The Archimedes was a great machine, but just like the BBC B it was overpriced which prevented many families from owning it; schools too for that matter.
you must read this. once you have started there is no turning back. a little 10 year old girl was raped and murderded in 1945. her body was not found until 1947. then a boy last week read this and did not copy and paste this message. the dead girl appeared in his room haunting him and killed him.if you do not copy and paste this onto 10 videos in 30 minutes the dead girl will apear in your room tonight and haunt you and kill you well you start to copy
I rememeber when this came to my primary school in 88. Really wanted one. Only now I realise they cost a couple of grand to get one! That was the late 80s (89.) Silly money of that time and priced themselves out of the market. Then came the good ol 286 PC!
This is Thatcher's TRUE legacy... sod the Miners, the UK had a world beating product and she and Tebbit f#$ked it up by never investing in it 'cos it "would never work"... yeah and we're are the RISC/OS chips now... erm EVERYWHERE!
Loved my Archie 3010 so much .... Later A5000 ... :( Damned I miss these Commodore / Atari / Acorn years ... MAchines with Soul for me .... Thanx for the memory refresh! :)
I used a BBC micro at school back in the early 90's, but I've never used one of these, at least, I haven't had any real experience with them. Those machines would have been incredible for their time, but the graphics look very dated now, the desktop looks so old fashoned now.
Also RiscOS was wonderfull, drag & drop fully integreted, even later OS never reached this interoperability.
I was really angry when Intel bought DEC, no one understood the main reason: the StrongARM (SA110 &SA1100) wich evolved (Intel took 10 years to make it run 2x faster. LOL) to the Xscale.
The ARM processor still lives on and is one of the most widely used embedded processors.
Smart phones as we know them might not have even been possible with out the ARM processor because just about everything else just uses too much power per MIP.
An X86 based smart phone would have really bad battery life and would likely be prone to over heating and exploding.
Still RISC OS looked cool esp the nearly instant boot too bad it never caught on outside the UK.
"Still RISC OS looked cool esp the nearly instant boot too bad it never caught on outside the UK". Hey, it's not too late yet - RISC OS is still in development after all ;).
The Arthur desktop... what an angry fruit salad! At the time the Arc's capabilities were stunning, but it couldn't win out against the PC software base.
Yep, went the same way as the hovercraft... Great British engineering, not taken seriously by the government and ultimately thrown down the pan. At least ARM are doing alright for themselves.
I'm aware of that. But is it doing well compared to other operating systems out there? In my opinion RISC OS is in serious need of being opened up (i.e. open source), but even if that were to happen, I fear it is too late.
Hmm that depends on how you define 'doing well'. It does have a small user base these days, but software is still being written/developed for it. For most purposes, it is still a viable alternative to the 'bigger' OSs, and in my opinion vastly superior (I'm currently running Virtual RISC PC under Mac OS X). There is actually a group called RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) who are publishing the source code in batches. There are still some keen users out there (myself included), so I'm still optimistic :)
4 mips from 8Mhz was great in 1987, but amigas custom hardware gave an edge for certain graphic intensive tasks. drop in an 030 card and you had cpu power licked too...
@bobbystar101 Only because it was alot newer and alot more expensive. Not to mention the 2 faults, first dispite it being a totally different machine to the ST Atari put it in the same case so many assumed it was just a glorified ST. That and the lack of unique software for it.
Archies where way ahead of anyone (even Commodore and Atari) in 1987 with this system, yet few people realised its potential and as it was mostly hand made in the UK, wasn't that cheap to buy.
@bobbystar101 no it didn't. Your OS still sucked massive ammounts of dick and it was so incompatable with ST/STE/TT hardware that even with an emulator running only 70% of software would actually work.
@bobbystar101 Oh you are a joke, trying to claim the falcon wasn't part of the ST series. It ran TOS, it had a 68k series processor, it shared peripherals, and even used the same case.
And you seriously think being forced to replace a brand new computer's OS was acceptable? Christ you have stockholm syndrome.
Perhaps "emulator" was the wrong word, but there definately was a hack you had to load to mess around with memory locations, so that SOMETHING would work.
@bobbystar101 The Falcon had a 16 bit bus to help it with being backwards compatible with the ST line of software.
I don't think you can draw too many comparisons between the 8 and 16 bit Atari's as the company changed hands and had the bulk of technology behind the ST introduced to it through engineers brought in by Jack Tramiel. In fact I think Atari had about 70% of its staff fired when Jack took over.
