Acorn Archimedes is 25 | Hacker News Reader

Acorn Archimedes is 25

reghardware.com

52 pointsukdm43 comments

I sometimes wonder what the world would be like today had the UK govt decided that our computing future was too important to be left to anyone else, and had just bought a few million Archies for the civil service, MoD, NHS etc. Of course given that critical mass/economy of scale, and the obvious superior power compared to PCs of the time, the private sector would have adopted them too. We'd be 10 or 20 years ahead of the state of the art now.

The untapped capabilities of some of those old systems were quite astonishing. It would have been cheaper to replace every dumb VT100 type terminal with an Atari ST (which had a built-in terminal emulator) and given every user a powerful machine on their desktop. The Amiga just destroyed the contemporary Mac in terms of not only price/performance but raw performance - to say nothing of the PCs of the day! It makes you realize for all the numbers of gigabytes and gigahertz, just how little actual progress has been made, since the world settled on x86 as the lowest common denominator. Windows, OSX and Linux have far more in common than Archie, ST and Amiga, where is the radical thinking in systems design now?

Of course what would actually have happened is that obsequious little weasel Alan Sugar would have foisted his word processor abomination on us, but it's nice to dream.

You don't really need to wonder. Just look at France.

The news from France is mixed: Minitel could be argued to have held back the internet in France. Nuclear power research and trains pushed them to the forefront ("10 or 20 years ahead" as you say). Home-grown OSes like Chorus failed after spending lots of money.

On the other hand the French pay more for everything from energy to computers.

In retrospect, I think that had the UK adopted the Archimedes, it would have been the bargain of the century. Enough software gets written here that compatibility with the rest of the world wouldn't have been an issue (esp. since at the time we were in a world in which incompatible systems were the norm) and in fact once the Archie's superiority was demonstrated we'd have been exporting it. Esp. considering the change in the national mental landscape, that every (user-friendly, GUI) computer you encountered was easily programmable to a professional standard in BBC Basic - now only 25 years later is that kind of democratization of computing entering the public consciousness, we could have had it all the time!

While BBC Basic was kinda fun, I'm not sure I'd be in a happier place right now if I had to work with 100 million lines of legacy BBC Basic :-)

Pop quiz. What did the following commands do?

    *.
    P.
    *OPT4,3

* causes OSCLI to handle the rest of the line. Dot was an abbreviation for Cat, short for catalogue, IOW ls(1). P. is presumably at the BASIC prompt; it abbreviated the PRINT keyword. OPT had the filing system set some options stored on the current disk; 4 was how to handle the !Boot file. 0, do nothing; 1, load; 2, run; 3, exec, i.e. pretend it had been typed.

Was P. shorthand for PRINT .? No idea what the other two commands do I think *OPT was for addressing a serial port or the screen but my memory is very hazy.

BBC BASIC on the original RISC PC was my first experience writing code. I think that machine is still in my parents' garage along with the 6 volume BBC BASIC reference manual.

Yes, in BASIC you could enter keywords abbreviated with a . to save typing. The tokeniser would turn it into the byte or two representing PRINT ready for it to be interpreted.

I think you're thinking of the four volume RISC OS Programmers' Manual, plus slim index, that came in a big white cardboard sleeve. Augmented later by a Volume 5 of changes with later OS versions to save re-printing costs. BASIC itself was introduced in the User Guide that came with the machine IIRC and had a one-volume reference manual of its own at additional cost.

Further to other comments, you would never see P. in the output of LIST. It would be expanded automatically to PRINT.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't P. being expanded to PRINT at the time of LIST but the byte representing the tokenised PRINT being expanded then. The P. was turned into that byte earlier.

Much as I loved the Archie, I don't see it working like that, largely because if the UK is going to play the protectionist game then it would simply have encouraged others to do so.

Arguably the main problem was never working out how to sell them into the US, but ARM aside too much of the rest of the platform may have been superficially nice, but wasn't really the foundations of a long running computer platform.

What really still amazes me is Acorn didn't put the RISC OS front end on NetBSD back when it became clear running BSD was far more interesting to most of Acorn's own staff than RISC OS was. By then it was probably game over anyway.

I wasn't arguing for protectionism (e.g. a tariff on competing systems) - just that if the govt had bought Archies instead of PCs and dumb terminals, that it was buying anyway, things would have turned out differently for the whole country, if not wider.

but wasn't really the foundations of a long running computer platform

Interesting, how do you mean? Esp. in light of the state of PC OSs at the time. If you had to restart computing what would you take as your foundation, MS-DOS or Arthur?

Erm they ported BSD to Acorn machines (RiscIX).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX

Actually, it died not because of Sugar (who didn't produce a product that was even considerable), but RM PLC who chucked out a load of cheap, unrelaible pile of shite clone PCs and took the contract away from Acorn basically through lying, cost cutting and cash backhanders.

Mr Weasly Weasel (Sugar) is just an asshat anyway though.

