3 ms·

this brings back memories, albeit bad ones. the department i worked for it the BBC in the late 80s standardised on apricots (because "british") and they were te

this brings back memories, albeit bad ones. the department i worked for it the BBC in the late 80s standardised on apricots (because "british") and they were terrible. they had such a low profile case that you couldn't fit a network card in - instead it had to go in a side bus-extension box, which was about as reliable as a zx81 ram pack. and the rest of the hardware was crap too. we eventually decided that the money we were spending on maintenance was just too much, and reqplaced them all with compaqs.

ChainOfFools 3y ago
This being a late '80s, how unfortunate that they did not decide to settle on the other British computer platform starting with A and referring to a kind of fruit
- zabzonk 3y ago
  presumably you mean acorn? hardly a business machine, and with very limited network connectivity, which we required for our unix boxes and ICL mainframe. i remember when the (acorn) BBC Micro came out having a quiet laugh about how poor it was compared to CP/M boxes i was used to using at the time.
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    Well yes, but again this being the late 80s I was thinking not BBC micro but Archimedes or even the Cambridge Workstation, both of which were considerably more powerful than anything else available on the market at the time (in the comparable price segment) even if they were not directly marketed to business. The Cambridge was available in xenix form IIRC, and by the time the a5000 came along in I think 90 or 91 acorns platform was fully matured onto ARM architecture by then, although I admit few would have foreseen just how significant an advantage that could have been at the time.
    - zabzonk 3y ago
      oh, but the archimedes were so expensive, and once again didn't have the connectivity. Acorn did have a couple of unix/xenix boxes, but not arm based as far as i can remember (could be wrong). i can't believe they sold more than a dozen or so of the things, generally to act as file servers for the BBC Micro's weird networking (forgotten what it was called).
  - jlokier 3y ago
    The Acorn machines in 1985 actually did run CP/M business software if you added a Z80 or 68000 second procoessor. The CP/M variant was called CPN but it supported a compatible set of commands and system calls. It was the machine I grew up with, and I ran dBase II and Wordstar on it among other things - "real" business software. Wordstar was good for editing BBC BASIC code, with its inline Z80 assembler... which could communicate with the other BBC BASIC code with its inline 6502 assembler on the same machine. Multiple cores in 1985 :)

ChainOfFools 3y ago

This being a late '80s, how unfortunate that they did not decide to settle on the other British computer platform starting with A and referring to a kind of fruit

zabzonk 3y ago
presumably you mean acorn? hardly a business machine, and with very limited network connectivity, which we required for our unix boxes and ICL mainframe. i remember when the (acorn) BBC Micro came out having a quiet laugh about how poor it was compared to CP/M boxes i was used to using at the time.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  Well yes, but again this being the late 80s I was thinking not BBC micro but Archimedes or even the Cambridge Workstation, both of which were considerably more powerful than anything else available on the market at the time (in the comparable price segment) even if they were not directly marketed to business. The Cambridge was available in xenix form IIRC, and by the time the a5000 came along in I think 90 or 91 acorns platform was fully matured onto ARM architecture by then, although I admit few would have foreseen just how significant an advantage that could have been at the time.
  - zabzonk 3y ago
    oh, but the archimedes were so expensive, and once again didn't have the connectivity. Acorn did have a couple of unix/xenix boxes, but not arm based as far as i can remember (could be wrong). i can't believe they sold more than a dozen or so of the things, generally to act as file servers for the BBC Micro's weird networking (forgotten what it was called).
- jlokier 3y ago
  The Acorn machines in 1985 actually did run CP/M business software if you added a Z80 or 68000 second procoessor. The CP/M variant was called CPN but it supported a compatible set of commands and system calls. It was the machine I grew up with, and I ran dBase II and Wordstar on it among other things - "real" business software. Wordstar was good for editing BBC BASIC code, with its inline Z80 assembler... which could communicate with the other BBC BASIC code with its inline 6502 assembler on the same machine. Multiple cores in 1985 :)