4 ms·

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),

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

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