Never a truer word was spoken. I remember RM "PCs" from schools and they absolutely sucked. It's a wonder kids didn't go blind from looking at those horrible curved 14" monitors that they probably charged £100s for.

Don't worry, you'll be able to run RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi! Maybe they can deploy that into the ailing NHS project (it's probably about all they can afford now @ $35/board).

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11...

Unfortunately, nothing seems to be available yet, unless you want to build it yourself -- but then you have to buy the dev tools from them! (WTF?).

A few errors (corrections sent) but worth a read. It was the first computer shipped containing an ARM, the ARM 2. Ignore the crummy looking screenshots of Arthur; the WIMP was usable in Arthur for single-tasked applications but a very-nice co-operative multi-tasking desktop came with RISC OS 2.0.

It had features I still miss today, e.g. drag a scrollbar thumb with Adjust (X's Button3) instead of Select (B1) and you were panning that scrollbar and its partner in the other axis. Adjust often did similar to Select but with a tweak, e.g. the pop-up context menu with Menu (B2) could have an item selected with Select and would disappear but use Adjust and the menu, possibly several deep, remained opened. How often today do you have to re-navigate to a nearby place to select a second item? Select on a scrollbar's up arrow scrolls up, Adjust down; no need to move to the other end of the bar. Same goes with paging by clicking to the side of the thumb.

I always thought the special thing was the way file saving was done, especially if you had something like ArtWorks and Impression up at once and wanted to save between them.

Definitely miss mine - and it still amuses me how things it handled so easily like having a common vector file format or decent anti aliased text took so long for the rest of the world to get near.

Zarch/Lander was impressive, but seeing Sibelius running for time was astounding.

The drag-and-drop of the file icons with the sender not needing to know whether it was going to another running program or a filing system? Yes, that was nice. You know of the ROX Desktop? RISC OS on X. http://roscidus.com/desktop/

Makes me walk down memory lane! Here is my list of all the computers that I've owned:

  ZX Spectrum 48k 
   -> Camputers Lynx 48k 
    -> BBC Micro model B 
     -> Acorn Archimedes A420 
      -> Some bog standard PC (initially put SCO Unix on later Slackware Linux 95) 
       -> iBook (clam - came with Mac OS 9 but I upgraded to OS X) 
        -> Custom built PC (with Redhat Linux 9 + Windows dual boot) 
         -> Powerbook G4 
          -> iMac (first 24 inch and now 27 inch).
           -> Macbook Air

Definitely fond memories of the Archie. I think I bought it via Beebug (http://8bs.com/beebugmags.htm) and I had them put in a Midi card (though never got to use it!).

Sorry for the overindulgence :)

Thanks for the nostalgia trip. Mine was similar upto the iBook and I had a couple of RiscPCs...

I actually lived down the road from the Beebug store in St Albans in the 1980s. I remember getting a demonstration of Econet and SJR MDFS back in the late 80s and seeing the FIRST retail Acorn A310 demonstration. I also bought my copy of E-Type[1] in there!

At the time, the A310 literally cocked a leg and wee'd all over anything else on the market.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwWXloIzqAg

I had precursor to this at home , the BBC Micro. I remember using the Acorn Arch at school, we had a lab of about 20 of them.

From what I remember no crashes, viruses or anything of the sort on any of them.

I remember at the time the pressure on the school at the time to switch to IBM PCs "because that is what business is using", which in hindsight feels like a shame.

Were these things popular outside of the UK?

I remember a composer I knew had one because of Sibelius, this was in Australia. They weren't unknown here but were certainly rare. I do remember that RiscOS was a thing of beauty though, very very sleek.

I used to sing with one of the authors of Sibelius, who was a very talented guy. I remember him bemoaning the cost of an Apple dev kit when they were looking at porting Sibelius to the Mac back in the early 90s.

One of the great advantages of the Acorn hardware was that there was no barrier to entry if you wanted to program them. Perhaps because their initial focus was computers for use in education everything you needed was always right there. You could sit down and start typing code.

If you wanted to write C (there was a C++ compiler based on CFront too IIRC) then you had to buy a compiler, but people achieved a huge amount with the tools available on stock machines.

For a number of years, Acorn had the most powerful desktop computers in the world at a reasonable price, but they failed to capitalise on that advantage & were eventually overtaken by the MS/IBM/Intel juggernaut.

I still remember being in awe of the effortless full screen scrolling of scores in Sibelius on RiscOS, so far ahead of the offerings on PCs of the time. I remember thinking the concept of RISC was a bit of novelty though, yeah I may have been wrong about that.

The did crash - quite regularly, but it was usually user error :)

They did also have viruses, but they were usually funny and harmless.

However, business wasn't using IBM PCs in the UK at the time. They didn't get a look in - pretty much everyone was Acorn in the UK.

My father was the FIRST major PC clone importer/builder in the UK (waaaay before Dell even got going here) and he nearly died from lack of sales a couple of times as people were either quite happy with their ancient Acorn kit or bought new Archs when they came out. The PCs of the day were a bag of shite, unreliable and unproductive and people knew it. He now sells Dell kit which is a bag of shite, unreliable and unproductive. How times change....

