Whatever Happened to the Acorn range of computers?

[1500]

Well, this takes me back ...

We had all BBC Master Compacts and Master 128s when I did my GSCE Computer Studies all of idontwantothinkhowmany years ago.  For their time, they were good pieces of kit, very well built and they had to be given their environment.  Spent most of my time trying to get places I shouldn't be over their ECONET network, which has a great big enormous 5MB winchester hanging off the back of some other Beeb which remained carefully locked away.

Archie's were a couple of years after my time - even in college I was on Beebs and XT or AT PC clones.  I went from the Acorn to the Amiga - I think the Amiga 500 was about £100 cheaper than a Master 128 which is pretty woeful given the technology gap - the Acorn stuff was always expensive.  Very well engineered though.

I still have my old Electron, complete with Rombox and a dual 5.25" floppy drive tucked away in the loft, not to mention my old Texas TI-99/4A up there as well, but that's another story.  Ah, Parsec.  Really must get that down and play that old game again.  I bet it still works!

[1500]

Hodgkinson wrote:
I remember dismantling an old computer at the local amateur radio club some time ago - I’m sure that it was badged as an "Apricot".

Could anyone confirm if such a machine actually existed?

Hodgkinson.

They were junkheaps.  A lot worse whan Amstrads, and they were shockingly bad.  I remember having to go and fix one of these - OEM DOS 3.something running a bespoke dBase II app.  MFM hard disk was on the blink, so I had to dig one of the our junky old MFM drives off the shelf, laplink all the data off praying that the whole thing wouldn't come crashing down around my ears, replace the drive, try to remember what the DOS debug thing was to prep it (g=c800:5 if anyone's interested), re-install Apricot DOS which was a manual process without a manual, then laplink the data back.  The whole thing was a mess and took a lot longer than that summary.  The box was virtually impossible to take apart without breaking something.  Everything was non-standard.  It was like dealing with Sony.  Talk about engineering by stealth.