7 ms·

Acorn and Amstrad

77 points by mmastrac 10y ago

JohnHammersley 10y ago
This brings back lots of memories - my first computers were the Acorn Electron and the A3000 (never realised they were the 'posh' end of the market until now), and I still remember my Dad letting me install the RAM upgrade in the A3000 despite what was undoubtedly an internal worry that he'd just opened up what was an expensive piece of kit at the time to his clumsy, all too eager son :) I also remember programming my first games (space invader clones) in BASIC on the A3000 (and the A3020s we had at school) - fun times.
- petepete 10y ago
  Me too, the A3000 was a fantastic piece of kit, I just wish I'd put more effort into leaning to program instead of playing Pandora's Box and Chocks Away.
  - JohnHammersley 10y ago
    Yes, I too spent most of my time playing games - the James Pond series was a particular favorite, along with a side-scrolling shooter with awesome music...anyone remember the name of it? Edit: It was Nevyron: https://youtu.be/jOwhIlMoZZs https://youtu.be/jOwhIlMoZZs The intro music still sets the spine tingling :)
    - alblue 10y ago
      You can get James Pond on the iOS App Store.
    - petepete 10y ago
      Ah yes, I remember Nevryon too. And Cataclysm, that was amazing for the time https://youtu.be/VMlZ2MwYvuA https://youtu.be/VMlZ2MwYvuA
- gbrown_ 10y ago
  My first memories of using a computer was playing Stunt Racer 2000 on my Dad's Acorn, good times.
- tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
  I always thought the whatever text editor that was used on the Archimedes had a very intuitive copy/paste, if I remember correctly you could move a "second cursor" around and then pressing a key it would paste the current character in the "copy cursor" at your current location This would make it really easy to do something like duplicate a line while changing some things, just move the copy cursor to the line/variable/thing you wanted to paste and modify, then hold the copy key until you got to where you had to change something (at your current location the characters from the other line would appear), type what you wanted, then back to the copy key for the rest of the line Seeing my best friend at the time use it it seemed really cool, some days I think of trying to write a minor mode for emacs that lets you do that...
  - the-dude 10y ago
    The copy/paste function was already there in the Beeb and the Electron.
    - tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
      really? interesting, wonder why it seems no other editor has something similar, or at least I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        Yes, confirmed the bbc and the electron already had this. Interesting tidbit: it matched the data on the screen with the font in graphics mode, which meant that if your graphics intersected anywhere with text you wanted to copy that it stopped copying on corrupted characters. There was too little memory in those machines to keep a 'backup copy' of what was in the character cells of the screen, so the copy key function had to recover the screen contents directly. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/BBC_Micro.jpeg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/BBC_Micr... You can see the keyboard here, the copy key is bottom row, rightmost key.
        10y ago
keithpeter 10y ago
I saw the PCW as a different kind of thing to the Archimedes, it was an appliance rather than a general purpose computer. My sister ran a theatre box office off a PCW spreadsheet (each day's bookings printed out, signed and put into a ledger and a copy saved to one of the chunky non-standard 3" disks). I used PCWs in the College library to write handouts and cut stencils for a Gestetner duplicator. Later when encountering an Apricot PC running Aldus Pagemaker on Windows (Or GEM? Can't remember now) I recognised it as the same kind of thing as the Archimedes. As was the funny little monochrome Macintosh. I'm a bit old for the Sinclair thing. Some technical details... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/archaeologic_amstrad_cpc_464/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/archaeologic_amstrad... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_25_years_old/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_... The A310s were built like tanks and were very fast for the time... unless you wanted to do floating point calculations. You could get a podule with a floating point extension unit on it.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Frankly i suspect that most GPC users today would be as well served by an appliance like the PCW. And to some degree that appliance is what Google has ended up making in the form of Chromebooks.
zelos 10y ago
"...didn’t give a sht whether there was an elastic band or an 8086 or a 286 driving the thing" There actually was an elastic band in the disk drive: I remember replacing it twice in my dad's PCW9512 when it wore out.
robotresearcher 10y ago
The Archimedes' performance was astonishing at the time. It was amazing to see Zarch [1] in 1987, when games were mainly sprites [2] (with important exceptions like Elite). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0T03sFX_yM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0T03sFX_yM
- contingencies 10y ago
  I remember seeing a spiritual successor of that game (helicopter though, I think) on an Amiga in the early 1990s. It was still impressive. Also, just noticed that the UI of Wasteland (1988) [1] in that video looked hugely like Infocom's Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception (1988) [2] but I can find no documented link or engine reference. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Hawk%27s_Inception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Hawk%...
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    Virus was a port of Zarch to Amiga and ST. I don't recall the amiga version but the ST one was much less smooth than the Archimedes and would bog down with a couple of agents onscreen.
  - mjg59 10y ago
    The helicopter game was probably Zeewolf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeewolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeewolf)?
    - contingencies 10y ago
      Yep.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Yuioup 10y ago
paulgrimes1 10y ago
Our first computer was an Amstrad CPC464. A cousin dropped a jam sandwich onto it and the E key became terminally stuck down, rendering the entire thing impossible to use. As a fledgling nerd, I was devastated. Devastated!
kolleykibber 10y ago
This article misses that Sugar lucked out on Mark Eric Jones , Roland Perry, Locomotive Software and William Poel (Maybe others I missed). The CPC though cheap had a very clever circuit design and surprisingly good software. He wasn't so lucky for later products. The AmsEmailer springs to mind.
aidos 10y ago
I loved my CPC6128 so much. By age 7 I'd hacked my sister's ghetto blaster so we could feed it in to the Amstrad as a tape drive. I've actually been considering getting one for my kids to play with - the simplicity of having basic right there and having physical disks gives a great way to explore what's really going on.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  I think the Raspberry Pi can run RISC OS, which also has BASIC right there. BASIC on an Acorn was my introduction to programming. I was aware that the machine was very expensive. All games played better than on my friends' computers, and it could even play video and render 3d models (in 1991!) so my friends pestered their parents, but it was too expensive. Ours were all second hand, my dad taught students how to use them, but couldn't afford a new one.
bane 10y ago
If anybody is looking to spend some time soaking in nostalgia, there's a small community at /r/amstrad /r/acornarchimedes and /r/acornelectron
mouzogu 10y ago
In case anyone is interested, there is a really good (imo) film from the BBC about the forming of Acorn and it's struggle against Clive Sinclair called Micro Men. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Micro_Men https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Micro_Men
duncan_bayne 10y ago
Amstrad development is still very much alive. This is a short demo I prepared of unit tests running on the CPC: https://vimeo.com/69787152 https://vimeo.com/69787152 http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/test-driven-development-on-an-amstrad-cpc/ http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/test-driven-developm...

