Misplaced Pages

#686313

112-537: Acorn had stated in a February 1985 press release that the ABC machines would soon be available in 50 stores, but having been rescued by Olivetti, no dealers were stocking the range and only the Personal Assistant and 300 series models were expected to be on display by the end of March. However, the ABC range was cancelled before any of the models were shipped to customers. The ABC 210 was subsequently relaunched as

224-579: A microcomputer capable of performing various tasks which they could then demonstrate in the TV series The Computer Programme . The list of topics included programming , graphics , sound and music, teletext , controlling external hardware, and artificial intelligence . It developed an ambitious specification for a BBC computer, and discussed the project with several companies including Acorn Computers , Sinclair Research , Newbury Laboratories, Tangerine Computer Systems , and Dragon Data . The introduction of

336-478: A "Bitstik" [1] . The Model A and the Model B were built on the same printed circuit board (PCB), and a Model A can be upgraded to a Model B. Users wishing to operate Model B software need to add the extra RAM and the user/printer MOS Technology 6522 VIA (which many games use for timers) and snip a link, a task that can be achieved without soldering. To do a full upgrade with all the external ports requires soldering

448-704: A "CAD graphics workstation based on the 16032 chip" in October 1983, and presumably following on from work done by Acorn related to the design of the ULA components in its products, the Acorn Cambridge Workstation formed the hardware basis of a chip design product by Qudos called Quickchip, "a comprehensive CAD package for semi-custom gate arrays... supported by a high speed direct write electron beam fabrication facility", used by custom semiconductor product designers such as Flare Technology and promoted by

560-691: A "Universal Gluon" expansion did eventually come to pass through the availability of a number of third-party expansions for the BBC Micro such as the Cambridge Microprocessor Systems 68000 second processor, Flight Electronics 68000 processor board, and the Micro Developments MD512k Universal Second Processor System. Meanwhile, various companies pursued the development of Tube-based second processor solutions involving

672-512: A "generic port of UNIX System V". However, during 1985, Genix was replaced on the MG-1 by a port of 4.2BSD called 42nix and augmented with the Oriel graphical user interface to give a reported factor of six performance improvement in graphics performance, Oriel being partially kernel -based. The kernel-based screen driver in this architecture managed window viewports, called panels , and updated

784-559: A "low-cost development" of an existing machine, the Transam Tuscan, which included dual floppy drives and cost £1,700. This proposal was voted down by the ITV companies, citing a possible contravention of the companies' obligations under broadcasting regulations prohibiting sponsorship, along with concerns about a conflict of interest with advertisers of computer products. Despite denials of involvement with ITV from Prism Microproducts,

896-431: A 10, 22 or 45 MB hard disk, 800 KB floppy drive, and an optional Ethernet interface, with prices stated as being equivalent to $ 6,975 for the 10 MB hard disk system, $ 8,250 for the 22 MB system and $ 9,500 for the 45 MB system. UK pricing was given as £5,495, £6,495 and £7,495 for the respective configurations. The product was claimed to be "the first $ 10,000 personal work station", comparable to

1008-601: A BBC Micro clone called the Dolphin. Unlike the original BBC Micro, the Dolphin featured blue function keys. Production agreements were made with both SCL in India and distributor Harry Mazal in Mexico for the assembly of BBC Micro units from kits of parts, leading to full-scale manufacturing, with SCL also planning to fabricate the 6502 CPU under licence from Rockwell. According to reporting from early 1985, "several thousand Beebs

1120-487: A Master 128 or Master Econet Terminal (ET), these models being the foundation of the range. It was therefore possible to acquire and upgrade the Master 128 or ET to one of the other models by installing the appropriate coprocessor card, and unlike the ABC whose models could be purchased as complete systems, only the Master 128 and ET were offered by Acorn as systems with the coprocessors offered separately as "modules" to realise

1232-650: A Z80 board and hard disk drive from Torch that allowed the BBC machine to run CP/M programs. Separate pages, each with a codename, are used to control the access to the I/O: The Tube interface allowed Acorn to use BBC Micros with ARM CPUs as software development machines when creating the Acorn Archimedes . This resulted in the ARM development kit for the BBC Micro in 1986, priced at around £4000. From 2006,

SECTION 10

#1732780612687

1344-598: A broadcast quality signal for use within television programming; it was used on episodes of The Computer Programme and Making the Most of the Micro . The computer included several input/output (I/O) interfaces: serial and parallel printer ports, an 8-bit general purpose digital I/O port, a port offering four analogue inputs, a light pen input, and an expansion connector (the "1 MHz bus") which enabled other hardware to be connected. An Econet network interface and

1456-528: A business upgrade for the BBC Micro, with Z80-based computers running the CP/M operating system being the established business platform at that time and thus the likely form of any such upgrade. This upgrade was eventually delivered in 1984 as the Z80 Second Processor, requiring a BBC Micro, dual floppy drives and a display to complete a basic business system for a total cost of around £1500. As such,

1568-586: A computer retailing strategy. A key feature of the BBC Micro's design is the high-performance random-access memory (RAM) it is equipped with. A common design note in 6502 -based computers of the era was to run the RAM at twice the clock rate as the CPU. This allowed a separate video display controller to access memory while the CPU was busy processing the data just read. In this way, the CPU and graphics driver could share access to RAM through careful timing. This technique

