so 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