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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Except, of course there was the Archimedes. Which was a BBC Micro on steroids.

Besides, it did say 'in many ways' so I think that this is really needless nitpicking.

I have used both when I was a kid. There were nothing alike really.

I owned a BBC Micro Model B (was given one when a friend was given a 486 PC) and I used the Archimedes at school. The BBC Micro was archaic compared to the Archimedes and PCs of the time.

Of course it was.

It was six years older and this was the era when CPUs evolved massively from one generation to the next. Just like the Acorn 'Atom' was 'nothing like the BBC Micro' in spite of using the same processor.

For some contrast: when the BBC Model A came out in 1981 originally it had cassette tape as mass storage, an 8 bit cpu clocked at 2 MHz, 16K RAM and if you were very lucky yours came with the optional floppy drive which cost nearly as much as the machine itself. When the first ARM was sold to the public, six years later it came with a 32 bit RISC CPU clocked at 4 MHz, 512K or 1M of RAM, an ST 506 based harddrive option.

That's just six years of progress, and we're skipping over many steps in the lineage, the BBC Master series, the tube expansions and the Olivetti saga. You could pick 1980 to 1990 and write a pretty large book about personal computing progress during those years and you likely would still miss important events.

But the lineage was - for those that owned all of the intermediary machines as well - pretty clear, and that is before we get into the lineage of the software that the Archimedes shipped with, MOS and BBC Basic, which both worked more or less as you would expect given the new machines capabilities.

I aware of most of the history. I've used a Master briefly while I was at school and honestly it worked like a upgraded BBC Micro Model B and looking at the wikipedia page it looks like that was exactly the case.

The Archimedes was called a "BBC Micro" because it was part of the BBC's home computing initiative, but architecturally, it had nothing to do with the original BBC Micro.

Hardware architecture not, for very obvious reasons. But if you wrote BBC Basic you'd have felt right at home and this continuity was one of the reasons they sold quite well, lots of people that were using the BBC Micro in ways that it wasn't intended for had run into the limitations of the platform and wanted something similar but bigger and faster. The Archimedes was that - and more. To get maximum performance (still very anemic by today's standards) out of a 6502 based BBC you'd have been programming in assembly and that of course did not port at all to the ARM based machines.

As I wrote in another comment I was pretty close to the fire and had very early access to the ARM architecture based beebs courtesy of a friendly contact but I realized soon enough that the future for home computing and SMB business computing did not lie with either Acorn, Atari, Commodore or any of the other contenders. In '88 or so (my memory is a bit hazy about the dates, there was a lot going on in my life back then) I moved to x86 professionally with a side of Atari ST (using the fantastic Mark Williams C compiler + documentation) for more fun stuff and with the advent of the availability of the internet for the masses I ran SGI Irix for a couple of years until I settled on Linux which has been my daily driver for decades now. Hardware architecture used to be a super important factor for me, now the only thing that matters is whether or not I can run Ubuntu and whether the hardware is sufficiently powerful to get me through my working day. The fact that my daily driver is a 12 year old laptop is a nice indication of how far we've come, it is pretty rare that I put together machines where performance really matters.

But regardless of all of that I have a fond spot in my heart for the BBC, regardless of processor used, it was the machine that allowed me to finally do some more structured programming and explore other languages without breaking the bank.

I don't recall the Archimedes ever getting called a "BBC Micro". I remember the introduction of the Archimedes. We had an Acorn Electron, and we'd seen the introduction of various "BBC Masters"; BBCs with more memory, more powerful hardware, but still a BBC. The Archimedes, was always marketed as something completely new, as far as I recall.

My brother had one. Really cool machine, and as far as I remember, on a completely different level than anything that had existed before it. Soon succeeded by the Risc PC, which I mostly remember for being able to accept various configurations of additional processors (it could get either an x86 as co-processor, or several additional ARMs).

It was something entirely new, of course. In fact it wasn't called a BBC Micro - however it was "endorsed" by the BBC - had the owl logo on it etc. Was indeed a cool machine, and streets ahead of anything else at the time. Typical UK tech story...

> I don't recall the Archimedes ever getting called a "BBC Micro"

Pictures:

https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A3000....

Note the logo at top right of the keyboard.

Also note the bright red function keys.

> architecturally, it had nothing to do with the original BBC Micro.

This is not true. It had lots to do with it.

* The Archimedes used a CPU whose designers (Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber) have specifically said they built it to be conceptually similar to the 6502. Source: I have met both and seen them say this in person.

* The Archimedes ran RISC OS which is a rewrite of the BBC MOS. Source: I have interviewed the project leader, Paul Fellows.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/

The Archie came with !6052tube and could run some BBC apps.

Source code: http://bbc.nvg.org/rom/Acorn/os/?C=N;O=A

Somewhat more than that. RISC OS was MOS on steroids too.

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