The Evolution of Computing: A Journey Through Time with Acorn Computers

I've had the pleasure of working with various computers throughout my career, and I've seen firsthand how technology has evolved over time. From the humble beginnings of Acorn Computers to the modern machines we use today, it's been a wild ride. In this article, I'll take you on a journey through the history of computing, highlighting some of the most notable milestones and innovations.

My first encounter with Acorn computers was in Moscow, Johannesburg, Seattle, and many other places where these machines were used to automate television broadcasts. The system I worked on was based on an Acorn machine that could be set up quickly and easily, thanks to its tool-less design. This allowed us to focus on the programming aspect of the job, rather than wrestling with the hardware. The operating system was in ROM, which meant it didn't require a hard disk to spin up before loading. Instead, the system simply turned on and worked, making it ideal for time-critical applications like television automation.

The Acorn machine I used was a version of what the company I work for used to sell. We loved these machines because they were so versatile and could be used for a wide range of tasks. They were also relatively affordable, which made them accessible to smaller organizations and individuals. In the mid-to-late 1990s, we started using Windows and Macs in our operations, but the Acorn machine remained popular among certain groups due to its reliability and ease of use.

One of the most interesting things about the Acorn machine is its interface. When you ran an application, like the drawing program, you got a menu bar that was similar to what we see today on Macs and Windows computers. The folklore goes that someone who worked on the Acorn machine before joined Microsoft and contributed to the development of the Windows 95 start menu. While I'm not sure if this is entirely true, it's certainly how the story goes.

The welcome disc that came with the Archimedes computer was a highlight of my time using these machines. It included various applications, including the famous game "Lander," which was released in 1987 and became a cult classic. The game featured 3D graphics, which were revolutionary at the time. Although it was initially intended as a demo, it was later ported to other platforms, including the ZX Spectrum on an 8-bit machine.

The Archimedes computer was also notable for its mouse-based interface. The control system was incredibly sensitive, making it easy to navigate and interact with the machine. However, this sensitivity could also be a curse, as even small movements could result in unintended consequences. I remember spending hours exploring the game "Lander" on the Archimedes without realizing that my character was actually falling through the landscape.

Over time, Acorn Computers continued to innovate and release new machines, including the A500 and A600 series. These computers were popular among hobbyists and gamers, who appreciated their speed and capabilities. Although they never quite reached the mainstream success of some other platforms, they maintained a loyal following throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Today, Acorn Computers is no longer a major player in the computing industry, but its legacy lives on through the many machines it helped to inspire. The Archimedes computer, in particular, remains a beloved retro machine among collectors and enthusiasts. Its influence can be seen in modern computers, from the mouse-based interfaces to the emphasis on tool-less design.

If you're interested in exploring the world of Acorn Computers further, I recommend seeking out copies of the welcome disc or an Archimedes emulator. These machines are still capable of running some classic software, and it's amazing to see how they hold up today. Who knows? You might just discover a new passion for retro computing and the magic of the Archimedes machine.

