The micro YOU used in school: The story of the Research Machines 380Z If you’re a British techie of a certain age, there’s only one microcomputer that defines your first memories of computing at school. No, not Acorn’s BBC Micro – the Research Machines 380Z. While Acorn was still knocking up the Proton, the machine being designed as the successor to the Atom, and while the BBC was pondering how …
Having learned to code on a 380z, I was over the moon to join the Fischer Education Project. After working for Mike Fischer for a number of years, I can say that his management experience and that of his senior staff at FFT is still non-existent!
The phrase couldn't manage a spark up in a match factory springs to mind. The charity commission didn't think much of it either.
Another great article, as also was the one a couple of months ago about Chris Shelton and the Nascom 1. Both articles have brought back many memories of that time. Excellent.
I worked for John Marshall from 1978 to 1986, firstly as Technical Coordinator at Nascom, then as Technical Manager at Gemini Microcomputers (later becoming Gemini Computer Systems). They were certainly fascinating times.
I didn't spot the Shelton/Nascom article until several days after it had appeared, so chose not to respond then as most people had already read it, commented, and moved on. However, as this article is much fresher I thought I would take the opportunity to report something that I have not spotted reported anywhere in any press.
That is that John Marshall sadly died suddenly of a heart attack on Hove / Brighton front 3 - 4 years ago. I had maintained periodic contact with him since I had left Gemini in 1986 and to the end John was still very entrepreneurial, working on various projects, forever seeking to repeat that rare mix of ideas/timing/execution (and luck!) that had resulted in the massive and somewhat unexpected success of the Nascom 1 - the original aim of which was to allow his semiconductor sales company to sell lots more components!
I had no idea that Sintel & RM were the same company.
My friend and I bunked off work (Racal Electronics in Wembley) and drove to Oxford one rainy November afternoon in 1974 to purchase some digital clock chips ( Mostek), strips of bare i.c. socket pins and 7-segment LEDs. They were very friendly and accomodating, considering we didn't have much to spend.
I will never forget the thrill of building our first digital clock, and the unique glow of the multiplexed red leds behind the purple magnifying lens. Digital clocks were not available in the shops those days, so we started knocking them out for friends and family. I even made my landlord one for his touring car (flared wheel arches and go-faster stripes) in lieu of rent.
As it happens I still have a 380Z in the loft which I rescued from a skip, along with numerous Acorn BBC B and Archimedes machines.
Nowadays I am getting to grips with the Raspberry Pi.
We use a load of them at the school where I'm employed: RM One desktops. Basically just PCs inside, of course, but they are PCs really built for schools - and in the knowledge that students are a bunch of destructive hooligans. Hard plastic screens, tamperproof cover for the cabling with a clamp to prevent pulling them free, and every plastic surface is only a cosmetic cover for the sheet steel beneath. You could beat one of those things up with a baseball bat and not even scratch it.
So the students smash the keyboards up instead.
From 1984 I worked at High Level Hardware with David Small and Tim Robinson, the technical director.
We had a number of 380zs, the Orion's i/o systems being basically independent Z80 machines on a board, so a lot of David's work was used in there.
The actual 380zs ended up as plantpots and doorstops, mind you!
Orions still exist, we have two working ones in restoration in California, and about a dozen are known to be in storage.
http://www.iscene.us/HLH/
Any working 380zs out there?
My curiosity piqued by the reference to Cesil, I made the mistake of googling it. Don't. Especially not the image search.
Nubility aside, my fondest memories of RM were the Nimbus machines. There was some demoware that came with it that played a Bach fugue and me and my mates spent far too long trying to get the ten machines in the room to all play it at the same time. Somehow our teacher, who was years ahead of his time, managed to get copies of Turbo Pascal and Zortech C. (Thankyou Mr Balls). I never forgot one kid in my class. We were all producing reasonable stuff, like graphing programs and text editors, to show off our understanding of algorithms and data structures, and then he comes in one day and shows us the C compiler he had written. Total, jaw-dropping mastery of the subject.
My least fond memory, and I cringe to recall it, is interviewing at RM straight out of college. Panel interview with three old guys and one, er, Cesil. She started asking questions about networking and it became immediately apparent that I was the stupidest muppet to ever darken their doors. Truly cringeworthy.
That's a great article - thanks. I hadn't really realised how important the 380Z was to my education until recently. Our school had one and it was the first microprocessor I had seen. Until then, we had used the 300baud modem link to Birmingham Council treasury computer to program in BASIC with a teletype (in a cupboard). I managed to get a book on 8080 assembler (the 380Z was a Z80 which had the 8080 instructions as a subset) and wrote an assembler in machine code. From that, I was able to write a noughts and crosses game using the teletext graphics. I learnt another great lesson from that - never write or invent a game no-one can win. They get angry very quickly!
