A3000: The last BBC Micro

[@cowasakiElectronics]

I was the sales manager and then later the technical services manager of Orion Computers who were a decent sized Acorn dealer. We produced our own products and were a service centre with me being a component level service engineer. The 300, 400 and 400/1 were the predecessors with the 540 and unix boxes coming out just afterwards. The price was about the same as a bbc micro taking inflation into account. I was responsible for the A3000 podule expander :-) and we also did 1 and 4mb upgraded with the 4Mb replacing the 1Mb because the MEMC could only address 4Mb. The 540 had a MEMC for each 4Mb board with 16Mb max. The Econet module was the same :-) RiscOS was a really good OS. I loved the way the folder auto ran and all the setup files etc hide inside it and with relative addressing you could just move them about. I loved the Archimedes machines. I remember build several Econet networks but we had thin wire Ethernet at the shop/workshop.

[@cowasakiElectronics]

I answered before finishing watching! We did get 8Mb on an A3000 but it was too expensive and like the Arm3 required socketing of surface mount chips! The 400/1 etc had socketed MEMC, IOS, ARM and VIDC so it was a bit easier :-)

[@RedPillRachel]

@@cowasakiElectronics can I have you for Christmas? Did you just say you DESIGNED the 4 podule expander for the Risc PC?

[@cowasakiElectronics]

@@RedPillRachelI designed the double podule external expansion for the A3000. Internally the A3000 can select all four podules but only the first two are wired up. One goes to the internal and one to the external. I created a backplate and box then we supplied a clip to take the high bit of the podule number to an unused pin of the external connector which then used that for the other podule. I had a hand in others too but that was down to me specifically. I had a trick where I could upgrade the RAM on an A410/1 to 2Mb blind folded. Acorn wouldn’t let us discount computers so we had to find a way to make ours the best proposition. We upgraded the RAM on all A3000s, upgraded A410/1 to A420/1 spec, all 420/1 to 440/1 spec and all 440/1 to 120Mb hard drives and something else. The 540 was what I really liked especially with a multi sync monitor

[@RedPillRachel]

@@cowasakiElectronics Oh, I see, so like the one in the Risc PC but hanging out the back of the a3000. External IDE in 1993. And to think, I was kept AWAY from the computers as a kid, because they were scared of my intelligence, it's the only explanation in hindsight.

[@devnull73]

@@RedPillRachel Sounds like the education system.

[@20windfisch11]

The A3000 was sold under the Archimedes name in Germany, without using Acorn‘s name. I remember ads for the „Archimedes A3000“ in German Amiga and Atari magazines.

[@Jonteponte71]

It was the same in Sweden. I was an Amiga fan but was still close to buying this. Even got an ARM assembler book to start learning. It looked so cool but unfortunately I never got one. Would have been cool to have today :)

[@stuart.swales]

@@Jonteponte71 Were you one of the two people that bought Swedish PipeDream 3? ;-)

[@brucetungsten5714]

Blast from the past.

[@lucasrem]

Wind Fish Acorn Archimedes it was in germany, CHECK IT PLEASE !! NOT using the BBC name Same as the Acorn Electron. I still have the German Acorn Compact Cassettes ! Rics was a Co processor on the BBC first. ARM was born !

[@andreasu.3546]

As a kid in Germany, the Archimedes was the only thing that could come close in desirability (at least for me) to the Amiga. In the end, I asked my parents for an Amiga because of the school yard software exchange that simply wasn't there for the Archimedes.

[@joncarter3761]

We had one of these back in the early 90s, loved it and imo it has the best version of Lemmings (very important to a 5 year old!)

[@MostlyPennyCat]

With the best version of the lemmings soundtrack by Matt Furniss

[@integerofdoom69]

What? I was obsessed with that game back in the day.

[@robertianhawdon]

Playing Lemmings on my auntie's A3000 was also my first experience of the game. Was very disappointed when I got my hands on the MS-DOS version for our home PC at the time. I mean, the game play was practically identical, but it was the little things like the music, and the fact the PC version used nothing but FM Synthesis for sound (so no "oh no!" soundbites).

