Acorn Archimedes is 25
The Acorn Archimedes is 25 years old this month. The first machines based on the company's ARM (Acorn Risc Machine) processor were announced in June 1987, the year after the 32-bit chip itself was launched. Four versions of the Archimedes were released in 1987: the A305, A310, A410 and A440. The first two had 512KB and 1MB of …
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"The 32b ARM vs the 16b 68K made a difference."
Rubbish, nothing to do with number of "bits" (both 32-bit ISAs), everything to do with a huge difference in cycles per instruction. (32-bit instructions were only slightly slower than 16-bit ones on the 68000, most of the difference between the ARM and the 68000 was due to the fact that one was implemented as a pipeline because it was easy to do so, the other was not - because it was next to impossible.)
The good old Archie
Blazingly fast and way, way ahead of it's time. You could write stuff in BASIC on it that was as fast as MC on other systems. It could have been a world-beater.
Re: The good old Archie
You mean: "It SHOULD have been a world-beater."
Great memories
I remember these from my school days, and how in awe we all were about the GUI. Having sneaky games of Lander when the teacher wasn't looking. Using the art program to draw the usual cock-and-balls, etc.
I found a great bug in the operating system that you could use to bork your classmate's floppy disks. You could drag and drop a parent directory into it's child, and then it would recursively copy until the disk filled up. For some reason, it wsn't possible to simply delete the directories, so your only recourse was to reformat the disk.
Memories:)
My dad bought an A310, then we got an 80MB HDD for it, then we got an A5000, then dad got a RiscPC and upgraded to a StrongARM with the PC card as well. Finally when I was a student what else was I supposed to spend my money on ;)
BASIC V was amazing, I believe the whole module would fit into the cache on a StrongARM so it ran interpreted BASIC ridiculously fast.
Re: Memories:)
You're right about the BASIC on the ARM. As well as being one of the better BASICs around, with proper control structures, it was incredibly fast.
I wrote various programs in both C (compiled with the Acorn ANSI C compiler) and BASIC and in almost every case the BASIC version ran faster. This included number crunching programs.
Amazing!
As an Acorn fan girl...
I loved my BBC micro. The first affordable ARM machine was the Acorn A3000. So I got that when it came out. By then I'd already been programming ARM code on a Uni Archimedes 305. I've known ARM assembler for almost 25 years. I feel old!
I still have my A3000 (plus a spare for parts) and my RiscPC which I replaced it (with a couple of spares including one which was an ex Acorn development machine). My RiscPC had the 486 card, 4MB RAM, 2MB VRAM and a 130MB SCSI HD. Alas the HD has died.
Basically those machines founded my career. On the A3000 I developed my first piece of commercial software. I produced an ARM Linux distribution for them in the 90s. I am now a software consultant and my work still requires me to do ARM dev. Finally to go full circle my Raspberry Pi turned up this morning. I will be putting RISC OS on it to play with.
Re: As an Acorn fan girl...
Don't worry, it you want to feel old try still remembering 6502 instruction codes in hex!
I rather missed out on playing with ARM in the early days. I suspect I have a few years on you. I do remember playing lander on one once, and having a true jaw on the floor moment. An insanely powerful machine. Unfortunately I couldn't afford one :'(
Apart from that, I'm not going to talk to you any more... I'm still waiting for my RaspPi :-(
Re: As an Acorn fan girl...
I'm not sure you are older than me :-). I can remember that RTS is 0x60 and JMP is 0x4C. But that's about it.
Re: As an Acorn fan girl...
Actually I remember the JMP instruction because of the FX calls to program the BREAK action. Three bytes, the first of which was JMP, the next two being the address of your hook routine. :-)
Re: As an Acorn fan girl...
> try still remembering 6502 instruction codes in hex!
Haha! Those were the days.
Who didn't enjoy hooking the reset key on an apple ][ to move an image onto the graphics page and display it?
At least for my A-level exams they had the decency to base questions on assembly. I know - they were soft on us!
Re: As an Acorn fan girl...
That nicely sums up the ethos behind the Raspberry Pi.
Re: As an Acorn fan girl...
I grow old, I grow old.
I have the bottoms of my loops unrolled.
Re: As an Acorn fan girl...
IIRC the first 3 byte pairs of the 6502 memory map were the jump points for reset, NMI and IRQ... Although I could be wrong, it's been a while!
I shall consult Rodnay Zaks when I get home tonight!