In conclusion, my journey through the history of Acorn Computers has been a fascinating one. From its humble beginnings as a tool-less design machine to its later success in the market, this company has left an indelible mark on the world of computing. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a retro computing aficionado, or simply someone interested in the evolution of technology, I hope this article has given you a glimpse into the incredible story of Acorn Computers and the Archimedes machine.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso yet again it's another birthday in the computer world another home computer it's got its 30th birthday so we have the mac in 2014. we have the atari st in 2015. we probably should have done the amiga in 2016 but we didn't um and this year it's the acorn archimedes gotta ask a question at this point dr bagley because this is a british computer but why would anyone around the rest of the world know about this computer they probably wouldn't know about the computer directly they probably know a lot about the processor in it so a couple of years ago we did a video on the 30th anniversary of the processor i think only half the 12 billion arms shipped in the last year went into mobile phones because this was the first computer ever to use the arm cpu the arm cpu was developed because of this computer right it was developed to drive acorns next generation and this was what they developed this is what came out of that development yeah let's find one still in its original box all right so where are we going this way this is just like the sun all over again yeah absolutely not quite going as far as that did have a comment asking what kind of lift it was actually so here we go it's a serious cybernetics um lift i did manage to go to do weird things the other day so um it's a cone left there you go for the person you want to know what lifting around right we're going this way and we're going to my secret hiding chamber another archimedes still in its original box this is one i bought off ebay a couple of years ago but what i was fascinated by is it's actually still in its original box but this is probably one of the earlier models of it because when acorn released the archimedes in 87 there were four different versions released i think one of them never actually left the market but there was the a300 series in the a400 series the 400 series was a professional model and can come with one mega ram or four mega ram and the hard disk if you wanted it the a300 was aimed at the home user or schools it came with either 512 kilobytes of ram or one mega ram so that's the 305 but there are other machines in the range the archimedes 310 is also a bbc micro when i got this one off ebay it was advertised as a a one meg machine but i realized looking at the box and the serial number on the bottom it had originally been a 512 512k machine which had then been upgraded at home made 1987 in the uk we won't use this one we're going to use the one upstairs because it actually works a bit better this one's uh got an earlier version of the operating system on we're going to have a chat about what this machine did and why it was certainly in the uk very very popular in the uk anyone of a certain age will be very familiar with these because they were bought by pretty much most schools in the uk so everyone sort of used them as a kid the interesting thing about the archimedes line is it continued the tradition of being a bbc micro certainly the a310 and the a305 did so they had the red function keys which were sort of the staple thing they were also used by the bbc on screen as well so lots of tv shows doctor who and other prime time shows if they needed a computer it would often be an acorn computer perhaps rebadged with some fictional brand and so on um that appeared on there doing whatever it was needed to do but they were also used behind the scenes often linked up to external software to generate the graphics using lots of prime time shows when kids would phone in play the little on-screen game yeah yeah yeah yeah you're phoned up it's left left left left right so all of those were actually done using the acorn archimedes computers we talked about everything on turkey but actually the thing you have to remember about this when it came out this machine was incredible for the time at the time it came out it was a home computer it sold for less than a thousand pounds and it gave you four mips four million instructions per second worth of computing power that's roughly the same amount of computing power that you could get in something like probably the sun workstation that we looked at in the previous video so that's on 3160 which is pretty top of the line for 86 was probably about the same sort of power as you suddenly got in a home computer and actually at that same time sun introduced their spark cpu and we're starting to move to risk based architecture so the nice thing about this is the risk machine when it was originally released it had an operating system called arthur don't ask why um no one really knows that basically was very similar to what was on the bbc micro except that it did support windows mics and so on so it's got the same sort of user interface it wasn't really useful at all on the original release that came with the later version which was renamed to risc os which you can still get today and install on your raspberry pi so the operating system's still available um and it generally worked you had multitasking cooperative rather than preemptive so if one program was sort of carried away doing something and didn't relieve control to everything else then you sort of had to wait for it to finish but it all boosted up out of rom so they turned on and off very very quickly you get started within seconds so risk os 2 came along about 89 with sort of some of the later versions of the machine and it continued and you could upgrade it so this machine's