Update: BBC Acorn

From: Rob O'Donnell <rob_at_irrelevant.fsnet.co.uk>
Date: Tue Jan 14 22:48:01 2003

At 09:44 14/01/2003 +0000, you wrote:
>Rob,
>
> > BBC mostly, though not in a "must have everything" sense. Just because I
> > spent many years making a sort of living off them. I've got one of Acorn's
> > original ARM development systems though (connects to the BBC) which I've
> > had since they were hot off the press.
>
>Is that the "ARM evaluation unit" (or labelled as something similar)? I've got
>one of those *somewhere* but no docs / software for it. Think it had 4MB of
>memory which was a reasonable amount in those days.

ARM Evaluation Kit - yep - that's the one. I do have various discs and
manuals for it, too. I used to love the "twin" editor - several open files
at one, and could cut and paste between them. Ahead of it's time...

It's all boxed up somewhere under the stairs though.


>I've got a whole pile of other BBC and related stuff, but I've generally
>forgotten what I have - your posting made me remember the ARM unit.
>
>Funny how people don't remember the BBC systems that well - I suppose they
>were
>generally quite expensive to have at home (compared to the Spectrums and C64
>machines) and in a school environment people didn't get much of a chance to
>really play about with them. They're certainly quite well designed machines...

They were expensive, but much more expandable than the spectrum. At one
point I had about six of them in my bedroom on an econet network, had
several on modems running a multi-user BBS. Ah, those were the days -
publishing your thoughts to the world took equipment and promotion.. these
days, anyone can bung up a web page.

That was about the time I was still single, working for Ferranti Computer
Systems (and I've never seen ANY of their computers lying about anywhere...
) and had plenty of money to indulge my hobby.


Rob
Received on Tue Jan 14 2003 - 22:48:01 GMT