Other scary things stuck in my mind:
VDU23,224,24,60,90,255,24,36,66,36
No wonder there's no room left for anything useful!
Why was the A7000+ missed off the article?
I still have one of these beauties up and running with RISC OS 4. One of the most reliable machines I have ever used!
I credit the Amiga as the real computer that I cut my programming teeth on, but without the Archimedes at school I think I would have lost interest in computers as at the time I only had a C64. Can't for the life of me remember the name of the database application we used but at the time I was very impressed!
Database software
PipeDream, perchance? It was a database-cum-spreadsheet-cum-word processor. Later ported to the Z88.
Lander in BASIC?
I'm not sure why people are saying that Lander was written in BASIC. To the best of my knowledge, it was pure ARM code, and I'd be astonished if it went anywhere near Acorn's triangle drawing routines. BBC BASIC on an Archimedes is fast (and the Arthur, although not RISC OS, desktop was written in it), but it's not *that* fast. Minotaur, one of the first commercial games launched for the Archimedes (alongside Zarch), *was* written in BASIC, however.
(Speaking of BASIC, I'm not sure about this "press reset twice and you get the program back" thing. Not in my memory you didn't. I also remember the reset switch being on the back, right next to the headphone socket, where it was easy to reset the device when plugging headphones in. It was still on the back on the RiscPC, even though the power switch was on the front. Never understood that...)
As for comparisons to Virus, I believe Virus had some more enemies - it got harder faster than Zarch - but it was also noticably less pretty; for example, there was no depth cueueing of the background (in Zarch, everything got darker towards the back of the screen). I'd assume that the Amiga version used the blitter, although since there was an ST port I can't guarantee that. I've never played the Spectrum version, but it's high on my "most preposterous port" list. Lander, of course, didn't have all the enemies, let you blow up on the launch pad, and didn't clip the front edge of the landscape properly - but it was very good at training people to play Zarch! (I still maintain that I ought to be able to fly a helicopter, should I ever need to, because of this game.)
Part of the exciting colour scheme of Zarch was that it could use the 256 colour mode, back when the best PCs had original VGA graphics. The 256 colour mode had 16 palette entries (that most people didn't touch) and the rest of the values derived from them; the default mapping was an effective perceptual HSV scheme, accessed from BASIC by 64 base colours (setting the top two bits of each channel) and four levels of "tint" (setting the bottom to bits of all three channels at once), giving you fine grained luma control. It might not have had all the colours of HAM6, but it was pretty effective. Despite a brief foray into VU-3D on the Spectrum, it was probably Render Bender that taught me to think in 3D graphics (and now I work in graphics professionally).
Re: Lander in BASIC?
(Since I've been sad enough to look it up, Virus also didn't adaptively shade the spacecraft according to surface angle like Zarch did, possibly more because it didn't run in enough colours to do so rather than anything to do with calculations.)
Re: Lander in BASIC?
Zarch wasn't BASIC. But I'm pretty sure that Lander was or at least was BASIC game logic with ARM assembler graphics rendering (assembled via the built in assembler).
Re: Lander in BASIC?
I'll believe you, it's just that this thread is the first I've heard of it. There can't have been much logic on the BASIC side, and even a CALL statement to thunk between the two had quite an overhead, so it just seemed unlikely to me. If there's a reference to this, I'll be interested. (Or I may be able to find my old disks and have a look.)
I'm prepared to believe that it might have used BASIC to set itself up, but that seems less likely than doing any BASIC when the program itself was running. I'll go and google this now, but I would have thought that I would have remembered...
Re: Lander in BASIC?
[Okay, I've found an article that claimed that Lander was in BASIC, although I suspect it was only the boot code. Unfortunately, because everyone had a copy, I'm having a little more trouble finding a binary to check. I'm prepared to eat my words, though.]
Re: Lander in BASIC?
[And, while I'm eating my words, the reset button on the Archimedes was, of course, on the back of the keyboard, where it was useful if slightly prone to getting poked by the keyboard coily caable - although it meant the keyboard was nonstandard. The RiscPC's "normal" PS2 keyboard meant the reset button was, as I said, at the back of the machine, where you'd hit it plugging in headphones. Clearly I'm going senile.]
Still have a mint-condition A5000 Alpha (33MHz!) in its box.
It will be kept in working order for my children.
