Update: BBC Acorn - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

14 Jan 2003

Hi,

...
  ARM Evaluation Kit - yep - that's the one.  I do
have various discs and
 manuals for it, too.  I used to love the "twin" editor - several open files
 at one, and could cut and paste between them.  Ahead of it's time... 
yeah, that's it. Without any discs or being able to find anyone who knew
anything about it I'm afraid mine got put in storage. I believe I've got the
original polystyrene packaging for it, but no discs or outer box or anything
(go figure)

I've got some other BBC add-on in the same style housing as the ARM unit, but
can't remember what it is now. It wasn't the teletext unit unfortunately, as
that could have been interesting to play about with.

...
  They were expensive, but much more expandable than the
spectrum.  At one
 point I had about six of them in my bedroom on an econet network, had
 several on modems running a multi-user BBS. 
excellent :-)
I never got into the networking side of things with them (I've got all the
fileserver/network for the RM Link machines which I believe were the schools
alternative to having BBCs in the UK)

Slowly picked up a few BBCs and assortments, plus I've got a Master somewhere
that's fairly well modified from original spec (and an Acorn Cambridge
Workstation which still needs a suitable hard drive and the OS discs to format
it)

Interesting machines as far as old 8-bitters go!

...
  That was about the time I was still single, working
for Ferranti Computer
 Systems (and I've never seen ANY of their computers lying about anywhere...
 ) and had plenty of money to indulge my hobby. 
I've got some sort of machine of theirs, housed in a shell a little bigger than
an IBM XT, plus the guts of a second one - but I don't know if it's just some
sort of XT clone. Uses an XT-style keyboard anyway and output was CGA
compatible if I remember right. I certainly never got it to boot with any
version of DOS I had though (from DOS 2.0 upward) - best I got was a 'missing
operating system' one time.

I seem to remember this machine is way more complex than the innards of an XT
though, with about 1.5x the board space and a lot of ULA chips on board.

I'm sure Ferranti produced much better machines than glorified IBM clones
though, if that's what this is :-)

cheers

Jules

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