77 points by mmastrac 10y ago

This brings back lots of memories - my first computers were the Acorn Electron and the A3000 (never realised they were the 'posh' end of the market until now), and I still remember my Dad letting me install the RAM upgrade in the A3000 despite what was undoubtedly an internal worry that he'd just opened up what was an expensive piece of kit at the time to his clumsy, all too eager son :) I also remember programming my first games (space invader clones) in BASIC on the A3000 (and the A3020s we had at school) - fun times.

petepete 10y ago
Me too, the A3000 was a fantastic piece of kit, I just wish I'd put more effort into leaning to program instead of playing Pandora's Box and Chocks Away.
- JohnHammersley 10y ago
  Yes, I too spent most of my time playing games - the James Pond series was a particular favorite, along with a side-scrolling shooter with awesome music...anyone remember the name of it? Edit: It was Nevyron: https://youtu.be/jOwhIlMoZZs https://youtu.be/jOwhIlMoZZs The intro music still sets the spine tingling :)
  - alblue 10y ago
    You can get James Pond on the iOS App Store.
  - petepete 10y ago
    Ah yes, I remember Nevryon too. And Cataclysm, that was amazing for the time https://youtu.be/VMlZ2MwYvuA https://youtu.be/VMlZ2MwYvuA
gbrown_ 10y ago
My first memories of using a computer was playing Stunt Racer 2000 on my Dad's Acorn, good times.
tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
I always thought the whatever text editor that was used on the Archimedes had a very intuitive copy/paste, if I remember correctly you could move a "second cursor" around and then pressing a key it would paste the current character in the "copy cursor" at your current location This would make it really easy to do something like duplicate a line while changing some things, just move the copy cursor to the line/variable/thing you wanted to paste and modify, then hold the copy key until you got to where you had to change something (at your current location the characters from the other line would appear), type what you wanted, then back to the copy key for the rest of the line Seeing my best friend at the time use it it seemed really cool, some days I think of trying to write a minor mode for emacs that lets you do that...
- the-dude 10y ago
  The copy/paste function was already there in the Beeb and the Electron.
  - tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
    really? interesting, wonder why it seems no other editor has something similar, or at least I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Yes, confirmed the bbc and the electron already had this. Interesting tidbit: it matched the data on the screen with the font in graphics mode, which meant that if your graphics intersected anywhere with text you wanted to copy that it stopped copying on corrupted characters. There was too little memory in those machines to keep a 'backup copy' of what was in the character cells of the screen, so the copy key function had to recover the screen contents directly. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/BBC_Micro.jpeg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/BBC_Micr... You can see the keyboard here, the copy key is bottom row, rightmost key.
      - 10y ago