had the ram upgraded reform bag it's got an arm 3 card in it's got acorns local area networking in there and things and a scuzzy card which gives it some nice big hardware so yeah it was a really nice machine for this time you could also get a version that ran unix so acorn ported unix to it not linux admin you have a proper unix to run on this machines and so you had actually quite a powerful set of machines that were released at that point certainly with the arm3 chip they're as powerful as many other unix workstations at the time if not more so of course technology marched on and so they produced later versions so you got sort of less interesting looking versions with the a5000 which alex used to do a few videos years ago the design of these is quite nice this one's got two drives i like it um and then of course you've got later machines which sean is very familiar with which was of course the risk pc this was the sort of the end of the line for the archimedes range he lost the archimedes badge and looked a bit like a playstation 2 before the playstation 2 at that point in fact all computers started to look like this because atari had a prototype that had this sort of wedge shape effect but yeah this is the one that um i should let sean talk about what this one really got used for all right let's hold the camera i shall give you a quick yeah you want to tell us about these it keeps trapping me into being on the wrong side of the camera absolutely one of my first jobs and one of the reasons i got so heavily into computing is i used to help install this kind of machine at um television stations so i used to go around the world installing them places like moscow um johannesburg uh seattle you name it i've been there and often put one of these machines in so this is a version of what the company i work for used to sell and what we used to love about them was they were tool-less so you could get into them very quickly and easily and they were pretty much instant on a bit like steve just mentioned that the os was in rom which meant they didn't have to wait for a hard disk to spin up to load in the operating system they just kind of turned on and worked so right i've forgotten how to put it back on so let's leave it for a minute steve can show you inside and talk about a bit more technically but we used to use them for on-air uh television automation so very very kind of time-critical uh application and you wanted you needed confidence from the people operating them so these things fantastic for that the system's moved through to using windows and macs and all sorts of stuff since then but certainly in mid to late 90s early 2000s and even now some of these are still in operation transmitting television programs i'm not sure i could name any because i haven't worked in that area for a while one of the interesting things that you initially notice about this is that when you run an application let's run the drawing application whichever kid used to though is you get what is effectively equivalent to the dock that's in os x or the start menu that is in uh windows from 95 on us so the folklore goes is that someone went from working with acorn machines like this to microsoft and took his acorn with him and apparently was seen and they decided that's where the windows 95 start menu was going to come from this little bar crossbone whether i believe that or not but that's certainly how the folklore goes so you end up with the icons down here and you could then sort it and it often certainly by risk off three came with the applications built in to rom and so you could load them up very very quickly and so you could start to draw pretty pictures you had bezier splines in there so again from 1987 this is the original welcome distance perhaps the thing that the arm archimedes when it first released was most famous for was a demonstration or a game that was on the actual welcome disc and it was actually released as a full game so hopefully this will run that so this is what happens when you try and run 1987 software on a machine operating system from 1993 even then it was out of date so let's find a slightly later version of the welcome disc we use the other drive that's just showing off two floppy drives oh absolutely oops and that disc doesn't work um somewhere i've got there we are another copy of applications just too the copy of application is just one there we are a backup copy so sometimes if i please would die so you often would make backup copies um let's try this one sounds more hopeful and so there was this game called lander which became the full game's arch and when this game was released it was sort of full 3d graphics which was not really seen like this and the idea was that you had to sort of fly the spaceship around the um it says it was just a demonstration and i was never any good at it i remember being blown away by this yeah i think everyone was when it came out so this was the sort of the demo again you've got the 87 thing there written by david brabant of elite fame who then wanted to be involved with the creation of the raspberry pi this originally came out and everyone said no you couldn't do this on anything but the aiken argument is because you need the power it was later ported to the game virus to the st and the amiga and then in a true bizarre turn of fate someone actually ported it to run on the zx spectrum on an 8-bit machine with the four megahertz processes so perhaps they were everything but certainly the the acorn version on the archimedes was the smoothest the control system was controlled by the mouse and it's incredibly sensitive so even on the launch pad if you're not careful you can blow things up and you can sort of explore because you've got some interesting sort of clipping issues there is the house sort of falls through the landscape has that been uh is that available online do you know that um there's definitely clones with about i'm sure if you look in