1680-400: A disk drive interface were available as options. All motherboards had space for the electronic components, but Econet was rarely installed. Additionally, an Acorn proprietary interface named the " Tube " allowed a second processor to be added. Three models of second processor were offered by Acorn, based on the 6502 , Z80 and 32016 CPUs. The Tube was used for third-party add-ons, including

1792-441: A finger on a certain place on the motherboard caused the prototype to work. Acorn put a resistor pack across the data bus, which Furber described as " 'the engineer's finger' and again, we have no idea why it's necessary, and a million and a half machines later it's still working, so nobody asked any questions". The Model A shipped with 16  KB of user RAM, while the Model B had 32 KB. Extra ROMs could be fitted (four on

1904-403: A given price, none of them surpass the BBC ... in terms of versatility and expansion capability". As with Sinclair Research 's ZX Spectrum and Commodore International 's Commodore 64 , both released the next year, in 1982, demand greatly exceeded supply. For some months, there were long delays before customers received the machines they had ordered. Efforts were made to market the machine in

2016-461: A kind of overlay, this being combined with the main display image to produce the final screen image. The machine also featured a "soft power switch" similar to that provided by the Apple Lisa (and also the slightly later Torch Triple X ) which initiated "an orderly UNIX shutdown". Realising that the price of the MG-1, at around £5,495, would need to be reflected in the physical appearance of

2128-511: A kit with an ARM7TDMI CPU running at 64 MHz, with as much as 64 MB of RAM, was released for the BBC Micro and Master, using the Tube interface to upgrade the 8-bit micros to 32-bit RISC machines. Among the software that operated on the Tube are an enhanced version of the Elite video game and a computer-aided design system that required a second 6502 CPU and a 3-dimensional joystick named

2240-451: A month" were being produced in India. Meanwhile, the eventual production arrangement in Mexico involved local manufacturer Datum (a company founded by Harry Mazal and others, initially to act as ICL's Mexican distributor ), aiming to assemble 2000 units per month by May 1985, with the initial assembly intended to lead to the manufacture of all aspects of the machines apart from Acorn's proprietary ULA components. Such machines were intended for

2352-616: A port of 4.3BSD Unix to the ARM architecture. Despite the ABC 300 series embracing compatibility with the IBM PC world, Acorn would subsequently mostly avoid selling dedicated PC compatibles, with the Acorn M19 - a rebadged Olivetti M19 - appearing in the product range for a short period in the mid-1980s. Beyond the Master 512, the Archimedes range was initially intended to support a similar second processor expansion, but PC support on

SECTION 20

#1732780612687

2464-562: A scanner. However, the company entered receivership in April 1988. Its assets related to the Hitech-10 were purchased in June 1988 by a consortium, Computer Hitech International, which adopted the corporate identity Mistral Computer Systems . Mistral subcontracted the design of its systems to Algorithmics Ltd., this being "essentially the rump of the old Whitechapel design team". Algorithmics

2576-599: A separate keyboard. The Zilog Z80 , Intel 80286 and National Semiconductor 32016 were all used as second processors in the various models. Two of the eight models produced, the Personal Assistant and the Terminal, had no second processor. As part of the agreement made between Acorn and the BBC to supply a microcomputer to accompany the BBC Computer Literacy Project, Acorn had committed to deliver

2688-653: A similar strategy to that of the Acorn Business Computer, Torch were said to be "actively evaluating the B+ motherboard", having used the previous BBC Micro motherboard as the basis of the company's earlier products. Torch's own Graduate product had been noted as potentially filling a gap within the ABC range, this being the "big jump" from the Z80-based ABC 100 systems to the 80286-based ABC 300 models. The 1982 vision of microcomputers acting as terminals to

2800-505: A specific microcomputer to a more general computer literacy initiative was a topic of controversy, however, with criticism aimed at the BBC for promoting a specific commercial product and for going beyond the "traditional BBC pattern" of promoting existing information networks of training and education providers. Accusations were even levelled at the Department of Industry for making the BBC "an arm of Government industrial policy" and using

2912-486: A stop gap", and others criticising the elevated price of £500 (compared to the £400 of the original Model B) in the face of significantly cheaper competition providing as much or even twice as much memory. The extra RAM in the Model B+ is assigned as two blocks, a block of 20 KB dedicated solely for screen display (so-called shadow RAM ) and a block of 12 KB of special sideways RAM . The B+128, introduced towards

3024-439: A super-minicomputer", providing the result of an in-house benchmark test against a VAX 11/750 running 4.2BSD, both in single-user mode and in "typical heavily loaded" multi-user mode, to illustrate and reinforce the message that such a computer could "take the strain off an overloaded super-minicomputer". Queen Mary College was a significant purchaser of the Acorn Cambridge Workstation, having reportedly acquired "no less than 80 of

3136-487: A working memory management unit (MMU) in the National Semiconductor 32016 chipset, for which a socket was provided on the machine's processor board. Thus, the machine was delivered with only the 32016 CPU, 32081 FPU (Floating Point Unit), and the 32201 TCU (Timing and Control Unit) fitted as standard. Such problems with the 32082 MMU had been noted with regard to hardware workarounds adopted in the design of

