Captain Jack
Burnt out human
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2006
- Messages
- 11,806
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- My Location
- North Somerset
Unlike most people of my age (and beyond), I didn't have the likes of Spectrum or a C64 as my first computer. It was an Acorn A3010 running RISC OS 3.10 on which I have learned pretty much everything I need to know about computers, including some low level assembler programming (since mostly forgotten!).
It was a brilliant system, years ahead of its Microshaft equivalents and I did everything on it from playing games, school work to programming. It cost my parents £250 in 1994 and came with a 1MB RAM, which was nowhere near enough for my needs, a floppy drive and er.... that's it. No hard drive there either since the OS was in ROM and was impossible to break (unlike Windows!). Sadly, this meant that all programs had to be loaded from floppy disks, which was slow and inconvenient and was impossible to upgrade to a later version.
After struggling for a while, I blew my life savings on a 4MB RAM board and 170Mb hard drive. It was like being released from the shackles. 4MB was more than enough for every day use and 170Mb hard drive swallowed up all of my floppy disks with half of space to spare. It also meant that I was able to load modules from later OS versions at boot-up, which essentially upgraded OS from it's ROM-based 3.1 to 3.5-ish. This allowed me to view JPEG files natively without having to convert them to native "Sprite" format.
That said, it did struggle with some things that we all take for granted now. Having a 12MHz ARM processor without on-board floating point capabilities to play with meant that things like mp3 files wouldn't play natively. In fact, it took almost an hour to convert an average file into uncompressed "wav" and would only play it if I played it from command line in single task mode.
At the time, the greatest RISC machine was a RISC PC based one with a StrongARM processor, which ran at a whopping 233MHz and later were even overclocked to 287MHz! So, my puny 12MHz paled into non-existence. Sadly, the price was so high that it was never accessible for me and it was cheaper to buy a top range Intel-based PC.
Now, however, things have changed. The priced dropped (though not as much as you'd think for a 20 year old computer) and I acquired a StrongARM 233MHz RISC PC with a MIDI(!) card. The plan for it is to spec it up to a top-range model, along with 486 DX2 card and Windows 95 installed. An old-school VM! It doesn't have a network card or a mouse, so I need to source these.
I have no idea what happened with my A3010. According to my mum, she 'threw it out'.... but plenty of old floppies still remain so I wonder what goodies I'll be able to find there. Assuming any still work.
Has anyone used/owned/owns an Acorn computer here? Also, this specifically relates to RISC OS versions, branded under Archimedes name, not BBC Micro ones.
It was a brilliant system, years ahead of its Microshaft equivalents and I did everything on it from playing games, school work to programming. It cost my parents £250 in 1994 and came with a 1MB RAM, which was nowhere near enough for my needs, a floppy drive and er.... that's it. No hard drive there either since the OS was in ROM and was impossible to break (unlike Windows!). Sadly, this meant that all programs had to be loaded from floppy disks, which was slow and inconvenient and was impossible to upgrade to a later version.
After struggling for a while, I blew my life savings on a 4MB RAM board and 170Mb hard drive. It was like being released from the shackles. 4MB was more than enough for every day use and 170Mb hard drive swallowed up all of my floppy disks with half of space to spare. It also meant that I was able to load modules from later OS versions at boot-up, which essentially upgraded OS from it's ROM-based 3.1 to 3.5-ish. This allowed me to view JPEG files natively without having to convert them to native "Sprite" format.
That said, it did struggle with some things that we all take for granted now. Having a 12MHz ARM processor without on-board floating point capabilities to play with meant that things like mp3 files wouldn't play natively. In fact, it took almost an hour to convert an average file into uncompressed "wav" and would only play it if I played it from command line in single task mode.
At the time, the greatest RISC machine was a RISC PC based one with a StrongARM processor, which ran at a whopping 233MHz and later were even overclocked to 287MHz! So, my puny 12MHz paled into non-existence. Sadly, the price was so high that it was never accessible for me and it was cheaper to buy a top range Intel-based PC.
Now, however, things have changed. The priced dropped (though not as much as you'd think for a 20 year old computer) and I acquired a StrongARM 233MHz RISC PC with a MIDI(!) card. The plan for it is to spec it up to a top-range model, along with 486 DX2 card and Windows 95 installed. An old-school VM! It doesn't have a network card or a mouse, so I need to source these.
I have no idea what happened with my A3010. According to my mum, she 'threw it out'.... but plenty of old floppies still remain so I wonder what goodies I'll be able to find there. Assuming any still work.
Has anyone used/owned/owns an Acorn computer here? Also, this specifically relates to RISC OS versions, branded under Archimedes name, not BBC Micro ones.
(I'm exaggerating, but still...)