@DingKong The Falcon was way more powerful than the A1200. The Falcon may have been crippled by a 16 bit address bus, but it had much faster ram and other hardware.
They created a version of Unix for these machines to be used in University but never released it!! WHY? It could have been the standard for science departments everywhere at a fraction of the price of machines available at the time...shame.
It was intended for use in universities only and was not for general release. I saw it demonstrated by Acorn themselves at a show in the mid eighties.
I also owned and programmed an Archimedes so I am very familiar with RISC OS, which was a developement of the BBC OS.
The university where I was working in the early 90's evaluated a Unix-based R140. They were amazed at its capabilities and relatively low price, but for some reason didn't purchase it. My recollection is that the box was colored green, but I'm not sure about that.
I dont think it was ever taken seriously enough as a games machine. It would be a tough call for it to get longside Amiga but it wouldnt be far off. Out performs Atari ST's quite easly though.
Just clearer one thing up. the real Acorn don't make PC laptops. it's a new company that has rights to the Acorn name. The real Acorn ltd changed there name and went into making settop boxes.
So the ARM chip is a real winner! Well done ARM LTD for being so smart. I know! I should boart shares!
It would be safe to say that ARM chips out number PC chip at lest 5 to 1. not bad for a uk company. your PC may have as many as 10. Hard disk's, modems, DVD, LAN ect, all kinds of places. In fact all kinds of companies make ARM chips under license from ARM ltd (a offshoot of Acorn). ARM as also been making quad-core chips for a while. It had a full computer on a chip way back in 1992 with the Acorn A3010,A3020,A4000 they all had ARM250 full integrated computer system chips.
ARM chips are now in most every electrical devise you could think of. Amazingly the iPhone has three of them. what they need three for I don't know lol. My mp3 player has a ARM9 with a media co processor. most hard disks printers, mobile phone, use a ARM chip of one type or another. even Intel have paid for the rights to develop ARM chips. I have one in my DELL PDA its a 624MHz Xscale basically ARM chip + MMX instruction set.
I had one. it was a great computer. Acorn had a 32 bit Risc chip when everyone else had 16 bit chips. It had 2Mb ram was much more power when I compared it to my Atari ST. even though it did not have as many games.
I also had a Acorn Risk-PC when I was 21. It had a ARM chip and a 586 chip on two boards. dual boot, way back in mid 90. you could add sections together to make a bigger computer up to 7 sections. the case was made of the same plastic the crash helmets are made from.
Someone was planning ahead when they designed the original BBC computer, which morphed into the Archimedes, because, even though an 8-bit computer, it had a 32-bit address space.
what a grate computer shame Acorn now make shitty windows based laptops they use to make the best Risk Computers the world has eva seen just look at the ARM processor its still used to this day
Nothing to do with Acorn Computers Ltd 1978-1998. They've just hijacked the name, to confuse people (Wikipedia disambiguates them neatly). Acorn never built Windows PCs and fought to the death (as a company) for that cause. Can't believe trading standards allow this.
Hi mickeya7, what motivates you to make such a comment? There was a whole software and hardware industry in britain and around the world covering any field you might ask for. If you needed to "exchange" software with other users, then that was also well possible at meetings.
Unfortunately you're very wrong and in each category you could find impressive software (from Impression word processor to Sibelius for music composition).
I think you never owned such a machine to say there were no software.
Yes there were few games but everything for the rest
The Archimedes was a great machine, but just like the BBC B it was overpriced which prevented many families from owning it; schools too for that matter.
10p6 2 months ago
This has been flagged as spam show
you must read this. once you have started there is no turning back. a little 10 year old girl was raped and murderded in 1945. her body was not found until 1947. then a boy last week read this and did not copy and paste this message. the dead girl appeared in his room haunting him and killed him.if you do not copy and paste this onto 10 videos in 30 minutes the dead girl will apear in your room tonight and haunt you and kill you well you start to copy
ImSooAwkward 4 months ago
I rememeber when this came to my primary school in 88. Really wanted one. Only now I realise they cost a couple of grand to get one! That was the late 80s (89.) Silly money of that time and priced themselves out of the market. Then came the good ol 286 PC!
dezhar 6 months ago
I still have my Acorn A3000, bit tatty looking but it still works! awesome computer.
