Slice of Pi?

[Tony Bryer]

Vaguely. I started with a Commodore PET - see the 1980 CompShop ads at

- PET, TRS80, Exidy Sorceror, Compukit-101 and Nascom.

[Tony Bryer]

I had a B (like everyone at the time had to wait for it), added floppy disk controller (£100 IIRC) and single floppy (£300) and one or more of the various Solidisk boards that did all sorts of clever stuff (when they worked). After that a Master repackaged in a Viglen split case/keyboard.

[Jules Richardson]

Not in Sheffield, was it? I heard a rumour once that a shop there had ACWs at one point (but it was one of those resale shops too, so I suspect they'd come from an educational place somewhere and the shop were trying to sell them on)

cheers

Jules

[David Paste]

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Tony Bryer escribió:

Started with an AIM KIM-1:

PET (with the dual external drives that connected over IEEE488/HPIB), ZX81, Spectrum, QL, BBC, then various PCs.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Jules Richardson escribió:

aka the famous "RAM pack wobble".

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Tony Bryer escribió:

The controller chip was the Intel 8271, which was already obsolete when Acorn designed it into the BBC micro. They were very hard to get hold of, which is why the disk upgrade was so expensive.

[Gordon Henderson]

Nope, Edinburgh!

Gordon

[John Rumm]

I remember nearly falling off my chair when first seeing the price of an Epson FX-80 ;-) (not that it was beeb specific - but it was commonly shown with them)

[John Rumm]

That was the ZX80, not the 81. The 80 came out at £99 prebuilt, or £79 in kit form (although the kit did not include the PSU which was another £11!).

The '81 was £69 on first release (built) or £49 in kit form.

I went from a ZX-80 to a Vic-20 in '81 ish... paid £169 for it (they went up to £220 shortly after), plus £44 for the C2N cassette deck. In '82 I paid £199 for a 1541 Disk drive. I eventually wore that one out and bought another late in its life at £69. Mid '85 I paid £275 for a C128... can't remember what I paid for a 1571, but picked one up from the Commodore show at the Novotel. An Amiga B2000 cost me £950 in 1988 I think. Some time later an extra 8up expansion board with 2MB on it was around £400! A 42MB Seagate HDD plus 8 bit ISA card MFM ST506 controller piggybacked onto a Zorro card adaptor was about £450.

[John Rumm]

I toyed with the idea of building a Mircrotan at one point - I was looking for a step up from the ZX-80 that I could actually afford... (well more to the point, that I thought whoever I was going to get to buy it for me could afford!)

[John Rumm]

The beeb (before it became the beeb) was never intended to be anything other than the front end processor and user interface for things that were going to hang off the tube bus. That was how Howser and Curry intended it to be used before the chance for the BBC contract came along. So the theory went, it would do the IO and be a functional computer, but the real power would come from what you bolted onto the back end.

I used one running CP/M with a Z80 second processor - all sat on an Econet network. Actually worked rather well. I remember each of the machines only had one single floppy, but I needed two to compile my program. I was impressed when I could share the drive on a machine elsewhere on the network and use it at almost full speed... (this was in

1985/6 probably)

Although the C64 pissed over both due to all its custom graphics and sound hardware (and was not far off the expansion capabilities of the BBC)

they are still people writing demos for it today... Amazing what you can do on a 1MHz 8 bit machine in 64K of RAM:

Memory and price were the biggest problems.

The fall in the price of memory is probably the single most significant advance in computing history...

£30 of the cost of a ZX-80 was its 1K of RAM. A 16K expansion card for the VIC-20 was £79... I think I paid about a tenner for a 4GB module last week!

[Adrian C]

I've collected other weird Acorn things over the years.

An 'communicator' computer with a 65816 16bit CPU

an

Reuters APM Board, basically a BBC B+ on a eurocard

Above web site nought to do with me, but an interesting read :)

Ok, a silly boast - I've used all the ports on my old 1982 vintage beeb with gadgets with the exception of Econet. And pretty much all the overlay PCB's that could be fitted for sideways ROM/RAM, shadow RAM and several disc controllers (replacing the 8271).

Hmmm. Some people build model railways in their Attic. Maybe I should build a shrine to my BBC Micro obession and keep it going?

[Jules Richardson]

many of them about. My one went off to the Centre for Computing History when I moved as I decided I was probably never going to do much with it. I like tinkering with the older machines, but not so much the more recent stuff (but I suppose 'more recent' is still over 25 years old!).

'survivor' other than the one that Chris has.

:-) Talking of those kinds of things, I still have a large 68008 coprocessor board which fits inside a BBC micro and runs OS-9 - it makes the machine run a little on the warm side!

Of course ;-) At one point I did have examples of almost everything that Acorn ever made, but I thinned it out a *lot* when I moved to the US as I didn't fancy shipping it all here one day. I kept most of the 8-bit stuff (plus add-ons such as copros etc.) but got shot of all the ARM-powered kit (although I just remembered that someone's got an A500 for me which I'd completely forgotten about!)

cheers

Jules

[Jules Richardson]

I think I saw £350 quoted somewhere in one of the articles, but can't immediately find it now (I don't think that was necessarily for an FX-80 though, but just referenced as a dot-matrix printer). Yes, they did cost a lot, considering they were "just a printer"!

cheers

Jules

[Jules Richardson]

That was certainly one of the aims, although I'm not sure it was the main goal - the machine was quite capable in its own right for the time.

Yes, it was pretty good for the smaller co-processors such as the Z80 and

6502 and using floppies as storage, although the concept got a bit long in the tooth toward the end of the BBC's era with faster processors such as the 32016 and with hard disks as the primary storage medium; the ACW felt incredibly sluggish.

Yes, from what I remember it was a pretty good machine - I know I had friends with C64s when I had the Spectrum and the graphics were rather impressive.

Amazing how cheap that kind of thing is these days. I think I paid about £300 for 8MB of RAM circa 1992. Probably a similar price for a hard disk which was about 90MB in capacity around the same time - rotating storage costs have really come down over the years, too.

cheers

Jules

[Adrian]

In message , Adrian C writes

Kill 2 birds with one stone, and build a BBC Micro controlled model railway. They ought to work wonders for your geek credentials :-)

Adrian

[Adrian C]

Heh, I've often played with the idea of implementing a whole house model railway system, with the track visiting each room and trains laden with maybe useful things, travelling through walls and tunnels.

I'd probably choose trains from London Underground Tube stock, or DLR - which I was sitting at the front of this morning (as a passenger, there's no driver). That really is a rollercoster of a trainset ;)

[John Rumm]

The FX-80 was more like £800 at the time IIRC. There was a cheaper RX-80 at about half that. First proper dot matrix I had was a Brother M1009, with add on tractor unit. Probably about a couple of hundred for the printer and 50 for the extra tractor.

[John Rumm]

Did you not watch James May's "Man Lab" ?