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Vintage computer fun

Tony L

Administrator
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Just been given a close to mint, boxed and seemingly perfectly functional Acorn Electron! An Elk! Very low use apparently, the original owner just didn’t get on with computers and its just sat in its box for decades. It really is a nice tidy one. It will be fun to play some old games (I’ve ordered a couple from eBay), reacquaint myself with BBC Basic etc. I’ve done nothing more than check the PSU voltage and look for leaky caps (none found) and run it for a couple of 20 minute stints so far. Much to my amazement its intro cassette loaded ok, and I also typed a 40 or so line program in from the hefty manual. All good, though looks a bit chunky on a 50” LCD TV (that thankfully has an RF input!)!

Never used an Elk before, though a friend had a BBC back in the early ‘80s so I took my first computing steps on that. I’ve a lot of time for the BBC Micro, it was a great bit of kit!

I’m pondering whether to recap it or not. It seems perfectly happy at this stage, and the ones in there are decent brands (Nippon-Chemi-Con, Nichicon etc). I know BBC Micro PSUs tend to fail, but I’ve not dug up much about the much smaller and simpler Elk. I’ll keep run time fairly short at this stage anyway in the hope what is there reforms and keep an eye for any issues.

Anyone else here into old computers, retro-gaming etc? What you got?

PS The new vintage rug might be a bit distracting as a photo background!
 
Wow. We had a room full of these at school back in the mid 80's. I never got one to do anything interesting.

OT, but the first network I managed had a BBC emulator run on Risc OS Archimedes A3000 desktops. It was used to run a whole bunch of old BBC Basic programmes stored on a 20mb econet server.

IIRC, econet used 3 pin din plugs. Crazy.

The humungous Archimedes A5000 desktop was the dogs nads when we got one in 1992 - although it could have done with more than a 40mb hard disc. Best flight sim around. For about 6 weeks.

I never had an Acorn computer fail on me other than through accidental damage. They were pretty robustly assembled.
 
I had a BBC Micro Model B back in the day*. Eventually filled the EPROM slots and had a dual double sided disc drive.


* 35 years makes this expression acceptable. CANNOT be use for anything after 1990 without causing raised eyebrows and tutting.
 
OK, "back in the day", I went though the BBC B, added a 2nd processor on its 'tube', then BBC Master, then the series of Arcs. All excellent. sadly, I never saw an Elk, although one of my ex-postdocs had one. There is, I think still a fair retro scene for the early machines.

Some of the old magazines have been available at times on CDROMs. Acorn User, Beebug, etc. Sadly, most of mine had to be skipped long ago. Think 'yellow pages'... :)
 
OK, "back in the day", I went though the BBC B, added a 2nd processor on its 'tube', then BBC Master, then the series of Arcs. All excellent. sadly, I never saw an Elk, although one of my ex-postdocs had one. There is, I think still a fair retro scene for the early machines.

Some of the old magazines have been available at times on CDROMs. Acorn User, Beebug, etc. Sadly, most of mine had to be skipped long ago. Think 'yellow pages'... :)

Interestingly my Atari STe has tighter MIDI timing than modern PCs, under 1ms latency! Aphex Twin still uses one for this reason.

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/03/10/atari-ste/
 
I used to envy my mates atari. I had a 128k speccy with built in tape player, cool stuff. And an 2600
 
Wasn't the BBC Master a B with added Solidisk sideways RAM? I found the sideways RAM that I installed in my B (that I still have!) very useful. I also had a second B with the LAN bits installed but I sold that via my brother to the BBC! I still have the receipt somewhere.

Cheers,

DV
 
Interestingly my Atari STe has tighter MIDI timing than modern PCs, under 1ms latency! Aphex Twin still uses one for this reason.

I used one back when I co-ran a little studio. Synced up to an ADAT recorder and running Cubase with lots of MIDI to CV converters controlling analog synths. MIDI latency was still very noticable over a fair sized loop, but that is just MIDI. I never got to investigate the Atari beyond thinking of it as a sequencer, but it looks like a decent old computer. Ours had the high-res monochrome screen, so wouldn’t have been great for games at all.
 