the right places you could find copies of the discs and an arm emulator an archimedes emulator to run it on yes it's a bit like the old moon lander game you used to get with him no game over and so there were no more computer files as sean's too busy playing games on the archimedesso yet again it's another birthday in the computer world another home computer it's got its 30th birthday so we have the mac in 2014. we have the atari st in 2015. we probably should have done the amiga in 2016 but we didn't um and this year it's the acorn archimedes gotta ask a question at this point dr bagley because this is a british computer but why would anyone around the rest of the world know about this computer they probably wouldn't know about the computer directly they probably know a lot about the processor in it so a couple of years ago we did a video on the 30th anniversary of the processor i think only half the 12 billion arms shipped in the last year went into mobile phones because this was the first computer ever to use the arm cpu the arm cpu was developed because of this computer right it was developed to drive acorns next generation and this was what they developed this is what came out of that development yeah let's find one still in its original box all right so where are we going this way this is just like the sun all over again yeah absolutely not quite going as far as that did have a comment asking what kind of lift it was actually so here we go it's a serious cybernetics um lift i did manage to go to do weird things the other day so um it's a cone left there you go for the person you want to know what lifting around right we're going this way and we're going to my secret hiding chamber another archimedes still in its original box this is one i bought off ebay a couple of years ago but what i was fascinated by is it's actually still in its original box but this is probably one of the earlier models of it because when acorn released the archimedes in 87 there were four different versions released i think one of them never actually left the market but there was the a300 series in the a400 series the 400 series was a professional model and can come with one mega ram or four mega ram and the hard disk if you wanted it the a300 was aimed at the home user or schools it came with either 512 kilobytes of ram or one mega ram so that's the 305 but there are other machines in the range the archimedes 310 is also a bbc micro when i got this one off ebay it was advertised as a a one meg machine but i realized looking at the box and the serial number on the bottom it had originally been a 512 512k machine which had then been upgraded at home made 1987 in the uk we won't use this one we're going to use the one upstairs because it actually works a bit better this one's uh got an earlier version of the operating system on we're going to have a chat about what this machine did and why it was certainly in the uk very very popular in the uk anyone of a certain age will be very familiar with these because they were bought by pretty much most schools in the uk so everyone sort of used them as a kid the interesting thing about the archimedes line is it continued the tradition of being a bbc micro certainly the a310 and the a305 did so they had the red function keys which were sort of the staple thing they were also used by the bbc on screen as well so lots of tv shows doctor who and other prime time shows if they needed a computer it would often be an acorn computer perhaps rebadged with some fictional brand and so on um that appeared on there doing whatever it was needed to do but they were also used behind the scenes often linked up to external software to generate the graphics using lots of prime time shows when kids would phone in play the little on-screen game yeah yeah yeah yeah you're phoned up it's left left left left right so all of those were actually done using the acorn archimedes computers we talked about everything on turkey but actually the thing you have to remember about this when it came out this machine was incredible for the time at the time it came out it was a home computer it sold for less than a thousand pounds and it gave you four mips four million instructions per second worth of computing power that's roughly the same amount of computing power that you could get in something like probably the sun workstation that we looked at in the previous video so that's on 3160 which is pretty top of the line for 86 was probably about the same sort of power as you suddenly got in a home computer and actually at that same time sun introduced their spark cpu and we're starting to move to risk based architecture so the nice thing about this is the risk machine when it was originally released it had an operating system called arthur don't ask why um no one really knows that basically was very similar to what was on the bbc micro except that it did support windows mics and so on so it's got the same sort of user interface it wasn't really useful at all on the original release that came with the later version which was renamed to risc os which you can still get today and install on your raspberry pi so the operating system's still available um and it generally worked you had multitasking cooperative rather than preemptive so if one program was sort of carried away doing something and didn't relieve control to everything else then you sort of had to wait for it to finish but it all boosted up out of rom so they turned on and off very very quickly you get started within seconds so risk os 2 came along about 89 with sort of some of the later versions of the machine and it continued and you could upgrade it so this machine's had the ram upgraded reform bag it's got an arm 3 card in it's got acorns local area networking in there and things and a scuzzy card which gives it some nice big hardware so yeah it was a really nice machine for this time you could also get a version that ran unix so acorn ported