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The Nimbus even came with a 3,5" floppy! Do you happen to know if they shared any design? Was there a reference Intel board which most designs are based on? Re

by clan 1y ago

The Nimbus even came with a 3,5" floppy! Do you happen to know if they shared any design? Was there a reference Intel board which most designs are based on? Reading up on the RC Piccoline I realise I misremembered. Each 4 computers shared one drive unit. So not quite terminals as I remembered. Did the UK variants have some of the same quirkiness? I see they have a "network server" (XN20) listed. I was stuck on the rare 3" size. But lived in a fishing town so I could get them a little cheaper - they where commonly used for plotters on the boats. Thanks for that hint. That was interesting. Impressed by writing a website on a CPC. You have been a true die-hard. I first saw "the web" with Mosaic on a SUN Sparcstation in 1993.

qingcharles 1y ago
In my school most of them booted over the network from the server and were drive-less. You always wanted to grab one of the floppy drive ones so you could play the games you'd sneaked in.
mattl 1y ago
Yeah my “internet” access was using Mini Office 2 on the CPC to make a modem connection to another computer and that computer had internet access. Later the Numbus machines were replaced with 486 SX 25 machines from RM (via the UK supermarket Tesco’s computers for schools program, previously they’d been supplying Acorn computers) which made things a little easier. I would later write it in Protext on the CPC and copy it to the floppy disk and IIRC remove a few control characters from the file before uploading it from one of the 486 machines. Most of the Nimbus and 486 machines were diskless and floppy driveless. Reserving one with a floppy drive was a crapshoot. Eventually one machine in the school was secretly outfitted with a small hard disk someone got their hands on from elsewhere. For the longest time I had never seen the web outside of a text browser, despite having a website (really a single page for a long time)

by clan 1y ago

qingcharles 1y ago

In my school most of them booted over the network from the server and were drive-less. You always wanted to grab one of the floppy drive ones so you could play the games you'd sneaked in.

mattl 1y ago

Yeah my “internet” access was using Mini Office 2 on the CPC to make a modem connection to another computer and that computer had internet access. Later the Numbus machines were replaced with 486 SX 25 machines from RM (via the UK supermarket Tesco’s computers for schools program, previously they’d been supplying Acorn computers) which made things a little easier. I would later write it in Protext on the CPC and copy it to the floppy disk and IIRC remove a few control characters from the file before uploading it from one of the 486 machines. Most of the Nimbus and 486 machines were diskless and floppy driveless. Reserving one with a floppy drive was a crapshoot. Eventually one machine in the school was secretly outfitted with a small hard disk someone got their hands on from elsewhere. For the longest time I had never seen the web outside of a text browser, despite having a website (really a single page for a long time)