I always thought the Acorns were far ahead of the competition when it came to the user interface. They even got simple stuff right the first time: Having to track your mouse pointer up to the top of the screen in order to access a menu on Apple Macs (or ribbon on MS products - aargh!) seems a stupid idea when you could simply click the middle button and have the menu appear right under your mouse pointer.
Re: Still have a mint-condition A5000 Alpha (33MHz!) in its box.
I absolutely agree about the mouse. Even after Microsoft eventually worked out that their mice had a second button, mousing on Windows still seems stupid compared with the Acorn approach. (Actually, menus at the edges of windows are the worst of all possible worlds - not near the mouse, not where you can get them quickly. I take the Amiga's scheme - like the Mac but invisible until you hold down a mouse button - as second best.)
Add in MouseAxess (we don't need no stinkin' window borders to move things...) and you got a system which was far more usable without a keyboard than most modern PCs.
Which brings me to the things you can do with the three button mouse. None of this "shift-click" to multiple select, that's what Adjust was for. Drag a window without bringing it to the front? Use Adjust. In the file manager, decide whether you want a new window for the directory you're entering or to re-use the current one? Select or Adjust again. I want to say the same thing about the difference between a copy and a move, but it's been too long for me to remember. And, of course, Acorn had the most sensible file save mechanism I've seen (why on earth does every application in Windows need its own way of viewing the file system?)
Ah, rose-tinted goggles. Shame about the lack of pre-emptive multitasking,..
Re: Still have a mint-condition A5000 Alpha (33MHz!) in its box.
"Having to track your mouse pointer up to the top of the screen in order to access a menu on Apple Macs"
You might want to read up on the reasoning behind Apple's approach: it makes a lot of sense to put menus and icons right at the edge of the screen. The physical edge means the pointer can't overshoot, so the "height" of the elements is effectively infinite, making them practically impossible to miss.
Compare with the MS Office 2007 "Ribbon", or the Windows "menu-in-each-window" approach, both of which require the user to stop the pointer much more precisely over the icons and menus. Similarly, pop-up menus still require greater aim.
That's why Apple has generally preferred the single mouse button approach: the mouse is conceptually a finger that you point at things; the button is a tap of that finger. Simplicity. The mouse was never intended as a primary device for power users: the idea was that you'd learn the keyboard shortcuts to your most common operations. (OS X lets you map any key combination you like to any application menu. This is handled at the system level, not at the app level, and it has always been there, even in the pre-OS X days.)
There are three modifier keys on Apple keyboards as standard—"Command", "Option / Alt" and "Control". The PS/2 keyboard only has two, official modifier keys; the Windows key can also be used as one, and Windows itself supports some commands on it, but it's rarely used.
Add in the shift key and you have a lot more key combinations you can use to access application shortcuts directly than on a normal PC. Literally thousands of combinations, so you have plenty of scope to avoid clashes with hard-coded shortcuts. All without using the mouse at all.
The mouse should never, ever, be seen as a primary input device for application functionality. It should only really be needed to manipulate graphical elements. Accessing menus and icons is something it can do, but experiences users should be using keyboard shortcuts for those, not accessing them with a mouse.
You guys do know there are textbooks and proper science behind all this UI design stuff, right?
Re: apple menu
"You might want to read up on the reasoning behind Apple's approach:"
ok so i get that. but why not abandon it when technology made it annoying/stupid? Using an APPLE 30" screen with a giant desktop, got a window down the bottom of the page, all the way up to the top again for the menu. then all the way down the bottom again. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Dual monitors? HAHAHAHHA lets track all the way back over to the 'main' monitor', then alll the way back to our app. very, very ,very, VERY stupid.
Re: Still have a mint-condition A5000 Alpha (33MHz!) in its box.
Do the capacitors still hold?
The motherboard of my old Amiga was felled when a capacitor lost its electrolyte and transformed it into something out of STALKER.
@STB
Just because there are text books does not mean that the way of working is correct or to everybody's liking. Take sociology for example......
I'm sure that there are many things that are completely insane that I can make rational sounding arguments to support. Try reading Douglas Adams' books for rational absurd reasoning (although, yes, I know he was a Mac User, but I'll forgive him that because of his genius)
The Mac way of working is fine if you use single or small numbers of applications. Not for many applications on a screen, like I use all the time.
And the argument about power users using key combinations is crazy. In my world, where I use Windows, CDE on UNIX, KDE, GNOME, and (god forbid) Unity, you just cannot learn every one of the myriad of key sequences. And in case you ask, I am an Emacs user, so am used to quite complex sets of key strokes.
