Fred Harris Introduces the Acorn Archimedes BBC A3000 Part 1

Fred Harris from Playschool and BBC Micro Live fame introduces the computer which seemed to be in every school until the late 90s, and is still in some schools even now!

Apologies for the sound/picture quality in places, it's off a very old video!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• acorn
• archimedes
• a3000
• bbc
• micro
• live
• fred
• harris
• playschool
• zarch
• lander
• genesis
• lotus
• 123
• computer
• literacy
• project

[animelubbor432]

so now wait a minute. Britain had pretty much most of the connections in the keyboard, so im assuming that the rest of the stuff was in the monitor?

[JSYBen]

@animelubbor432 Nothing on the monitor except a SCART to plug the monitor into the keyboard and the obvious brightness controls. All the other plugs were in the keyboard. Bizarrely you did plug the Mouse in underneath the keyboard though i seem to remember.

[JSYBen]

Argh, yet again YouTube screws me over. This video now goes out of sync very quickly. Sorry nothing to do with me, it was fine when it was first uploaded.

[gomemdesoto]

It's the processor that these systems used is where the greatness lies.

The British designed ARM is a huge success, for portable and embedded applications. Something like 90% of all cellphones use the ARM processor, and certainly all Nokia, Sony-Ericsson & Windows Mobile based cellphones have an ARM processor, as does the Apple iPhone. This IMO makes it the most successful 32 bit processor ever.

ARM is also widely used in other embedded applications like car ECUs, MP3 players, GameBoy

[Stevenup7004]

Trippy xD

[3nasacova]

Ah this takes me back. We had two of them in the computer room at school. They must have been the shizznit back then because the day they arrived our two resident computer geeks commandeered them. To my knowledge nobody else ever got to touch them. I know I didn't.

Interestingly, neither of them ever did anything noteworthy on them.

But not to worry. I have a computer now that is about a billion times better, and those two fuckers aren't allowed to touch it!

[LOPEZdJUNGLIST]

mr bean and his late 80s computing

[wikichris]

Someone correct me if I am wrong but these very bloody expensive even compared to the Amiga and ST.

[notanfningain]

could no one tell him the floppy is inside a protective plastic case

[trellis6]

@animelubbor432 - No, no. You're thinking about this the wrong way. That item is not the "keyboard" - that is the entire computer. The computer has the keyboard built into it, like all of the early home computer systems. I don't think it was a peculiarly British thing - the American Commodore and Atari machines were the same, as were Japanese MSX machines etc. It was years before home computers started having keyboards separate from the computer itself.

[zark212]

I bet he was playing Strip poker after the cameras were switched off lol.

[thesman32]

ah Fred Harris i remember when he used to do tv shows about the bbc micro on bbc tv.

yea the 80s were all good.

[TheSophera]

@MustNotRead Well, remember that the Learning Curve package, which this is explaining, was sold in 1990. That was only the same year in which Windows 3.0 was released - not even Windows 3.1! So the whole thing with mice and windows and icons was new at the time. :D

[TheSophera]

@xadam2dudex It does indeed! This computer didn't even have a hard disc at the time so everything had to be in ROM anyway.