After the 380Z things moved quickly: TRS-80, PET, Nascom, Acorn Atom (I built one - 2000 solder joints!), Atari 400/800, CBM-16/64, Dragon, Lynx(?), BBC (of course). I eventually worked on 68000s at college and HP-85s at work. Still in the biz, and still coding...
I don't know how or where we got one of these (it may have been through NASA since John Young was an Alum and big supporter of my school, so we did get some oddball stuff including samples of lunar dust, and crude oil for some reason) but my elementary school here in the States had one of these as late as 1989. Again, I have no clue how an American school wound up with a very British microcomputer, but it was there. For all I know it might still be down in the fallout shelter, out buildings, or attic the school uses for storage. Its a really old building for Orlando, dating back to 1927, so I'm sure there's all kinds of old stuff collecting dust in the attic and the various storage rooms.
I don't recall it ever working as we had an Amiga, a shedload of Apple IIes, a couple of IBM clones, and a few Macs, but it certainly was there, and mounted into a rack. I think the computer teacher (who was a proper computer teacher, we learned quite a bit of Basic as well as Logo starting in Kindergarten) may have been afraid of it.
Too bad Orange County Public Schools didn't really capitalize on what my elementary school taught us, by the time we got to Middle School they shoved us into a brainless clarisworks/typing class and it didn't get any better in high school except for the exceptions of the Engineering magnet, the Image processing class in Space Science, and the Computer Animation classes the Wrestling Coach taught, which were really outstanding and prepared a lot of people for going into game design, given that EA Tiburon is located nearby quite a few people I know wound up working there on the Madden, Rugby, and FIFA series.
The evil reset button on the front used to get pressed by other kids when you where trying to program you code. You could recover the code you done already by typing in a code (long since forgotten) however we were never able to save that said code to floppy afterwards, does anyone on the boards know how to do that. One kid did it to me I won't name him but suffice to say he doesn't work in IT but in insurance.
My only 380Z experience was the one we had as a fileserver for our network of 480Zs. I know there was also one in the science department - one with 8" floppy drives, no less - but I never actually used it.
With the right extras, the 380Z could produce wonderful coloured output - not like the 8 colours of the 480Z.
My school was an anti-Acorn school. They had RMs and then Macs. When they had a big throw-out of hardware (RM 186s and 386s, smashed Mac Pluses) I saved them from the skip. I think there were some 380Z/480Zs, but those went before my time.
The RM Nimbus 186 was not a pretty design - ribbon cable buses for expansion cards. I spent quite a while trying to port ELKS (Linux for 8086) to it - eventually gave up because I couldn't find any documentation on the wierd Nimbus hardware. Even salvaging most of the RM software when they cleared it out was no help - I have Autosketch and Windows 1.03 but nothing particularly useful - and they wouldn't run most DOS software. Most software ran in the BBC BASIC emulator. I tried for a while to find their network OS for Z-Net (their peer-to-peer serial network) - I think it was Microsoft Networks (long before MSN as an online service). Never found anything useful. How hard it was to find anything before the internet age.
The RM 386sx16 was OK - at least it ran Windows 3.1. My high point was running Linux, X and Netscape in 4MB of RAM. 30 pin SIMMs were a pain though.
I still have an RM Pentium 75 - ran a floppy Linux distro as a router until a couple of years ago. I didn't touch the hard drive which still has their Window Box software - how to make Windows 95 unusable.
I think there's a pattern here - RM took theoretically decent hardware and worked out how to make it almost useless...
My school got one sometime in 1980, and I had the chance to spend a fair amount of time on it in the sixth form, including doing a Computer Science A-level (completely self-taught, the teacher was learning from me and what I did so he could teach the following year). I remember poring through the BIOS listing (including the Lewis Carroll quotes), working out how to do floating point maths and other things. The circuit diagrams were equally instructive, and I used some of the tricks in my home-made computer that I built around then. I even remember being the person who installed the RAM upgrade because I knew how to do it. Fortunately it still worked afterwards...
Made my day coming across this article.
My tutor room in the slightly grim comprehensive school I was fortunate enough to attend suddenly and without warning had a couple of these babys appear.
Nobody knew what to do with them. Apart from a maths teacher who used it to do.... maths...
Luckily I had some experience on my mums boyfriends TRS-80. Soon I had figured out a really basic top down text shooter game that I could type in in five minutes, thus enabling other kids to play it for the rest of the break. They thought I was a god. Those were the days.
Unfortunately, being the lazy sod I am I moved into bespoke programming and tech support after school so never made my millions.
Great memories though,.
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