namco21gamefreak 8 months ago
Last night I dreamt that I ditched all my PCs and returned to using my old Archimedes 305.
koenlefever 8 months ago
The archimedes was the machines we had when I started primary school. Wasnt until about 1998 we got windows computers in!
madcapoperator 1 year ago
Comment removed
spacehelmetforacow 1 year ago
Lol what were Acorn thinking when they sold off ARM?!?!
pigeonshouse 1 year ago
@pigeonshouse They didn't have a choice.
russ0r 1 year ago
im sure the 3DO used an arm 32 bit risc processor.
bazfanv2 1 year ago 2
@bazfanv2 It did.
russ0r 1 year ago
7:26 amuses me - "640 by 256 pix-ells" hehe
geekymarianne 2 years ago
A good gameplay is not a matter of resolution.
TheMCMXXL 2 years ago
No, I'm talking about the pronunciation of the word "pixels" :) and yeah, the Acorn display was great for the time.
geekymarianne 2 years ago
It's hilarious how apparent it is from the narrator's tone that he has no idea what the script he's reading means
BeerTower 1 year ago 2
Thanks for uploading this!
SegaMegadriveMic 2 years ago
Archimedes A3000 was a BBC computer.
SegaMegadriveMic 2 years ago
I remember these from school, I used to play lemmings on it during lunch. Kinda sad now, how something so advanced for it's time is now old hat.
CoolDudeClem 2 years ago
dur... I meant "where are", unless we are truely RISC!
agghtee 2 years ago
This is Thatcher's TRUE legacy... sod the Miners, the UK had a world beating product and she and Tebbit f#$ked it up by never investing in it 'cos it "would never work"... yeah and we're are the RISC/OS chips now... erm EVERYWHERE!
agghtee 2 years ago
Yes, and 90% of RISC chips today are ACORN devices, so what is your point?
FactualTruthProvider 2 years ago
thanks for sharing this lovely specimen. I learned a lot and was amused.
ntheory 2 years ago
Acorn A3000 was great at it's time.
SegaMegadriveMic 2 years ago 6
Loved my Archie 3010 so much .... Later A5000 ... :( Damned I miss these Commodore / Atari / Acorn years ... MAchines with Soul for me .... Thanx for the memory refresh! :)
StrobeLightAgency 2 years ago 3
I agree.
nickmctrick 2 years ago
Comment removed
SegaMegadriveMic 2 years ago
I used a BBC micro at school back in the early 90's, but I've never used one of these, at least, I haven't had any real experience with them. Those machines would have been incredible for their time, but the graphics look very dated now, the desktop looks so old fashoned now.
Lachlant1984 3 years ago 2
I owned an A3000 & a RiscPC outside of UK.
Writing assembler was a dream on these.
Also RiscOS was wonderfull, drag & drop fully integreted, even later OS never reached this interoperability.
I was really angry when Intel bought DEC, no one understood the main reason: the StrongARM (SA110 &SA1100) wich evolved (Intel took 10 years to make it run 2x faster. LOL) to the Xscale.
AltMarc 3 years ago
Wow that takes me back. I had an Archimedes 310m
benward10 3 years ago
The ARM processor still lives on and is one of the most widely used embedded processors.
Smart phones as we know them might not have even been possible with out the ARM processor because just about everything else just uses too much power per MIP.
An X86 based smart phone would have really bad battery life and would likely be prone to over heating and exploding.
Still RISC OS looked cool esp the nearly instant boot too bad it never caught on outside the UK.
Membrane556 3 years ago
"Still RISC OS looked cool esp the nearly instant boot too bad it never caught on outside the UK". Hey, it's not too late yet - RISC OS is still in development after all ;).
TomPico12321 3 years ago
THIS IS ARCHIMEDES... what the fluff happened to the future?!
georeff23 3 years ago
The Arthur desktop... what an angry fruit salad! At the time the Arc's capabilities were stunning, but it couldn't win out against the PC software base.
regregex 3 years ago
I had the Acron atom, BBC B then the Arch 310. They were all brilliant machines.
swinkyuk 3 years ago
Yep, went the same way as the hovercraft... Great British engineering, not taken seriously by the government and ultimately thrown down the pan. At least ARM are doing alright for themselves.