Re: @STB
Yes, the 'text books' were written when it was a single-tasking OS with a 12-inch 512x320 screen. And for that scenario (or similar) the concepts they espouse are very valid. Today, not so much.
Re: Still have a mint-condition A5000 Alpha (33MHz!) in its box.
Yup, studied the textbooks, own "The Design of Everyday Things", did HCI as part of my CompSci course, was a member of SIGHCI for a while. The Mac/Amiga solution is better than trying to aim for the top of a window - as you say, there's a hard stop. However, it doesn't scale well to large or multiple monitors. The Acorn solution of popping up a menu in the same position relative to the mouse meant that muscle memory for menu access worked very well - compared with flinging the mouse at the top of the screen between each interaction, at least; you're incorrect about claiming the need for "greater aim" because the menu was already under the mouse when you start. It's true that context-specific menus (changing the mouse pointer, there's an idea for Microsoft...) needed aim, but no more than pressing a button.
There were plenty of keyboard shortcuts available for common operations on RISC OS, but they were much less necessary than on other systems - claiming power users weren't what the mouse was designed for doesn't mean that making the mouse interface as powerful and usable as possible was a bad thing. Sure, Impression Publisher (which had its own hot keys should you want them) isn't as powerful as InDesign (although it can occasionally give Word a run for its money), but InDesign is unusable if you're using one hand to hold the reference document that's the source of your layout. I'm a little confused as to which keyboard you've been using that has only "Alt" and not "Alt Gr", let alone separate Windows and Menu keys, but - much though I love Emacs, ctrl-alt-meta-cokebottle-x is not a user-friendly short-cut. Acorns had a "copy" key that, who knew, copied things.
I like Macs, but my HCI lecturer was a bit prone to claiming that their interface was perfect - notably "don't make nested menus too deep because you have to click every time to expand them" (not on RISC OS you don't). Acorn's interface guidelines would still do a lot of modern developers good - particularly "never write a large amount of text in a dialogue box and put OK and CANCEL at the bottom - name the buttons for what they do". Acorn never asked you to eject a floppy disk by dragging it to the recycle bin or popped up a "disk not recognized - format? [ok]" box, nor did it expect you to shut down the system by clicking "start" or decide whether it was going to copy or move a file according to where you were putting it. There were some really nice touches - expanding a window off the bottom/right causing the top/left to grow springs to mind.
Not that everything was perfect. It's nice to be able to resize windows from more than one corner (I had a plug-in, although I still think twm had the nicest solution). There was still the odd UI clanger ("Please insert RISC OS 3 ROMs and press any key to continue"), as a co-operative system it could still get locked up by a misbehaving app (although app killers help), it wasn't as dynamic or secure as a modern OS. But some stuff really was done right, and still isn't by almost anything else.
Those were the days
I spent many hours playing 4th dimension games on this... E-Type, Saloon Cars, Nevron, Apocalypse, etc. Maybe you could do an Antique Code Show of these.
We had a word-processor, a paint program and a 9 pin dot-matrix printer. And an adapter that allowed you to use Amiga joysticks via the parallel port. And a handheld scanner!!
The best time came when my mum brought home a digital camera from school that used floppy disks!
Crikey, nostalgia o'clock.
Re: Those were the days
and Chocks Away! Has there ever been a more fun and playable flight sim than Chocks Away?
Re: Those were the days
Starfighter 3000 anyone? I only had the demo, but I learnt to nail that pretty quickly. Might have to drag my old Risc PC 700 out of the attic and fire it up again!
Re: Those were the days
Absolutely there was - Interdictor! With it's colour chart copy protection in the days before colour photocopiers!
Re: Those were the days
"I spent many hours playing 4th dimension games on this... E-Type, Saloon Cars, Nevron, Apocalypse, etc. Maybe you could do an Antique Code Show of these."
El Reg will only review those if by then Stunt Racer 2000 or Star Fight 3000 are ported to Android.
Happy Days
Spent playing Lander on the A5000, as well as other games, I remember E-Type being compatible from the A3000 that the next door neighbours had but on the A5000 the average speed ofthe car would be about 300mph, faster processor seemed to result in a faster car! It was also my introduction to SimCity (many lost hours) and I suspect if I asked my parents would still have it in the loft somewhere and would no doubt still work.
Oh and !Draw was an awesome free package, my brother designed an extension for our house using it (never got built) and the kitchen for our new build house (which did get built), just so much easier to use than Visio and massively cheaper than any fancy CAD package.