keithpeter 10y ago

I saw the PCW as a different kind of thing to the Archimedes, it was an appliance rather than a general purpose computer. My sister ran a theatre box office off a PCW spreadsheet (each day's bookings printed out, signed and put into a ledger and a copy saved to one of the chunky non-standard 3" disks). I used PCWs in the College library to write handouts and cut stencils for a Gestetner duplicator. Later when encountering an Apricot PC running Aldus Pagemaker on Windows (Or GEM? Can't remember now) I recognised it as the same kind of thing as the Archimedes. As was the funny little monochrome Macintosh. I'm a bit old for the Sinclair thing. Some technical details... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/joyce_turns_30/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/archaeologic_amstrad_cpc_464/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/archaeologic_amstrad... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_25_years_old/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_... The A310s were built like tanks and were very fast for the time... unless you wanted to do floating point calculations. You could get a podule with a floating point extension unit on it.

digi_owl 10y ago
Frankly i suspect that most GPC users today would be as well served by an appliance like the PCW. And to some degree that appliance is what Google has ended up making in the form of Chromebooks.

zelos 10y ago

"...didn’t give a sht whether there was an elastic band or an 8086 or a 286 driving the thing" There actually was an elastic band in the disk drive: I remember replacing it twice in my dad's PCW9512 when it wore out.

robotresearcher 10y ago

The Archimedes' performance was astonishing at the time. It was amazing to see Zarch [1] in 1987, when games were mainly sprites [2] (with important exceptions like Elite). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0T03sFX_yM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0T03sFX_yM

contingencies 10y ago
I remember seeing a spiritual successor of that game (helicopter though, I think) on an Amiga in the early 1990s. It was still impressive. Also, just noticed that the UI of Wasteland (1988) [1] in that video looked hugely like Infocom's Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception (1988) [2] but I can find no documented link or engine reference. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Hawk%27s_Inception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Hawk%...
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  Virus was a port of Zarch to Amiga and ST. I don't recall the amiga version but the ST one was much less smooth than the Archimedes and would bog down with a couple of agents onscreen.
- mjg59 10y ago
  The helicopter game was probably Zeewolf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeewolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeewolf)?
  - contingencies 10y ago
    Yep.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Yuioup 10y ago

paulgrimes1 10y ago

Our first computer was an Amstrad CPC464. A cousin dropped a jam sandwich onto it and the E key became terminally stuck down, rendering the entire thing impossible to use. As a fledgling nerd, I was devastated. Devastated!

kolleykibber 10y ago

This article misses that Sugar lucked out on Mark Eric Jones , Roland Perry, Locomotive Software and William Poel (Maybe others I missed). The CPC though cheap had a very clever circuit design and surprisingly good software. He wasn't so lucky for later products. The AmsEmailer springs to mind.

aidos 10y ago

I loved my CPC6128 so much. By age 7 I'd hacked my sister's ghetto blaster so we could feed it in to the Amstrad as a tape drive. I've actually been considering getting one for my kids to play with - the simplicity of having basic right there and having physical disks gives a great way to explore what's really going on.

Symbiote 10y ago
I think the Raspberry Pi can run RISC OS, which also has BASIC right there. BASIC on an Acorn was my introduction to programming. I was aware that the machine was very expensive. All games played better than on my friends' computers, and it could even play video and render 3d models (in 1991!) so my friends pestered their parents, but it was too expensive. Ours were all second hand, my dad taught students how to use them, but couldn't afford a new one.

bane 10y ago

If anybody is looking to spend some time soaking in nostalgia, there's a small community at /r/amstrad /r/acornarchimedes and /r/acornelectron

mouzogu 10y ago

In case anyone is interested, there is a really good (imo) film from the BBC about the forming of Acorn and it's struggle against Clive Sinclair called Micro Men. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Micro_Men https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Micro_Men

duncan_bayne 10y ago

Amstrad development is still very much alive. This is a short demo I prepared of unit tests running on the CPC: https://vimeo.com/69787152 https://vimeo.com/69787152 http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/test-driven-development-on-an-amstrad-cpc/ http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/test-driven-developm...