matt9741399 3 years ago 2
Actually, RISC OS is still in development and is better than ever before :)
TomPico12321 3 years ago
I'm aware of that. But is it doing well compared to other operating systems out there? In my opinion RISC OS is in serious need of being opened up (i.e. open source), but even if that were to happen, I fear it is too late.
matt9741399 3 years ago
Hmm that depends on how you define 'doing well'. It does have a small user base these days, but software is still being written/developed for it. For most purposes, it is still a viable alternative to the 'bigger' OSs, and in my opinion vastly superior (I'm currently running Virtual RISC PC under Mac OS X). There is actually a group called RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL) who are publishing the source code in batches. There are still some keen users out there (myself included), so I'm still optimistic :)
TomPico12321 3 years ago
matt9741399: Check out RISC OS Open...
bhtooefr 2 years ago
4 mips from 8Mhz was great in 1987, but amigas custom hardware gave an edge for certain graphic intensive tasks. drop in an 030 card and you had cpu power licked too...
kimosaaaabe 4 years ago
But the atari falcon beat the amiga hands down in every way.
bobbystar101 2 years ago
@bobbystar101 Only because it was alot newer and alot more expensive. Not to mention the 2 faults, first dispite it being a totally different machine to the ST Atari put it in the same case so many assumed it was just a glorified ST. That and the lack of unique software for it.
Archies where way ahead of anyone (even Commodore and Atari) in 1987 with this system, yet few people realised its potential and as it was mostly hand made in the UK, wasn't that cheap to buy.
R33Racer 2 years ago
@bobbystar101 no it didn't. Your OS still sucked massive ammounts of dick and it was so incompatable with ST/STE/TT hardware that even with an emulator running only 70% of software would actually work.
richardmaudsley77 1 year ago
Well actually you could put a different OS on it wasn't like you were forced to use one... Dont comment if your that misinformed.
Its also misinformed to expect it to run st programs. The ST didn't runatari 8 bit programs did it? The Falcon was a different computer (rolleyes)
Also there is no "emulator" for ST programs, a computer of the falcons power could barely emulate a gameboy let alone an ST.
Using phrases like "sucked massive ammounts of dick" well... you sound like a bit of a dick uself
bobbystar101 1 year ago
@bobbystar101 Oh you are a joke, trying to claim the falcon wasn't part of the ST series. It ran TOS, it had a 68k series processor, it shared peripherals, and even used the same case.
And you seriously think being forced to replace a brand new computer's OS was acceptable? Christ you have stockholm syndrome.
Perhaps "emulator" was the wrong word, but there definately was a hack you had to load to mess around with memory locations, so that SOMETHING would work.
richardmaudsley77 1 year ago
@bobbystar101 The Falcon had a 16 bit bus to help it with being backwards compatible with the ST line of software.
I don't think you can draw too many comparisons between the 8 and 16 bit Atari's as the company changed hands and had the bulk of technology behind the ST introduced to it through engineers brought in by Jack Tramiel. In fact I think Atari had about 70% of its staff fired when Jack took over.
rovercrew 1 year ago
@bobbystar101 Really? The A1200 was far more popular than the Falcon
DingKong 3 months ago
@DingKong The Falcon was way more powerful than the A1200. The Falcon may have been crippled by a 16 bit address bus, but it had much faster ram and other hardware.
10p6 2 months ago
They created a version of Unix for these machines to be used in University but never released it!! WHY? It could have been the standard for science departments everywhere at a fraction of the price of machines available at the time...shame.
swinkyuk 4 years ago
Nor released ?
What do you mean ?
Its name is RISC OS and even today you can buy a copy.
Clive0075 4 years ago
Nope, not RISC OS, Unix.
It was intended for use in universities only and was not for general release. I saw it demonstrated by Acorn themselves at a show in the mid eighties.
I also owned and programmed an Archimedes so I am very familiar with RISC OS, which was a developement of the BBC OS.
swinkyuk 4 years ago
Do you mean RISC iX?
According to Wikipedia, it was actually sold in combination with the Rxxx series machines (R140, R225, R260).
kth42 3 years ago
kth42, yes, RISC iX it is. I always thought it would have sold well as a ROM upgrade to the Archimedes.
swinkyuk 3 years ago
The university where I was working in the early 90's evaluated a Unix-based R140. They were amazed at its capabilities and relatively low price, but for some reason didn't purchase it. My recollection is that the box was colored green, but I'm not sure about that.
