For home computer users, the end of the 1980s was the era of 16-bit computers. The challenge facing manufacturers of 8-bit machines through the middle of the decade was to transfer their range and customers to the new hardware, and the different brands each did this in their own way. Commodore and Atari had 68000-based powerhouses, and Apple had their 16-bit-upgraded IIGS for the middle ground below the Mac, but what about Acorn, makers of the BBC Micro? They had the Archimedes, and [RetroBytes] takes us through how they packaged their 32-bit ARM processor for consumers.
The A3000 was the computer you wanted if you were a geeky British kid at the end of that decade, even if an Amiga or an ST was what you got. Schools had bought a few of the desktop Archimedes’, so if you were lucky you’d got to know Arthur and then RiscOS, so you knew just how fast these things were compared to the competition. The video below the break takes a dive into the decisions behind the design of this first ARM consumer product, and along the way it explains a few things we didn’t know at the time. We all know what happened to Acorn through the 1990s and we all use ARM processors today, so it’s a fascinating watch. If only an extra two hundred quid had been in the kitty back then and we could have bought one ourselves.
If you have never used an Archimedes you can get pretty close today with another Cambridge-designed and ARM-powered computer. RiscOS never went away, and you can run it on a Raspberry Pi. As we found, it’s still pretty useful.
Hi. I think this advertisement here is a must see.
It captures the atmosphere of amazement of the technology of the day.
You can hear the proudness of Acorn of its own achivement, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK5AZrg3ZD8
I just love the insanity that it’s been rigged so that the ‘MMU’ is only on the address bus (just does address/bank translation and recognizes writes to ROM space as commands), and the video chip is only on the data bus (just processes what’s being read from memory when the ‘MMU’ flags it as being video data).
That’s… not actually weird at all.
Would have put IBM to shame but if it didn’t have a FPU then what
I still have a Risc PC at my ancestral home – I dread to think what state the internals are in! I was an Acorn (Electron, Beeb, Archimedes and Risc PC) lad through and through!
Go get the battery cut out and neutralise the pcb asap, or let someone help out, they need saving, not left to rot :(
That’s not the orginal battery, the original has been removed and the PCB cleaned. That’s a modern leak proof verison.
If you haven’t already done so, you will want to replace the barrel battery with a coin cell battery as the original barrel batteries are known for leaking and damaging the PCB.
I never could afford one in the 80s, way outside my price range. I got an Atari 1040STe instead. A friend of mine was recently clearing out his attic and found 2 Archimedes PCs he’d completely forgotten about. He did quickly realise what they were worth, so I still couldn’t get my hands on one.
My mum being a teacher we had all Acorn computers, a BBC Model B followed by an A3000 as we had access to a staff discount.
I packed all my Acorns away in boxes in the loft before I left home to collect once I had somewhere stable to live.
Sadly my parents threw it all in the bin without asking. 🤬
I remember switching on a friend’s Amiga to be presented with….
Nothing.
Apparently you had to put a disk with the operating system on it which they didn’t have because nobody did anything but play games with it.
RiscOS ROMs FTW.
“apparently” you were a bit thick then 🤡🤣
You should have at least seen a picture of a hand holding a floppy, telling you what to do, or if it was a later model, you’d have got an animation of a floppy being inserted!
Of course, Amigas were designed to do more than just play Granny’s Garden, so they had to rely on more than just a ROM ;)
So your saying nothing is better than something? Typical amiga halfwit. Amigas were designed to do far less than the archimedes and were much less capable and the OS on floppy was also much less capable.
This is a ludicrous assertion.
ROMs were expensive, limited in space, and difficult to upgrade. Putting the bare minimum inside the ROM for boot is the sensible thing to do. It allowed Commodore to sell Amigas for gaming and also professionally with hard drives with the full OS (several MB by version 3) on the hard drive.
Nothing is only bad if you don’t have software, and every Amiga came with software.
The core of the Amiga OS was a sophisticated preemptive multi tasking os, the bulk of it contained in 512k rom. riscos was an inferior cooperative system with many limitations.
Oh, well. That must have hurt. :( Unfortunately, a lot of parents are like that, so please don’t let it put you down so much.
Either they don’t realize what they do or they are being cleaning mad and obsessed with throwing out everything that seems “unnecessary”.