3248-540: Is a series of microcomputers designed and built by Acorn Computers Limited in the 1980s for the Computer Literacy Project of the BBC . The machine was the focus of a number of educational BBC TV programmes on computer literacy, starting with The Computer Programme in 1982, followed by Making the Most of the Micro , Computers in Control in 1983, and finally Micro Live in 1985. After

3360-532: Is also a long-running problem late in the B/B+'s commercial life infamous amongst B+ owners, when Superior Software released Repton Infinity , which did not run on the B+. A series of unsuccessful replacements were issued before one compatible with both was finally released. During 1986, Acorn followed up with the BBC Master , which offers memory sizes from 128 KB and many other refinements which improved upon

3472-406: Is fundamentally incompatible, and the 8271 emulators that existed were necessarily imperfect for all but basic operation. Software that use copy protection techniques involving direct access to the controller do not operate on the new system. Acorn attempted to alleviate this, starting with version 2.20 of the 1770 DFS, via an 8271-backward- compatible Ctrl + Z + Break option. There

Acorn Business Computer - Misplaced Pages Continue

3584-481: The Acorn Business Computer (ABC)/Acorn Cambridge Workstation range of machines was announced, based primarily on BBC hardware. In mid-1985, Acorn introduced the Model B+ which increased the total RAM to 64 KB. This had a modest market impact and received a rather unsympathetic reception, with one reviewer's assessment being that the machine was "18 months too late" and that it "must be seen as

3696-534: The Acorn Cambridge Workstation in July 1985, and sold in modest numbers to academic and scientific users. The ABC range was developed by Acorn essentially as a repackaged BBC Micro , expanded to 64 KB RAM, to which was added (in some models) a second processor and extra memory to complement the Micro's 6502 . The electronics and disk drives were integrated into the monitor housing, with

3808-720: The CG-1 , was also announced in 1986, followed by the MG-200 , with an NS32332 processor, in March 1987. The MG-1 employed an 8 MHz 32016 CPU with 32082 memory management unit (MMU) and 32081 floating-point unit (FPU), with the MMU being noted in a 1985 article as "suffering from bugs" and being situated on its own board providing hardware fixes. In order to deliver the machine at prices closer to personal computers than contemporary workstations (such as Sun, Apollo and Perq), design techniques from

3920-700: The East End of London , United Kingdom in April 1983 by Timothy Eccles and Bob Newman, with a combined investment of £1 million from the Greater London Enterprise Board (£100,000 initially ), venture capital companies Newmarket and Baillie Gifford , and the Department of Trade and Industry . The company was situated in the Whitechapel Technology Centre—a council-funded high-technology enterprise hub—and began

4032-611: The HP 9000 series but more competitively priced, and was initially aimed at computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing applications. A contemporary evaluation of a 40 MB hard disk system with 2 MB RAM lists an approximate acquisition price of £9,000. While there was no distributor in the United States, the MG-1 was sold in North America by Cybertool Systems Ltd. from 1984 through 1986. A colour version,

4144-664: The ITV network to introduce their own initiative and rival computing system, with a CP/M-based system proposed by Transam Computers under consideration for such an initiative by the Independent Television Companies Association at a late 1983 meeting. The proposed machine would have been priced at £399, matching that of the BBC Model B, and was reported as offering 64 KB of RAM, a disc interface, and serial and parallel interfaces, itself being

4256-466: The Master Compact eventually introduced the practice of bundling a display and storage into Acorn's traditional product range. Whereas the different models in the ABC range were combinations of a "host" computer based on the BBC Micro and a second processor fitted inside the display unit, the equivalent Master-series variants were generally accommodated by plug-in coprocessor cards fitted inside

4368-490: The Tube interface was incorporated into the design, enabling a Z80 second processor to be added. A new contract between Acorn and BBC Enterprises was agreed in 1984 for another four-year term, with other manufacturers having tendered for the deal. An Acorn representative admitted that the BBC Model B would not be competitive throughout the term of the renewed contract, and that a successor would emerge. The OS ROM v1.0 contains

4480-514: The Whitechapel MG-1 workstation (a somewhat higher-specification product than Acorn's offerings that initially provided National Semiconductor's own Unix variant, Genix, instead of Xenix). Logica had announced general availability of Xenix 3.0 for the 32000 series, featuring "full demand paging virtual memory", for May 1984, and 32032-based systems running Xenix reportedly became available. Four models were originally planned for launch in

4592-460: The 1981 original. It has essentially the same 6502-based BBC architecture, with many of the upgrades that the original design intentionally makes possible (extra ROM software, extra paged RAM, second processors) now included on the circuit board as internal plug-in modules. The BBC Micro platform amassed a large software base of both games and educational programs for its two main uses as a home and educational computer. Notable examples of each include

Acorn Business Computer - Misplaced Pages Continue

4704-415: The 300 machines Acorn has sold" by mid-1986. While certain users benefited from a single-user workstation in the way emphasised by Acorn's advertising, specifically that an individual could dedicate their machine to a task and see it completed sooner than the same task queued for execution on a much faster mainframe or supercomputer, Acorn's product saw numerous problems when introduced to a broader audience at

