Sunday Things - digital archaeology edition
posted in Computers by Cargo Cult on Sunday October 28 2012
RISC OS for Raspberry Pi released - come see what the ubiquitous ARM processor was originally designed for. While I never actually owned one of the peculiarly British computers from Acorn, I used the hell out of them at school. It's really weird seeing quite how futuristic it all was and also how much of a living fossil it now is. Attempts to find a decent SSH client failed miserably, although the included browser is pretty good. Compare some 1992-era screenshots!
On the theme of Acorn computers, I was reminded this week of the ridiculous ancient-security-camera to Watford-Electronics-digitiser to BBC-Micro through dodgy-serial-cable to ancient-HP-UNIX-workstation setup I built in (apparently) September 2000, thanks to bits of tech someone helpfully left lying around a university office. Familiar?
Have an Atari ST on the Intertubes? I need to dig it out of a cupboard when I next visit Britainland. One of the best things I ever did was not buy a Falcon 030...
... And finally, what the hell kind of operating system is that?
Bonus Computing History Museum corner:
- Museum of Communications - Seattle museum (not far from the Georgetown Steam Plant museum) with vast arrays of ancient telephony, communications and computing hardware. I need to go, with a camera.
- Living Computer Museum - another Seattle computer museum, this time with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen emptying his attic of antiquated but operational computing hardware.
- Bletchley Park - Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers and friends showing everyone how it's really done.
Article comments (now closed)
2. Re: Atari?
Posted by Cargo Cult at 9:43AM, Tuesday October 30 2012
Hylobatidae.org: resurrecting long-forgotten, decades-old home computing flame wars!
(For the youngsters round here - ST vs. Amiga was like Xbox vs. Playstation, Apple vs. PC, iPhone vs. Android all wrapped into one horrifying battle...)
3. kids
Posted by phuzz at 8:46AM, Thursday November 1 2012
Bah! Kids nowadays don't even know they're born!
Back in my day we had playground fights about the BBC vs the speccy, and everyone picked on the kids who had Acorn Electrons.
Our games came on 800Kb floppies on the front of these paper things called magazines and we had 256 colours and liked them dagnamit!
Article is now closed for commenting.
1. Atari?
Posted by phuzz at 3:53AM, Monday October 29 2012
An Atari ST? I thought you had better taste than that!
Amiga forever!
(and I did end up with a 68030 expansion card in my amiga, together with an 8Mb DIMM giving me a massive 10 whole megabytes of RAM! Towards the end I had a 1.5 Gb harddrive and a CDrom plugged in as well via a ribbon cable snaking out of the side of the case, and powered by a separate PSU. The whole lot is somewhere in my parents loft, I ought to go pick it up some time...)