unix to it not linux admin you have a proper unix to run on this machines and so you had actually quite a powerful set of machines that were released at that point certainly with the arm3 chip they're as powerful as many other unix workstations at the time if not more so of course technology marched on and so they produced later versions so you got sort of less interesting looking versions with the a5000 which alex used to do a few videos years ago the design of these is quite nice this one's got two drives i like it um and then of course you've got later machines which sean is very familiar with which was of course the risk pc this was the sort of the end of the line for the archimedes range he lost the archimedes badge and looked a bit like a playstation 2 before the playstation 2 at that point in fact all computers started to look like this because atari had a prototype that had this sort of wedge shape effect but yeah this is the one that um i should let sean talk about what this one really got used for all right let's hold the camera i shall give you a quick yeah you want to tell us about these it keeps trapping me into being on the wrong side of the camera absolutely one of my first jobs and one of the reasons i got so heavily into computing is i used to help install this kind of machine at um television stations so i used to go around the world installing them places like moscow um johannesburg uh seattle you name it i've been there and often put one of these machines in so this is a version of what the company i work for used to sell and what we used to love about them was they were tool-less so you could get into them very quickly and easily and they were pretty much instant on a bit like steve just mentioned that the os was in rom which meant they didn't have to wait for a hard disk to spin up to load in the operating system they just kind of turned on and worked so right i've forgotten how to put it back on so let's leave it for a minute steve can show you inside and talk about a bit more technically but we used to use them for on-air uh television automation so very very kind of time-critical uh application and you wanted you needed confidence from the people operating them so these things fantastic for that the system's moved through to using windows and macs and all sorts of stuff since then but certainly in mid to late 90s early 2000s and even now some of these are still in operation transmitting television programs i'm not sure i could name any because i haven't worked in that area for a while one of the interesting things that you initially notice about this is that when you run an application let's run the drawing application whichever kid used to though is you get what is effectively equivalent to the dock that's in os x or the start menu that is in uh windows from 95 on us so the folklore goes is that someone went from working with acorn machines like this to microsoft and took his acorn with him and apparently was seen and they decided that's where the windows 95 start menu was going to come from this little bar crossbone whether i believe that or not but that's certainly how the folklore goes so you end up with the icons down here and you could then sort it and it often certainly by risk off three came with the applications built in to rom and so you could load them up very very quickly and so you could start to draw pretty pictures you had bezier splines in there so again from 1987 this is the original welcome distance perhaps the thing that the arm archimedes when it first released was most famous for was a demonstration or a game that was on the actual welcome disc and it was actually released as a full game so hopefully this will run that so this is what happens when you try and run 1987 software on a machine operating system from 1993 even then it was out of date so let's find a slightly later version of the welcome disc we use the other drive that's just showing off two floppy drives oh absolutely oops and that disc doesn't work um somewhere i've got there we are another copy of applications just too the copy of application is just one there we are a backup copy so sometimes if i please would die so you often would make backup copies um let's try this one sounds more hopeful and so there was this game called lander which became the full game's arch and when this game was released it was sort of full 3d graphics which was not really seen like this and the idea was that you had to sort of fly the spaceship around the um it says it was just a demonstration and i was never any good at it i remember being blown away by this yeah i think everyone was when it came out so this was the sort of the demo again you've got the 87 thing there written by david brabant of elite fame who then wanted to be involved with the creation of the raspberry pi this originally came out and everyone said no you couldn't do this on anything but the aiken argument is because you need the power it was later ported to the game virus to the st and the amiga and then in a true bizarre turn of fate someone actually ported it to run on the zx spectrum on an 8-bit machine with the four megahertz processes so perhaps they were everything but certainly the the acorn version on the archimedes was the smoothest the control system was controlled by the mouse and it's incredibly sensitive so even on the launch pad if you're not careful you can blow things up and you can sort of explore because you've got some interesting sort of clipping issues there is the house sort of falls through the landscape has that been uh is that available online do you know that um there's definitely clones with about i'm sure if you look in the right places you could find copies of the discs and an arm emulator an archimedes emulator to run it on yes it's a bit like the old moon lander game you used to get with him no game over and so there were no more computer files as sean's too busy playing games on the archimedes\n"