Unfortunately for Acorn, the tables turned as RM PLC got into the government and promoted the PC, businesses hit the Internet, Windows 3.1 came out with Winsock, Netware was usable and interoperability with the US was required regularly (which was PC all over).

Game over. Momentum destroys superiority.

As for popularity outside the UK, NL, DE and NZ had a fair amount.

I remember helping install a stack of these into my old school the summer before I went to university. They were so impressive at the time.

I remember having to go around and swap the ROMs in a lab of machines when the new Arthur came out. Sigh. Good times.

Same here! I remember in 1997 (maybe) my school finally got an ISDN connection and I helped upgrade the machines (mainly A3000s and I think a couple of A5000s) with ethernet cards.

What a walk down memory lane. I built my first website on one of these 14+ years ago as a coursework component (it was a fan site for the UK dance band The Prodigy). The browser (Fresco?) was awful and didn;t support frames, which was a huge bug-bear when Hotmail begun using them in its new mode.

I also remember playing Lander for hours at the back of computing class. And upgrading our home system to 2MB RAM and adding a HDD so we could install a game instead of swapping between the 12 floppy disks (it was a flight sim called Birds of Prey/War I think).

i remember seeing "Chocks" (a flight sim) on the Archimedes at school when i was about seven. It was the most amazing thing i'd ever seen. There was only one Archimedes at school and everyone crowded around it, but there was a load of BBC Micros, so I sat down and started (very slowly) typing in pages and pages of printed out basic programs to see what they did. I'd probably never have become a programmer without that.

Weirdly I don't think I'd have become a programmer without BBC Micro's in primary school, we even had some vague 'formal' lessons on BASIC and after that we were encourage to try and write stuff ourselves.

We also had a TURTLE, programming and robotics for primary school lessons was awesome.

That was Chocks Away, a video that doesn't do it justice is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0x5JbmU6HU. The dog fights were good and the missions had you shooting up balloons and moving trains too. You could link two machines with a serial cable and fly in the same airspace. A friend that worked at an Acorn dealer and I used to visit the shop after hours, he had keys, to play it until early morning, day after day, until we had completed them all. Great fun shouting at one another about who was taking on what in a dogfight. If the machine had an ARM 3 then the graphics had a bit more detail.

Ah barrage balloons! Hours of fun.

I preferred Interdictor 2: http://www.apdl.co.uk/riscworld/volume3/issue6/disc/index.ht...

Oh, apologies, I was forgetting Arc's whitec doesn't handle Unicode things like U+2002. The youtube URL needs " The" removing from the end.

I remember playing around with that lander demo!

These machines had BASIC in ROM, and you could write WIMP programs with it. Lots of fun.

The lander demo is also know as the game Zarch (or Virus for other computers). David Braben (of the Elite[1] fame) wrote that in three months[2] for the release of the Archimedes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%29

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch

Zarch, now available for your web browser: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052784

This was the first computer when I was eight, thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Was the GUI really written in BBC Basic? Coo ur.

It was really easy in BBC Basic to drop in some inline assembler whenever you needed to. It wouldn't surprise me if Arthur was really a mix of Basic and inline ARM assembler. Anyone ever seen the source code?

There's some confusion here. The Arthur OS ROMs, starting with 0.2 on EPROM, that's why Acorn wanted them back on the upgrade to 0.3 on ROM, were written in assembler, including `modules' like the filing systems, BASIC, and the Wimp that gave SWIs like Wimp_CreateIcon. More as a demo of WIMP rather than anything useful there was a Desktop program stored in the ROM, written in BASIC, that used the Wimp module to present a crude selection of calculator, etc. Nothing like the later drag-and-drop RISC OS desktop; no other programs could run with the Arthur version. So there was some BASIC in the OS but only as one stores sprites and other data files too.

The source of RISC OS was opened up. https://www.riscosopen.org/viewer/view/castle/RiscOS/Sources... shows part of the BASIC module which has pedigree going back to when Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, wrote it.

It does seem surprising, but ARM BASIC was fast. Seriously fast. I read somewhere that it was later optimized further for the ARM3, so that its core working set (for common operations) would fit inside the ARM3's cache. When you consider that was only 4kb, you get a feel for how well-written ARM BASIC was.

It was very fast, and the built-in assembler and easy integration of your code from BASIC, e.g. [.mol% mov r0, #42:mov pc, r14]:PRINT USR mol%, meant there were easy options when it wasn't quite fast enough.

But then you've got to remember that Sophie Wilson wrote the 16KiB 6502 BASIC interpreter for the BBC micro, and the BASIC for the Z80 second processor IIRC, and then brought that experience to bear when designing the ARM instruction set. Having done so, she then wrote BBC BASIC V in ARM; hardly surprising if it knew every little nuance and could wring speed out of it.

In later years, the BBC BASIC code, 6502 and ARM, were good stress tests for emulators because of her wide use of the instruction sets.

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