Acorn Archimedes is 25

Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by gaius on Friday June 01, 2012 @07:20AM (#4052870)

In retrospect, I think that had the UK adopted the Archimedes, it would have been the bargain of the century. Enough software gets written here that compatibility with the rest of the world wouldn't have been an issue (esp. since at the time we were in a world in which incompatible systems were the norm) and in fact once the Archie's superiority was demonstrated we'd have been exporting it. Esp. considering the change in the national mental landscape, that every (user-friendly, GUI) computer you encountered was easily programmable to a professional standard in BBC Basic - now only 25 years later is that kind of democratization of computing entering the public consciousness, we could have had it all the time!

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by fidotron on Friday June 01, 2012 @07:37AM (#4052901)

Much as I loved the Archie, I don't see it working like that, largely because if the UK is going to play the protectionist game then it would simply have encouraged others to do so.

Arguably the main problem was never working out how to sell them into the US, but ARM aside too much of the rest of the platform may have been superficially nice, but wasn't really the foundations of a long running computer platform.

What really still amazes me is Acorn didn't put the RISC OS front end on NetBSD back when it became clear running BSD was far more interesting to most of Acorn's own staff than RISC OS was. By then it was probably game over anyway.

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by gouranga on Friday June 01, 2012 @09:29AM (#4053242)

Erm they ported BSD to Acorn machines (RiscIX).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by gaius on Friday June 01, 2012 @08:17AM (#4052998)

I wasn't arguing for protectionism (e.g. a tariff on competing systems) - just that if the govt had bought Archies instead of PCs and dumb terminals, that it was buying anyway, things would have turned out differently for the whole country, if not wider.

but wasn't really the foundations of a long running computer platform

Interesting, how do you mean? Esp. in light of the state of PC OSs at the time. If you had to restart computing what would you take as your foundation, MS-DOS or Arthur?

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by rwmj on Friday June 01, 2012 @07:26AM (#4052880)

While BBC Basic was kinda fun, I'm not sure I'd be in a happier place right now if I had to work with 100 million lines of legacy BBC Basic :-)

Pop quiz. What did the following commands do?

    *.
    P.
    *OPT4,3

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by ralph on Friday June 01, 2012 @07:35AM (#4052899)

* causes OSCLI to handle the rest of the line. Dot was an abbreviation for Cat, short for catalogue, IOW ls(1). P. is presumably at the BASIC prompt; it abbreviated the PRINT keyword. OPT had the filing system set some options stored on the current disk; 4 was how to handle the !Boot file. 0, do nothing; 1, load; 2, run; 3, exec, i.e. pretend it had been typed.

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by lukeck on Friday June 01, 2012 @07:53AM (#4052930)

Was P. shorthand for PRINT .? No idea what the other two commands do I think *OPT was for addressing a serial port or the screen but my memory is very hazy.

BBC BASIC on the original RISC PC was my first experience writing code. I think that machine is still in my parents' garage along with the 6 volume BBC BASIC reference manual.

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by ralph on Friday June 01, 2012 @08:06AM (#4052966)

Yes, in BASIC you could enter keywords abbreviated with a . to save typing. The tokeniser would turn it into the byte or two representing PRINT ready for it to be interpreted.

I think you're thinking of the four volume RISC OS Programmers' Manual, plus slim index, that came in a big white cardboard sleeve. Augmented later by a Volume 5 of changes with later OS versions to save re-printing costs. BASIC itself was introduced in the User Guide that came with the machine IIRC and had a one-volume reference manual of its own at additional cost.

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by gaius on Friday June 01, 2012 @08:18AM (#4053002)

Further to other comments, you would never see P. in the output of LIST. It would be expanded automatically to PRINT.

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Re:Acorn Archimedes is 25 by ralph on Friday June 01, 2012 @01:14PM (#4054494)

Strictly speaking, it wasn't P. being expanded to PRINT at the time of LIST but the byte representing the tokenised PRINT being expanded then. The P. was turned into that byte earlier.

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