4816-412: The 32016-based second processor solution provided by the Acorn Cambridge Workstation, and the Master 512 offers a 80186-based second processor with DOS Plus and GEM support, thus resembling the ABC 300 series in particular ways. However, none of the Master series features an integrated display, which had been criticised in some reviews of the ABC series. Around two years after the unveiling of the ABC range,

4928-491: The 6502 can translate the request for the local machine or send it across the Tube interface, as direct access is impossible from the coprocessor. Published programs largely conform to the API except for games, which routinely engage with the hardware for greater speed, and require a particular Acorn model. Whitechapel Computer Works Whitechapel Computer Works Ltd. ( WCW ) was a computer workstation company founded in

5040-701: The 68000, neglected by Acorn in its own offerings , such as the CA Special Products Casper board and the HDP68K board featured in the Torch Computers Unicorn, the latter offering the Unix support never delivered for Acorn's 32016-based systems. The Torch Unicorn was perhaps the clearest realisation of the broader "Universal Gluon" concept, effectively coupling a BBC Micro with a more powerful computing system. Initially mentioned as

5152-473: The ABC range as a "repackaging job" of the BBC Model B, the selection of models was itself regarded as "superb" in some of the commentary following the unveiling of the ABC in late 1984. The ABC Personal Assistant was perceived by some to be the BBC Model C expected from Acorn, raising questions about the work that had been done to the BBC Model B hardware and whether such a board, designed for a reduction in chip count and production cost, would eventually see use in

5264-466: The Acorn Cambridge Workstation range: the ACW 100, ACW 121 and ACW 143 being models with 1 MB of RAM (expandable to 4 MB except for the ACW 100), the ACW 443 having 4 MB of RAM; the ACW 143 and ACW 443 offering hard drive storage. A range of languages were bundled as standard, with Acorn emphasising the productivity benefits of having a 32-bit desktop computer with "the computational performance of

5376-615: The Archimedes range initially focused on software emulation with the PC Emulator product. Eventually, hardware expansions from Aleph One provided the envisaged second processor capabilities, these being sold by Acorn in some configurations for certain models. Acorn would go on to emphasise PC compatibility with the Archimedes' successor, the Risc PC , with its architecture supporting a plug-in Intel-compatible CPU alongside

5488-583: The BASIC III ROM chip, modified to accept the American spelling of COLOR , but the height of the graphics display was reduced to 200 scan lines to suit NTSC TVs, severely affecting applications written for British computers. After the failed US marketing campaign, the unwanted machines were remanufactured for the British market and sold, resulting in a third export variant. In October 1984,

5600-452: The BBC Micro system" for which 200 educational titles were being offered. In October 1984, while preparing a major expansion of its US dealer network, Acorn claimed sales of 85 per cent of the computers in British schools, and delivery of 40,000 machines per month. That December, Acorn stated its intention to become the market leader in US educational computing. The New York Times considered

5712-598: The BBC Models was high compared to competitors such as the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and from 1983 on, Acorn attempted to counter this by producing a simplified but largely compatible version intended for home use, complementing the use of the BBC Micro in schools: the 32K Acorn Electron . The involvement of the BBC in microcomputing also initiated tentative plans by the independent television companies of

SECTION 50

#1732780612687

5824-604: The BBC started what became known as the BBC Computer Literacy Project . The project was initiated partly in response to an ITV documentary series The Mighty Micro , in which Christopher Evans of the UK's National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming microcomputer revolution and its effect on the economy, industry, and lifestyle of the United Kingdom. The BBC wanted to base its project on

5936-564: The Computer Literacy Project as a way of "funding industry through the back door", obscuring public financial support on behalf of a government that was ostensibly opposed to subsidising industry. The Acorn team had already been working on a successor to their existing Atom microcomputer. Known as the Proton , it included better graphics and a faster 2 MHz MOS Technology 6502 central processing unit . The machine

6048-520: The Literacy Project's call for bids for a computer to accompany the television programmes and literature, Acorn won the contract with the Proton , a successor of its Atom computer prototyped at short notice. Renamed the BBC Micro, the system was adopted by most schools in the United Kingdom , changing Acorn's fortunes. It was also successful as a home computer in the UK, despite its high price compared to some other home computers sold in

6160-533: The London financial industry, and was aiming to increase production levels by relocating manufacturing from the UK to West Germany. The largest single user of the MG-1 was probably The City University (now City, University of London) which purchased and installed 140. Other academic users included Queen Mary College , the University of Lancaster , amongst "about a dozen" research institutes and universities in

6272-487: The MG-1 provided a monochrome display with a 1024 x 800 resolution, the CG-1 provided a 768 x 512 resolution supporting 256 colours from a palette of approximately 256,000 colours. Unlike the MG-1, the CG-1 employed a separate framebuffer fitted in an expansion slot to refresh the display, with screen data being copied to this framebuffer from the main system memory when updating the framebuffer contents. The MG-200 preserved

6384-426: The MG-1, Whitechapel engaged industrial designers Fether & Partners to produce a design for the different units of the system. The collaboration eventually settled on locating most of the electronics in a single "two-tier" box reminiscent of stacked hi-fi systems, with the monitor a separate unit that could be placed on top of the main unit or alongside. The main unit was also designed to be stood on its end. While