And the boot up time of 2 seconds eclipses Widows 7 on a SSD no problem...
Where's the A7000?
I remember these machines so fondly from school.
We had three rooms packed with A3000s that were hooked up via EcoNET to a shared SCSI hard-disk that was turned on and off with a key, and sounded like a gravel chipper. Just before I left school all the machines were updated to A7000s - they were just beautiful, so fast.
My favourite package at school was called Wordsworth (I think?) - it was a word processing and DTP package, incredibly easy to use and very powerful. Reminds me of Apple's Pages today.
The number of fonts included for free with RISC OS was astonishing too. Anyone else write EVERYTHING in that tube/bubble font?
Arthur
My recollection is that there were quite a lot of problems with Arthur and there was a fairly substantial rewrite to produce the rebranded RISC OS.
I had a BBC B in 1982, an A5000 in 1992 and a RiscPC in 2002. Time for something new in 2012 (maybe an ARMini).
Re: Arthur
I'm not sure about "problems" as such, although it wasn't until RISC OS that there was a proper multi-tasking interface, the draw module is an epic piece of useful coding, vector font rendering (as of later versions) was way ahead of its time (although so was the bitmapped antialiasing of Arthur), and in the newest versions, the SpriteExtend module (dynamically expanding JPEGs to render them stretched and dynamically mapping the output to the screen palette...) makes me wonder why a lot of modern systems struggle so much.
Hands up if you remember the dark blue/light blue version of Arthur?
Groundbreaking
Without question, the original Archimedes computers were the heralds of a new era in computing primarily because of the ARM processor. At the BBC@30 event in Cambridge a couple of months ago Steve Furber made a few remarks on the panel that were pretty revealing.
Firstly, yes they had tried to liaise with Intel about the use of the 80286, except they couldn't understand why the pinout had a shared address and data bus as it crippled the performance in their view. They wanted Intel to license the core to them and they'd repackage it. Intel declined, the rest is history.
Secondly, they visited WDC (which produced the 16-bit enhanced 6502, the 65816) and discovered it was essentially a 1 person operation. They figured that if one guy could develop a CPU, so could they.
Hence the Archimedes was released, using a UK-designed RISC processor at pretty much the same time as the FIRST commercial RISC computers in the US, except that the Archimedes was aimed at consumer machines rather than high-end workstations, a decision that lead to ARM being the dominant 32-bit CPU today, eclipsing Intel sales units by an order of magnitude, and the standard-bearer for RISC itself.
-Cheers from julz (the designer of the 8-bit DIY Computer FIGnition).
Is that Meg Ryan in the second picture?
I'll have what she's having.
happy memories of being shouted at by the teacher at school for trying to sneak in a quick game of lander during a lesson.
And of the last day of term...
... being allowed to play Super SWIV two-player co-op... I'm a tank, you're a helicopter!
Memories, all alone in the moonlight
Being a child of the 80's, I grew up first with the BBC's then the truely spectaular (for the day) Archies. Started with A3000s, then A310s and A320s, and completed my GCSE coursework by demonstrating a database application built using dBase, running under DOS within the PC emulator upgrade card the school had bunged into a Risc PC. I also got a saturday job working for a computer shop specialising in selling and repairing Arcs, but sadly that didn't last long as by the mid 90's, the x86 architecture had more or less killed off the demand for the green acorns.
I loved the software that was available (often at 'less than RRP' ;) ) as it was passed around between friends. Lander was amazing, but also there was some kind of tank programme that looked a bit like Lander. 'Funky Demo' (video shown on Youtube) was mindblowing for the time with a 3d looking animated character daning to music. Top stuff!
The demo I am trying to trace was a little animated sprite piece, with an animated railroad that went along the screen. A steam train would get hijacked by bandits and the gold bullion stolen. Then the cops would give chase. No idea what it was called - any ideas please?
Re: Memories, all alone in the moonlight
"some kind of tank programme that looked a bit like Lander"
That'd be 'Conqueror' - brilliant game. Great fun shooting at the other tanks and buildings...
Re: Memories, all alone in the moonlight
The railroad desktop silly was called !Locomo, and can be found on the Arcade FTP site. However, it runs a bit fast on modern ARM processors (about 5 seconds from start until end of the credits).
The Archie
Ultimately nice machine, marred by very high price and a lack of decent software. And I speak as someone who used them frequently from the A3000 through to the RISC PC.
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