got going, but oh boy did they take a while to get going.

The boot was from ROM and I remember them starting up pretty quickly, however there were also network options which might have slowed something down.

I'm almost certainly remembering this wrong, but I believe these machines supported EcoNET with 10 base-T ethernet being available later with an addon podule. At my high school we did network authentication to log on and then also had access to our private folder which was also a network share, as well as some of the applications / boot scripts being on a network drive. The 3020's were surprisingly slow if you used the TCP/IP stack. I have fond memories of waiting for someone to start a game (Aarknoid iirc) and then sending flood pings to their IP causing the system to slow down to about 2fps. Fun times. I don't remember this being a problem on the A4000 or any of the RISC-PC range.

If you're based in the UK and need an Acorn nostalgia hit, then the Wakefield Acorn Users Group still has monthly meetings.

I also have very vivid memories of getting an x86 addon card (probably a 486) for one of our early RISC machines and being able to run Windows 95 within a window from the Acorn desktop; mind blowing in the late 90's.

TLDR: I remember the 3020 booting quickly, but the network services were slooooow.

Earlier models (such as the A3000 my family bought in the early '90s) booted from ROM and would drop you at a desktop in literally 1-2 seconds. The POST screen was basically just "RISC OS 2.00 2048K RAM" (or something along those lines) and then all of a sudden it shows the desktop ready to use. Sadly later models would boot from HDD instead (copying the approach used by Microsoft for Windows) and these took ages to boot.

They still booted to a desktop from ROM, but the hard disc boot sequence had to update lots of kernel modules that had since been updated. Acorn would roll those updates back into the next version of the RISC OS ROMs, and (for some computers) you could buy newer ROMs. But the boot sequence generally took longer as time went on (though still only 10-15s from my memory).

Thats odd cause the OS was on rom. I remember them taking just a couple of seconds to boot. Now at my school most the machines were "just" networked and didn't contain their own hard drives (Though the A5000's did have their own drives as well as being networked).

Applications that were not on the rom were loaded from the network which meant if all the kids loaded differnt things all at the same time the network/fileserver could get congested witch slowed loading times but I don't recall loading times being too bad but that might just be recalling the experiance though rose tinted glasses.

This allowed finer control of the applications what could be installed as the network was kept in read only mode for most of the time and only swapped into write enabled mode when updates and new applications were needed to be installed. the Read Only/Write Enable switch was a keyswitch on the fileserver case which was stored in a locked room. For the age it was "enough" security.

I have fond memories of the Archimedes as the first time I got paid for my code it was written on one.

This was probably Econet and network !boot stuff. That was horribly slow. Stand-alone boot was about 5 seconds.

Usually the schools has MDFS filers from BBC days being repurposed as econet servers which could barely cope with the load of a room full of machines coming up.

The IBM compatibles that seemed to replace them from RM were complete dogshit. Fortunately they killed that half way through the rollout when my sister was at school and went full netware instead.

I’m feeling old now.

Those RM machines were terrible.

My secondary school was entirely Acorn and we'd had Amigas, Acorns and then Macs at home. I'd never really encountered Wintel until Sixth Form, where the college was full of Windows 3.1-era RMs.

Couldn't believe how primitive they were - compared to Workbench and RiscOS it was like stepping back into some terrible technological past. Don't think I used them willingly once in the whole time I was there. Still never used Windows much.

Going from the Amiga or Archimedes to Windows 3.1 would have been painful. I'm glad I didn't get into the PC until Win 95 had showed up and got it to a semi-reasonable point.

It's still painful trying to use any other GUI

Those weren't even fully-compatible PCs though, were they? If I remember correctly, the really popular ones were 80186-based.

Indeed. They weren’t real PCs. Complete software and hardware lock in from RM.

If I remember correctly Econet was only clocked at 200kbps and sharing that between 30 machines in a classroom doesn't give much for each of them!

You can see the typical boot sequence of a standalone machine here [1]. It's about 10 seconds.

Underpowered networks / network servers in a school could increase this, if the computer was configured to load resources from the network at boot.

https://youtu.be/5M6OIOIND-0?t=1284 (this is an A5000, but the startup time is similar).

I think that's probably it. They were all hooked up to a network, and it was never anything other than ropey.

If you use RISCOS on a Raspberry Pi, it boots really fast. It's just a few seconds.

Anybody here remember lander?

Forever.

Ahhh I remember these from school days, most of the lab was BBC Micros then they had a few A3000s. Used to love playing Lemmings on them. Seemed very futuristic at the time!

Blown away when I first saw an Archimedes. Though it didn't look like it had a future, the PC was on the scene already (I've owned an Amiga back then and later decided for an a4000/40 instead of an Archimedes, then lost some money on an expensive Bebox ;-).

I loved those as a kid. My school had some and I spent quite a bit of time with KidPix and a bunch of games on it.

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