6496-528: The Mexican and South American markets, potentially also appealing to those south-western states of the US having large Spanish-speaking populations. Ultimately, upon Acorn's withdrawal from the US in 1986, Datum would continue manufacturing at a level of 7000 to 8000 Spanish-language machines per year for the North and South American markets. The initial strategy for the BBC's computer literacy endeavour involved

6608-516: The PCB or sixteen with expansion hardware) and accessed via paged memory . The machines included three video ports, one with an RF modulator sending out a signal in the UHF band, another sending composite video suitable for connection to computer monitors , and a separate RGB video port. The separate RGB video out socket was an engineering requirement from the BBC to allow the machine to directly output

6720-476: The Proton was the only machine to match the BBC's specification; it also exceeded the specification in nearly every parameter. Based on the Proton prototype, the BBC signed a contract with Acorn as early as February 1981; by June the BBC Micro's specifications and pricing were decided. As a concession to the BBC's expectation of "industry standard" compatibility with CP/M, apparently under the direction of John Coll,

6832-429: The RAM had to allow four million access cycles per second. Hitachi was the only company considering a DRAM which ran at that speed, the HM4816. To equip the prototype machine, the only four 4816s in the country were hand-carried by the Hitachi representative to Acorn. The National Semiconductor 81LS95 multiplexer was needed for the high memory speed. Furber recalled that competitors came to Acorn offering to replace

SECTION 60

#1732780612687

6944-402: The UK at the time. Acorn later employed the machine to simulate and develop the ARM architecture . While nine models were eventually produced with the BBC brand, the phrase "BBC Micro" is usually used colloquially to refer to the first six (Model A, B, B+64, B+128, Master 128, and Master Compact); subsequent BBC models are considered part of Acorn's Archimedes series. During the early 1980s,

7056-438: The UK's Department of Trade and Industry. A related product was apparently produced by Qudos for the BBC Master Turbo or BBC Micro with 6502 second processor expansion, offering design support for custom gate arrays of "up to around 300 gates in size" based on Ferranti ULA technology. Quickchip was subsequently ported to the Acorn Archimedes , with the software having previously been "running on powerful Unix workstations". Although

7168-422: The UK. The MG-1 also found use as a silicon design workstation, equipped by European Silicon Structures to run that company's SOLO software suite, and by Lattice Logic to run that company's Chipsmith package. Whitechapel positioned the MG-series for publishing applications as the MG-Series Publishing Workstation based on the MG-1 and MG-200 models, bundling the PrintMaster technical publishing software along with

7280-460: The United States and West Germany. Acorn's strategy in the US focused on the education market, worth a reported $ 700 million , by offering the BBC Micro in an upgraded form of the Model B with an expanded ROM, speech synthesis hardware, and built-in Econet interface for a price of $ 995, complementing this with the provision of software and materials designed to support teaching and to encourage adoption by teachers "fearful" of computers or skeptical of

7392-411: The basis for more powerful machines. Meanwhile, the machine that would become known as the ABC 100 was described in mid-1983 as the Acorn Business Machine, being based on the BBC Micro with Z80 Second Processor, twin disk drives, running CP/M, with an anticipated launch the same year and a price of "under £2000". Such a configuration, with a Z80 processor running CP/M assisted by a 6502 processor managing

7504-417: The bundle was not offered as a single, packaged business computer product, unlike a widening range of competing products that could be obtained at such a price. Various systems had already been proposed by Acorn early in the life of the BBC Micro before the Acorn Business Computer name had been publicly adopted. For instance, the machine that would eventually be known as the ABC 210 was described in mid-1982 in

7616-453: The command line. The MOS recognises certain built-in commands, and polls the paged ROMs in descending order for service otherwise; if none of them claims the command, then the OS returns a Bad command error. Suitable ROM (or EPROM) images could be written and provide functions without requiring RAM for the code itself. Not all ROMs offer star commands (ROMs containing data files, for instance), but any ROM can " hook " into vectors to enhance

7728-507: The company had already been pursuing a joint venture with Transam on a product rumoured to be under consideration by the broadcasting group. This product, a business system subsequently known as the Wren, had reportedly been positioned as such an "ITV Micro" towards the end of 1983, also to be offered in a home variant with ORACLE teletext reception capabilities. However, not all ITV franchise holders were equally enthusiastic about scheduling programmes related to microcomputing or about pursuing

7840-474: The competition from IBM, Apple , and Commodore. Another deployment in Phoenix, Arizona valued at $ 174,697 saw 175 BBC Micros installed, with the local Acorn dealer predicting sales worth $ 2 million in the next two years, of which around 85 to 90 percent would be made into education, the remainder going to the small business market. In early 1984, Acorn claimed a US network of more than 1,000 dealers, also reporting "over $ 50 million worth of education orders for

7952-423: The component with their own, but "none of them worked. And we never knew why. Which of course, means we didn't know why the National Semiconductor one did work correctly. And a million and a half BBC Micros later, it was still working, and I still didn't know why". Another mystery was the 6502's data bus . The prototype BBC Micro exceeded the CPU's specifications, causing it to fail. The designers found that putting

