Acorn Archimedes A3010: Was It Better Than The Amiga?

Comments · 1.6K

• DA

  @danwood_uk · 5 years ago · pinned

  The first 1000 people to use the link will get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership: <a href="https://skl.sh/danwood10201">https://skl.sh/danwood10201</a> &nbsp;- These videos can take me 30-40 hours to produce, please help the channel by supporting the sponsors. :)

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• AN

  @andreasklindt7144 · 5 years ago

  Funny that this video comes out just when Acorn Archimedes&apos; great-great-great-great-grandson, the Raspberry Pi 400 arrives on the market for under $100.

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• CO

  @colorfinger-intermission · 3 years ago

  I had an Archimedes A410, and I fully credit it for teaching me how to think like a developer. I used it to write games, do a 3D animation project (in 1995!) and learn BBC BASIC. Now I have a multi decade career in software dev. Thanks, Acorn... 😅

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• TH

  @TheOneTrueSpLiT · 5 years ago

  My dad made me learn BASIC and tested me before I was allowed a ZX Spectrum in 1982. &nbsp;After gaining O and A Levels in Computer Science I was sponsored by GEC-Avionics to do a 3-year HND course (on the premise that if I passed I would be immediately employed by them) which involved writing an in-house tool for them. At the end of the course, I had to do a presentation detailing the tool and having just got an Amiga 500 I decided to do all the slides in Deluxe Paint III and Sculpt 3D, with animation and some flash logos and whatnot that I mixed in audio and recorded to VCR. &nbsp;Having seen all the other students stumble thru their presentations using a whiteboard, the GEC staff and lecturers were totally gobsmacked with my video presentation, showing off graphics and animation they&apos;d only ever seen on TV. &nbsp;Within 6 months the Amiga 500 had gone, replaced by an A2000 I still have, sitting a few feet away from me. &nbsp;As for the presentation... yep, I&apos;ve still got that original VCR tape from 1991 ;-)

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• PI

  @pingpongbawbagg · 5 years ago

  @10.00, the ARM processor is marked GPS 9241. This is a truly British machine, GPS is GEC Plessey Semiconductors, who were the 2nd licensee of ARM after VLSI. I worked in their Swindon site in 1992. The ARM devices were fabbed on the 6&quot; CMOS line at their Roborough (near Plymouth) wafer fab. &nbsp;9241 is the date code of chip testing - 1992, week 41 (second week in October). I wasn&apos;t directly on the ARM project at GPS, but I shared an office with a couple of guys who were. I remember the buzz when the license was signed. Sadly, it wasn&apos;t enough to keep GPS going, although it has recently been revived as a new company with same name. Now, simply Plessey Semiconductors.

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• TR

  @TrickysFlyingBurrito · 5 years ago

  Every time our IT &quot;teacher&quot; left the room for a cigarette break we&apos;d put sensi soccer on one of the arch&apos;s in our lab. It even ran decent PC emulation, any A level student of the time will have wrestled with PC DOS and Turbo Pascal on a 3020.

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• JO

  @JohnBrosan · 4 years ago

  I loved Commodore as well. Started with a VIC-20, moved up to a C= 128 and finally an Amiga 2000HD in 1990. Those were the days!

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• MO

  @MostlyPennyCat · 5 years ago

  The port of Elite to Elite Gold found that Brabem &amp; Bell&apos;s 6502 assembler to generate the galaxies were so tied to the 6502 in the Beeb that it was impossible to recreate in ARM Assembler.<br>So, Elite Gold contains the 6502 emulator <i>just to get the star systems identical to Beeb Elite</i>

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• KO

  @koenlefever · 5 years ago

  I was at the point of buying an Amiga 2000 in 1987 when the Archimedes was released. I bought an A305 with 512k RAM (and the Arthur 0.2 operating system in EPROM, later upgraded to RISC OS 1.2 in ROM), upgraded to 1 meg RAM within a month, and then later had it upgraded to 4 megs (sent it to a guy in the UK who de-soldered the RAM chips from the motherboard and put sockets with new chips on it). The ARM assembly book arrived a couple of weeks before the computer, so by the time the A305 arrived I had already memorized the ARM instruction set. In terms of raw CPU power, it was &nbsp;running circles around the 80186 and 68000 - the Archimedes had a quite usable IBM PC emulator which I used to run WordPerfect, dBASE II and the TopSpeed Modula2 compiler on MS-DOS. Fast scrolling was easy using the ARM block copy commands immediately on the video RAM. I never regretted choosing the Archimedes over the Amiga.

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• TH

  @TheVintageApplianceEmporium · 5 years ago

  Always wanted one of these beasts back when I was 14 years old. The Amiga and ST were the big boys in the playground, whilst the Arch was like the geeky kid sat in the corner doing &apos;important things&apos;. <br><br>And just look how important those things were to our modern world. No one should ever underestimate just how crucial these computers were to our present day technology. If you sit and think about it, it actually hurts your brain lol XD

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• JA

  @jamescane22 · 1 year ago

  My entire childhood computing experience was Acorn. &nbsp;I was lucky enough that my family could afford to buy me an Electron, then a BBC B and then, after they were released, an Archimedes. &nbsp; I then spent two great years with a Saturday job during 6th form helping out in an Acorn specialist shop called the Data Store in Bromley. &nbsp; Those experiences shaped my entire future career and are the reason I became a software developer. &nbsp;<br><br>The Archimedes was criminally underrated. &nbsp;It was, by far, the best machine when it was first released but was hampered by its price. &nbsp;Until watching this video, I didn’t realise it was also apparently hampered by an image of being a school computer only!

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• WI

  @willproctor7301 · 5 years ago

  I was taught A level computing on acorn machines, the A5000 mostly. My gran bought me an a3010 so I could &quot;study at home&quot; although I usually just &nbsp;played speedball 2, lemmings and Zool. What I loved about the system was the modules, you could rip out game music or sprite routines and program them through basic very easily. The tracker modules that played amiga like music were often in the !pling directory of the game and easy to use for yourself. The basic onboard was so much fun to play around with, a great open machine indeed. I have an A3010, A7000 and a Risc PC sat here now, all great machines. BTW my A3010 has 4mb of ram not the 2mb you said as max ;)

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