Gerry319 3 years ago
I saw this machine demonstrated at a show in Manchester. It was very impressive.
swinkyuk 3 years ago
Could've replaced the Amiga as a premier games machine, at the right price and with the right marketing. Imagine 4 mips in the right hands.
BurtWilson1 4 years ago 4
I dont think it was ever taken seriously enough as a games machine. It would be a tough call for it to get longside Amiga but it wouldnt be far off. Out performs Atari ST's quite easly though.
R33Racer 4 years ago
Just clearer one thing up. the real Acorn don't make PC laptops. it's a new company that has rights to the Acorn name. The real Acorn ltd changed there name and went into making settop boxes.
So the ARM chip is a real winner! Well done ARM LTD for being so smart. I know! I should boart shares!
jamesleetrigg 4 years ago
It would be safe to say that ARM chips out number PC chip at lest 5 to 1. not bad for a uk company. your PC may have as many as 10. Hard disk's, modems, DVD, LAN ect, all kinds of places. In fact all kinds of companies make ARM chips under license from ARM ltd (a offshoot of Acorn). ARM as also been making quad-core chips for a while. It had a full computer on a chip way back in 1992 with the Acorn A3010,A3020,A4000 they all had ARM250 full integrated computer system chips.
jamesleetrigg 4 years ago
ARM chips are now in most every electrical devise you could think of. Amazingly the iPhone has three of them. what they need three for I don't know lol. My mp3 player has a ARM9 with a media co processor. most hard disks printers, mobile phone, use a ARM chip of one type or another. even Intel have paid for the rights to develop ARM chips. I have one in my DELL PDA its a 624MHz Xscale basically ARM chip + MMX instruction set.
jamesleetrigg 4 years ago
I had one. it was a great computer. Acorn had a 32 bit Risc chip when everyone else had 16 bit chips. It had 2Mb ram was much more power when I compared it to my Atari ST. even though it did not have as many games.
I also had a Acorn Risk-PC when I was 21. It had a ARM chip and a 586 chip on two boards. dual boot, way back in mid 90. you could add sections together to make a bigger computer up to 7 sections. the case was made of the same plastic the crash helmets are made from.
jamesleetrigg 4 years ago
Someone was planning ahead when they designed the original BBC computer, which morphed into the Archimedes, because, even though an 8-bit computer, it had a 32-bit address space.
Gerry319 3 years ago
how much did Microsoft pay the acorn CEO to get him to recommend vista i wouldn't recommend that crap
hamster700 4 years ago
opms ment to say Risc not Risk LOL
arranmc182 4 years ago
what a grate computer shame Acorn now make shitty windows based laptops they use to make the best Risk Computers the world has eva seen just look at the ARM processor its still used to this day
arranmc182 4 years ago
Nothing to do with Acorn Computers Ltd 1978-1998. They've just hijacked the name, to confuse people (Wikipedia disambiguates them neatly). Acorn never built Windows PCs and fought to the death (as a company) for that cause. Can't believe trading standards allow this.
kgm1000uk 3 years ago
@kgm1000uk What does that make the RiscPC, though?
(Not sure that they shipped any with Windows, but they certainly marketed the 486 cards for that very purpose.)
bhtooefr 1 year ago
Being an Amiga lover, I always did appreciate how acorn worked. Very responsive and usable, unlike todays OS's.
nutellajunkie 4 years ago 14
Yeah me too, and i totally agree with everything you've said :)
blade004 4 years ago
@nutellajunkie Only thing that comes any where near the power & stability of the Amiga OS is BSD/Linux/Solaris even there not as stable
arranmc182 1 year ago
ooh look at that fancy keyboard
crazy87jim 4 years ago
Nice video. This is a powerful computer.
Melissadef 4 years ago 3
Hi mickeya7, what motivates you to make such a comment? There was a whole software and hardware industry in britain and around the world covering any field you might ask for. If you needed to "exchange" software with other users, then that was also well possible at meetings.
liamnital 4 years ago 2
The Archimedes was a great machine which could not actually be used for anything due to total lack of any software.
mickeya7 4 years ago
Unfortunately you're very wrong and in each category you could find impressive software (from Impression word processor to Sibelius for music composition).
I think you never owned such a machine to say there were no software.
Yes there were few games but everything for the rest
Clive0075 4 years ago
£1500 for a compaq running windows £700 4 archimedes i now which one id choose
hamster700 4 years ago