8064-695: The concepts were revisited in the BBC Master series of microcomputers. Like the ABC Personal Assistant, the Master 128 offers more memory than the original BBC Micro and includes the View and ViewSheet productivity software on board. The Master Econet Terminal, like the ABC Terminal, emphasises network access and a lack of on-board software and local storage. Meanwhile, the Master Scientific was intended to offer some continuity with

8176-482: The connectors to the motherboard. The original machines shipped with "OS 0.1", with later updates advertised in magazines, supplied as a clip-in integrated circuit, with the last official version being "OS 1.2". Variations in the Acorn OS exist as a result of home-made projects and modified machines can still be bought on Internet auction sites such as eBay as of 2011. The BBC Model A was phased out of production with

8288-477: The context of an apparent deal with National Semiconductor , indicating a 1 MB system with hard disks and "Acorn, Unix or Idris operating systems" at an estimated price of around $ 3500, with a second processor product for the BBC Micro having only 256 KB RAM. The Gluon concept, offering a 32016 second processor solution for the BBC Micro and other microcomputers, featured prominently in the company's strategy to offer more powerful computing hardware and to provide

8400-408: The conventional BBC Micro range, bringing lower pricing and higher reliability. This model, providing a hard disk, entered production as the Acorn Cambridge Workstation (ACW 443). The reason given for providing Panos as the operating system at the launch of the Acorn Cambridge Workstation instead of Xenix, despite Acorn having contracted Logica to port Xenix to the machine, was the apparent lack of

8512-737: The design of their first workstation model in August 1983, shipping the first units by September 1984. The company's first workstation model was the MG-1 (named after the Milliard Gargantubrain from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ). The MG-1 was based on the National Semiconductor NS32016 microprocessor , with 512 KB of RAM (expandable to 8 MB ), a 1024 × 800 pixel monochrome display ,

8624-499: The desired variants. A more direct legacy of the range concerns the BBC Model B+ whose motherboard has its origin as the BBC Micro "host" found in the different ABC models: a design using 64-kilobit RAM chips, an updated disk controller, and support for shadow RAM . Given perceptions of one ABC model as the BBC Model C, the Model B+ could be regarded as delivering the basis of that widely expected model. Having successfully pursued

8736-402: The details of the technical changes. Per Watford Electronics comments in their '32K Ram Board Manual': Early issue BBCs (Issue 3 circuit boards and before) are notorious for out of specification timings. If problems occur with this sort of machine, the problem can generally be cured by the use of either a Rockwell 6502A CPU chip, or by replacing IC14 (a 74LS245) with either another 74LS245 or

8848-776: The development of these products, however. In late 1983, the launch of the Z80 Second Processor had been estimated as occurring in February 1984, and although the 16032 Second Processor had been demonstrated at an event in Munich, Acorn had not apparently decided on pricing or positioning, describing the product as being "months away". Meanwhile, negotiations between National Semiconductor, Acorn, Logica and Microsoft were ongoing with regard to making Unix - Xenix , specifically - available on "the BBC machine". The following models were originally announced in late 1984, with pricing for several models announced in early 1985. Although acknowledging

8960-617: The display and peripherals was already proven by various Torch Computers products - notably the BBC Micro-based C-series (Communicator) - and also featured in machines like the C/WP Cortex. The successful development of second processor solutions was regarded as an essential progression that would enable Acorn to offer variants of the BBC Micro as business machines and to be able to compete with Torch, whose products were in some ways pursuing such goals. Delays affected

9072-442: The display using panel contents copied from raster images that were prepared in separate memory regions by applications. In order to improve responsiveness and reduce the latency observed with contemporary Unix systems, the mouse position was tracked using a dedicated processor which also monitored the keyboard for events, and a form of hardware mouse pointer was used, with the pointer bitmap being stored in its own 64-pixel buffer as

9184-544: The end of 1985, comes with an additional 64 KB (4 × 16 KB sideways RAM banks) to give a total RAM of 128 KB. The B+ is incapable of operating some original BBC B programs and games, such as the very popular Castle Quest . A particular problem is the replacement of the Intel 8271 floppy-disk controller with the Western Digital 1770 : not only was the new controller mapped to different addresses, it

9296-475: The faster 74ALS245. Two export models were developed: one for the US, with Econet and speech hardware as standard; the other for West Germany . Despite concerns of unsuitability for the Australian market, with the design failing at temperatures above 35 °C (95 °F), the machine was still "widely used in Australian schools". Export models were fitted with radio frequency shielding as required by

9408-522: The first MIPS desktop computers in 1987", initially announced the MG-300 based on the MIPS architecture with a performance rating of 8 to 10 million instructions per second as part of a strategy to pursue sales in the US market via original equipment manufacturers and value-added resellers, with the company's management having been reconstituted to include "one-half new and one-half old staff". The MG-300 model

9520-600: The following ASCII credits string (code here ): Additionally, the last bytes of the BASIC read-only memory (ROM; v2 and v4) include the word "Roger", which is a reference to Sophie Wilson whose name at the time was Roger Wilson. The machine was released as the BBC Microcomputer on 1 December 1981, although production problems pushed delivery of the majority of the initial run into 1982. Nicknamed "the Beeb", it

