Acorn RiscPC 600 (OT - only 5 years old)

Those Systems sound interesting too! Did they have 6502s or something else? I can see your point -- the Atom is small because it's a precursor to the BBC micro, but the Electron is small because it's a shrunken mutated BBC micro. The parallels between Acorn and Apple are very interesting -- the Atom and original Apple ][ were more or less on equal footing (in terms of RAM and ROM sizes and the capabilities of their BASICs). The Atom grew into the BBC micro and the ][ grew into the ][+ though I think the BBC micro surpasses the ][+ in terms of capability. The Master and //e both had to deal with limited address space, add new features, and maintain backward compatibility. Again the Master is more powerful than the //e. On the other hand, the Master's memory map is much more convoluted than the //e's. I'm not going to try to force the Electron, Apple //c, Apple ///, or the later machines of either company into the analogy though. My main sites for documentation have been: http://members.magnet.at/marku/bbc.htm http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/ Unfortunately the Advanced User's Guide for the Model B isn't done yet, and the graphics are missing from the regular User's Guide. The Master documentation is excellently done, however. Right now I only have a few questions. - Acorn seems to have made a lot of peripherals and also produced slightly "tweaked" models (e.g., the model B and B+, the BBC Master and Master Compact and some kind of Master Econet terminal, not to mention ROM revisions). Do you know of an authoritative catalog from them? - Was the source to the MOS ever released or reverse-engineered? It's very well documented but there are some undocumented features. (One example came up in the discussion of the Torch Z-80 card. It involved interrupts at power-on time, I think.) How about the source or disassembly for BASIC? - The Proton _is_ the same as the BBC micro, right? Some Web sites seem to disagree on this! As for finding a machine, I thought there was a place in London selling them new but I haven't checked yet. Thanks, -- Derek