I've got a pocket computer from Sharp, looks like a calculator on steroids and is programmable in BASIC. It has a dock it slides into with cassette deck and miniature printer (doesn't work due to teeth missing on nylon gear wheel IIRC) that works (or did once!) by moving coloured pens! Has instruction manual, case the lot.... Hopefully worth something one day:cool:

Edit: Had a look and it's a PC-1500 and I imagined the built in cassette deck... It's cute though!
 
I was at school and 10 years old in 1983 when this was released. I remember a room full of BBC model B's, but it was kept firmly locked unless it was lesson time.. I loved them but was to young to realise quite how 'new' it all was, I just loved playing Jet set Willy on my spectrum (which I still have Tony - I'll dig it out and take some pics)

Amazing how times change, my 7yo now teaches my wife how to use a MBP and does her homework on it!!
 
I was lucky to have a Maths teacher who was an early advocate of computing, and we were allowed to use his Tandy TRS-80. I'm guessing that's be 81/82 or so. The school got a BBC and an Electron, and I also remember one of the other kids had a Sharp MZ-80k, which was a lovely all in one box with typical 1970s grey/brown design.

Anyhow, fast forward however many years and i'm still coding, just spent the day hacking around on Android for a demo tomorrow :)

The electron was slower than the Micro B, but it still runs elite well enough, which is clearly where you have to start. BTW, I think there was a 16k and 32k model or something like that? Worth checking if you have all the RAM. Not sure if it was upgradeable.
 
The electron was slower than the Micro B, but it still runs elite well enough, which is clearly where you have to start. BTW, I think there was a 16k and 32k model or something like that? Worth checking if you have all the RAM. Not sure if it was upgradeable.

The Electron was a hugely cost-cut and sadly rather nobbled BBC B for the home market. It has 32k RAM, but can only access it at half the speed of the B, plus it lacks the very useful ‘Mode 7’ Teletext resolution which used way less RAM than other modes (the video uses main system RAM, which is not plentiful). IIRC BBC Model As were 16K RAM, the Bs and Elk 32, and the Master 64.

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(case open, top keyboard section to left, bottom section to right)

The interesting thing about the Elk is its (for then) large scale integration. It has a huge Ferranti-made ULA that contains a fair bit of a BBC B in a single device. They apparently had real issues fitting it to the main board, hence there being several revisions. This one looks to be a very early one with a socketed ULA and OS chip (Issue 2 mainboard). One surprise with the Elk is it has a very good keyboard, really substantial with a metal back-plate. I suspect it is just a smaller (no function keys etc) variant of the BBC Micro.
 
I had one of the first batch of BBCs. It had the 0.1 OS, which didn't have the ability to access most of the I/O ports. Cost £10 to get the 1.0 OS chip IIRC, which I always thought should have been a free upgrade since the computer was basically broken without it. Added sideways RAM and the DFS chip, and then had to run it with the lid off to stop it overheating (which was a common problem with the early machines) - I remember one of the mags providing a template to drill holes in the shape of the owl logo in the top cover to improve ventilation. Still got a BBC Master and an A4000 Archimedes.

One of my first jobs was coding for the MARDIS Orac speech communication device, which was based on a BBC Micro, but the circuits were re-engineered to make a portable, battery powered device. It could digitise and synthesise speech. All the speech synthesis was done in software using the BBC's audio system, which made it much cheaper to make than the competitor products that used dedicated synthesiser hardware. It also meant it was the only device with a British accent. This is one of the later models with a plastic case - the early ones weren't so pretty.
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Wasn't the BBC Master a B with added Solidisk sideways RAM?

Alas, too long ago for me to recall! I do remember the slots for plugging in packs with ROMs and RAMs. And having an EPROM blower, etc. IIRC at one time the software we used to run our mm-wave interferometer, do FFTs, and plot results were in EPROMs on the B and then Master. The Acorn machines were good for experiment interfacing because of all the hardware ports, etc, developed for the 'B'. And this was carried on to their later machines.
 
This thread prompted me to go looking for old mags, etc. (Apart from the ones I still have copies of, somewhere!) Found a number of places like

http://8bs.com/magazines.htm

and though it might be worth mentioning that 'Archive' magazine is still being published, and also sell a backset on DVDs of the old issues.
 


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