9632-445: The hardware and systems software that impacted the project for 15 months. Acorn's earlier positioning of this system as a CAD workstation failed to keep up with user expectations, with the BBC Micro architecture offering an insufficiently high screen resolution and with the system not being provided with mouse or trackball, these contributing to perceptions of it being "less than ideal for Computer Aided Design". Some confusion arose when

9744-693: The inclusion of local area networking to be of prime importance to teachers. The operation resulted in advertisements by at least one dealer in Interface Age magazine, but ultimately the attempt failed. The success of the machine in the UK was due largely to its acceptance as an "educational" computer – UK schools used BBC Micros to teach computer literacy , information technology skills. Acorn became more known for its BBC Model B computer than for its other products. Some Commonwealth countries, including India , started their own computer literacy programmes around 1984. Intending to avoid "re-inventing

9856-654: The inherent performance hit, as was the case for the Amstrad CPC , Atari 8-bit computers , and to a lesser extent the ZX Spectrum . Others, like the MSX systems, used entirely separate pools of memory for the CPU and video, slowing access between the two. Furber believed that the Acorn design should have a flat memory model and allow the CPU and video system to access the bus without interfering with each other. To do so,

9968-413: The institution. Despite a fairly varied range of programming language products being available for the machine's Panos environment - 32016 assembly language, BASIC, BCPL, Fortran, Lisp, Pascal - mostly giving the impression of being "top-notch" implementations, other kinds of applications were more scarce or suffered from performance issues. System and network reliability proved to be a significant problem in

10080-535: The introduction of the Acorn Electron , with chairman Chris Curry stating at the time that Acorn "would no longer promote it" (the Model A). Early BBC Micros used linear power supplies at the insistence of the BBC, which, as a broadcaster, was cautious about electromagnetic interference . The supplies were unreliable, and after a few months the BBC allowed switched-mode units. An apparent oversight in

10192-561: The keyboard, with the leftmost socket hard-wired for the OS. The intended purpose for the perforated panel on the left of the keyboard was for a Serial ROM or Speech ROM. The paged ROM system is essentially modular. A language-independent system of star commands , prefixed with an asterisk, provides the ability to select a language (for example *BASIC , *PASCAL ), a filing system ( *TAPE , *DISC ), change settings ( *FX , *OPT ), or carry out ROM-supplied tasks ( *COPY , *BACKUP ) from

10304-415: The main ARM processor. Eventually yielding to demands for dedicated PC-compatible systems, Acorn announced Pentium -based systems in 1996 for administrative use in educational establishments, although these models would eventually become available via Xemplar Education - Acorn's educational joint venture with Apple - and not Acorn itself. BBC Micro The BBC Microcomputer System , or BBC Micro ,

10416-461: The manufacturing process resulted in many Model Bs producing a constant buzzing noise from the built-in speaker. This fault can be rectified partly by soldering a resistor across two pads. There are five developments of the main BBC Micro circuit board that addressed various issues through the model's production, from 'Issue 1' through to 'Issue 7' with variants 5 and 6 not being released. The 1985 'BBC Microcomputer Service Manual' from Acorn documents

10528-498: The marketing of the "Acorn Proton-based BBC microcomputer for less than £200". The Model A and the Model B were initially priced at £235 and £335 respectively, but increased almost immediately to £299 and £399 due to higher costs. The Model B price of nearly £400 was roughly £1200 (€1393) in 2011 prices – thirty years after its launch – or around £1900 today. Acorn anticipated total sales to be around 12,000 units, but eventually more than 1.5 million BBC Micros were sold. The cost of

10640-584: The original release of Elite and Granny's Garden . Programming languages and some applications were supplied on ROM chips to be installed on the motherboard. These load instantly and leave the RAM free for programs or documents. Although appropriate content was little-supported by television broadcasters, telesoftware could be downloaded via the optional Teletext Adapter and the third-party teletext adaptors that emerged. The built-in operating system, Acorn MOS , provides an extensive API to interface with all standard peripherals, ROM-based software, and

10752-481: The personal computer industry were adopted, with a single eight-layer system board being used to hold the CPU and other integrated circuits. The 32201 timing and control unit (TCU) and 32202 interrupt control unit (ICU) were also employed by the MG-1. Initially, NatSemi's Genix operating system , described as being based on Unix System III with 4.1 BSD enhancements, or just 4.1BSD, was provided. NatSemi's Unix roadmap in 1984 advertised forthcoming 4.2BSD features and

10864-432: The protected mode of the 80286 and relying on the "host" 6502 at the core of the ABC architecture to handle the display needs of each application, skepticism was expressed at Acorn's likely pricing and the company's ability to deliver the product by a rumoured release date of March 1985. Although most of the ABC models failed to reach the market in their original form, particularly after Olivetti's rescue of Acorn, several of

10976-566: The range was first shown, with commentators given the impression that the graphical environment had been developed by Acorn. It was subsequently noted that Acorn and Digital Research had apparently conspired to leave such an impression because the Digital Research product itself was still "secret at the time Acorn decided to show it". Although impressed by the potential of the machine, offering support for running four applications concurrently, including traditional DOS applications, by using

11088-494: The resolution of the MG-1 but introduced the faster NS32332 processor along with faster RAM which was dual-ported to give the processor and display direct access via a 64-bit data path. A colour CG-200 variant of the MG-200 was also available. WCW went into receivership in 1986, but were soon revived as Whitechapel Workstations Ltd. The new company, described as "a briefly flowering UK-based UNIX workstation company that shipped