On a bright side though, it’s just hardware. It’s not easy/cheap, but you can buy that stuff “back” within a few years.
The memories and the fact that you were “there” at the time are much more worth.
That fact allows you to exchange experience with other Acorn users.
Seriously, there might be quite a few people/collectors who envy you for having real, own memories about using these computers.
I suppose the majority probably knows the Acorns mainly through magazines, internet or YouTube.
Before I reached a certain age, I used to think it was “cleaning obsession”.
But then the years roll by and you realise that your own death is becoming increasingly likely. This perception is due in no small part to attending one funeral after another of the older generation.
When the remaining parent dies, the next generation has to clear out the property. It’s a long and upsetting task. Your parents know this from their own experience. So we do our best to do most of the work for you.
It isn’t helped by the fact that the family home is often regarded by the children as a free storage facility for all the crap that they hold dear, but not enough for it to take up space in their own home.
Useful for only one of the 200+ countries worldwide…
I thought it was a neat article and I learned things from it. I’m not British.
Not everything can be about everyone. Some things are more specific, but are still neat. Like that French compuserve thing Minitel. Neat. French!
“Minitel” (Télétel) was part of the “Videotex” (no -t) family, actually.
The British “Prestel” and the German/Austrian/Swiss (?) “BTX” service, too.
Sweden called it “Prestel Plus”, Denmark “Teledata”, Netherlands “Viditel”, Spain “Ibertex” and Italy “Videotel”.
In early 90s, co-operation/communication between these services even happened, I think. You could reach one via the other. Send messages (non e-mail)..
Japan had a similar service called “Captain”, I believe.
So you don’t own anything with an ARM processor in it and you’re not interested in the history of that architecture then.
Of course the BBC Micro wasn’t Acorn’s last computer. It was followed by the Master System before the Archimedes, so that’s at least 2 computers (assuming the rest of the world counts the same was as in Britain)
A lot of talk about the education market for this computer. In the UK the Tesco Computers for Schools incentive where parents and friends got a voucher when they shopped there and ended them to their kid’s schools to collect and trade in for computers and software, had Acorn equipment for the first 2 (I think) years before switching to IBM compatibile systems later. Many schools got an acorn A3000 and A4000 through this scheme
I was a British school kid in the 80’s and while the Archimedes was a revelation over the very staid BBC Micros, I don’t remember many kids wanting one – they wanted the machines with the games, so C64, Amiga, Atari ST especially if your parents wouldn’t buy you a games console. The IBM PS/2’s displaced the Acorns pretty quickly in school.
I do remember our school getting a ludicrously expensive Canon Bubblejet COLOUR printer that needed special paper and getting to DRAW something with a MOUSE (wow! a MOUSE!) and then actually print it in colour – of course everyone immediately did flood fill in lurid colours and then printed out a huge block of ink, and moving the mouse while the printer was working created lines across the print for some reason.
I remember when I saw an Amiga 500 in school. My Physics teacher was playing Lotus 2 on it in lunchbreaks. At that moment I knew I needed one.
I also remember seeing Zarch (aka Virus) on the one single Archimedes at my primary school. They showed us a few amazing games, a paint program etc. The GUI was mindblowing compared to the C64s, Electrons and BBCs we usually used, which you had to use BASIC on to do anything. When I got to University I knew a few people who had Archimedes machines. They were really interesting and obviously incredibly powerful, but there were hardly any games and most software was educational and a bit…boring.
Back around 2001 I got an A3000 from Ebay for about £30. I only got it to play the fairly unique version of Elite on the Archimedes, and having played that a few times it went in the loft. In the last few years I dug it out, installed a CF hard disk adapter and started messing with it some more. Clearly it was well ahead of its time. The GUI was comparable to Amiga’s Workbench and the OS is certainly interesting. The machine is mostly designed around its CPU which was extremely powerful for its time. You can tell that games and software use the CPU to accomplish most graphical effects. It’s quite an impressive machine. Acorn had a stranglehold on the UK educational market for a time with the BBC, and then the first few Archimedes machines. Unfortunately they never really managed to break out of that educational niche, and once schools started moving on to PCs, their business slowly died.
Loved the BBC Micro at school and my Speccy at home. My school let me borrow an Archimedes over the summer holidays and enjoyed it a lot but end of that summer ai wanted and Amiga just like everyone else.