11200-544: The respective countries. From June 1983 the name was always spelled out completely – "British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System" – to avoid confusion with Brown, Boveri & Cie in international markets, after warnings from the Swiss multinational not to market the computer with the BBC label in West Germany, thus forcing Acorn to relabel "hundreds of machines" to comply with these demands. US models include

11312-598: The role of computers in the curriculum. By October 1983, the US operation reported that American schools had placed orders with it totalling $ 21 million . In one deployment in Lowell, Massachusetts valued at $ 177,000, 138 BBC Micros were installed in eight of the 27 schools in the city, with the computer's networking capabilities, educational credentials, and the availability of software with "high education quality" accompanied by "useful lesson plans and workbooks" all given as reasons for selecting Acorn's machine in preference to

11424-569: The screen. Features specific to some versions of BASIC, like vector graphics , keyboard macros , cursor-based editing, sound queues, and envelopes , are in the MOS ROM and made available to any application. BBC BASIC itself, being in a separate ROM, can be replaced with another language. BASIC, other languages, and utility ROM chips reside in any of four 16 KB paged ROM sockets, with OS support for sixteen sockets via expansion hardware. The five (total) sockets are located partly obscured under

11536-591: The smaller-scale Minichip solution ran on a BBC Micro-based system with 6502 coprocessor, and was also released for the Archimedes, the Unix-based Quickchip solution apparently ran on Vax systems running Ultrix. Having promised some kind of Unix product as early as 1982, Acorn eventually released a Unix workstation in 1989 based on the Archimedes hardware platform, followed up by other models in 1990. Instead of Xenix, these workstations ran RISC iX :

11648-474: The system variables and hardware, favouring official system calls . This was ostensibly to make sure programs keep working when migrated to coprocessors that utilise the Tube interface, but it also makes BBC Micro software more portable across the Acorn range. Whereas untrappable PEEKs and POKEs are used by other computers to reach the system elements, programs in either machine code or BBC BASIC instead pass parameters to an operating system routine. In this way,

11760-734: The system's functionality. Often the ROM is a device driver for mass storage combined with a filing system, starting with Acorn's 1982 Disc Filing System (DFS) which API became the de facto standard for floppy-disc access. The Acorn Graphics Extension ROM (GXR) expands the VDU routines to draw geometric shapes, flood fills, and sprites. During 1985, Micro Power designed and marketed a Basic Extension ROM, introducing statements such as WHILE , ENDWHILE , CASE , WHEN , OTHERWISE , ENDCASE , and direct mode commands including VERIFY . Acorn strongly discouraged programmers from directly accessing

11872-425: The teaching environment, although the introduction of Panos 1.3 improved the situation "markedly". One academic project struggled with "the initial unreliability and unsuitability of the Acorn workstation as a development machine", reporting slow program build times and the lack of debugging tools that led to other systems being used to develop software for the machine, also experiencing "apparently random faults" with

11984-510: The wheel", such efforts adopted the BBC Micro in order to take immediate advantage of the extensive range of software already developed under the United Kingdom's own literacy initiative, proposing that software tailored for local requirements would ultimately also be developed. A clone of the BBC Micro was produced by Semiconductor Complex Limited and named the SCL Unicorn. Another Indian computer manufacturer, Hope Computers Pvt Ltd, made

12096-606: Was later acquired by MIPS Technologies in 2002. Mistral launched the Mistral-20 workstation in late 1989, based on a 25 MHz R3000 processor and running Unix SVR3 with BSD 4.3 extensions. Despite anticipating a product based on the R6000 , the company adjusted its plans to target the R4000 in its next product, also seeking to reduce its dependency on its existing German manufacturing partner and aiming to bring production back to

12208-475: Was only at the design stage at the time, and the Acorn team, including Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson , had one week to build a working prototype from the sketched designs. The team worked through the night to get a working Proton together to show the BBC. Although the BBC expected a computer with the Zilog Z80 CPU and CP/M operating system, not the Proton's 6502 CPU and proprietary operating system,

12320-480: Was popular in the UK, especially in the educational market; about 80% of British schools had a BBC microcomputer. Byte called the BBC Micro Model B "a no-compromise computer that has many uses beyond self-instruction in computer technology". It called the Tube interface "the most innovative feature" of the computer, and concluded that "although some other British microcomputers offer more features for

12432-741: Was subsequently launched as the Hitech-10 , featuring the MIPS R2000 processor, this being followed by the Hitech-20 with a MIPS R3000 processor, subsequently known as the Mistral-20 . These ran the UMIPS variant of UNIX, with either X11 or NeWS -based GUIs, and were aimed at computer animation applications. Whitechapel had reportedly sold as many as 1,000 workstations from its first range, these having been "particularly successful" in

12544-467: Was used, for example, on the Apple II Plus and the early Commodore models. The BBC machine, however, was designed to run at the faster CPU speed, 2  MHz , double that of these earlier machines. In this case, bus contention is normally an issue, as there is not enough time for the CPU to access the memory during the period when the video hardware is idle. Some machines of the era accept

#686313