[@Galahadfairlight]

No idea why anyone considers the Arc version the best, it lacks the intro and you can't have two player both with a mouse

[@MostlyPennyCat]

​@@Galahadfairlight First off, performance, the ARM2 is ludicrously fast compared to everything with a 68000. The VIDC had some gnarly modes and superb output and 8 hardware logarithmic stereo PCM channels allowing lots of channels for music and FX, unlike the 4 limiting you to 3 channel music and single channel FX on its competitors. And on top of that, it really did have the best version of the soundtrack, Matt Furniss is a demon. So, it's fast, the controls are super responsive with zero lag, it's bright and colourful and sharp and sounds fantastic.

[@electronash]

I had an A3000 in the early 90s. Loved it. I was still rockin' the ZX Speccy +2 and got an Amiga a few years later, and PC with an Aztech "Quad Speed" CD drive. lol But I would still fire up the A3000 very often. The built-in BBC BASIC was great fun to mess with. Dad bought the RISC OS 3.1 ROMs around 1994. I had a Philips CM8833-ii as my main monitor through most of the 90s. I used the monitor to watch TV and movies on, recording stuff off TV on a Sanyo Betamax VCR. (things like Red Dwarf, Reboot!, X-Files, Games Master, and Bad Influence.) Always had it all hooked up to a Rotel amp and speakers. lol I still have four magazine floppy disks for the A3000. It's pretty much the only thing I have from that time. One of the disks had a demo of Quark (shoot-em-up) on it.

[@electronash]

On Halloween, I would often play No Excuses and Rotor, etc. From the "Play It Again Sam" games pack. Great times. Seeing Starfighter 3000 for the first time, was kind of mind-blowing, as it was largely done by the ARM2.

[@lucasrem]

rocking ? the rubber keys you meant ????

[@electronash]

@@lucasrem I... never really liked the rubber key 16K/48K Speccy. :( Probably because my first real experience of computers was our CPC 6128, around 1985 or 1986. Then an Olivetti PC1, around 1988. Got the Speccy +2 probably in 1986 or 87, but still loved it, even with having to load from tape. lol (I'm one of the weird people who genuinely likes the sound of a Speccy tape loading. It gave me a good idea of the quality of the tape, and whether it was likely to load OK). I always found it weird on the C64 Datasette, that you couldn't hear the tape loading sounds.

[@BollingHolt]

42:03 I was waiting for that overlay! ;) Another wonderful lesson about a computer I never happened upon over here in the states. Another video packed FULL of information and yet keeps my mind captive all at the same time. Marvelous! Merry Christmas from Alabama, USA!

[@domramsey]

Tiny, tiny correction: The RM PC186 definitely had sound. There was a Bach music "demo" that came with it and me and my school friends used to have fun pressing 'return' at the exact same instant on all the machines on the Nimbus network at the same time to cause a delightful musical cacophony. Also, we never had any BBC machines in our school, it was RM all the way, starting with a 380Z.

[@dr_jaymz]

ARM is the greatest success story that most people have no idea about - probably because ARM's greatest numbers are in embedded systems. They think its all about x86 - but ARM cores are now behind everything that powers the modern world. Nearly 400Bn have been produced by 2024, there's about 40 in a single car, it outnumbers everything else by a huge margin. Its an astonishing legacy. Self-proclaimed naive guys went to "experts" in the states to find out how to design such a thing, realised that they could do way better went home and got on with it. I had an Acorn A3010 and didn't realise at the time how learning assembly on that would be a very future-proof endeavour. The world is a better place for the Archimedes line up.

[@clonmult]

ARM variants are in almost every single phone sold these days - Acorn, Steve Furber and Sofie Wilson really did design something that took the world quietly by storm. I also think that a lot of the success would not have been realised if it hadn't been for Apple getting involved early on with the ARM6 - despite the Newton being a commercial failure, it still supported critical development of the processor.

[@Momentvm]

Another masterpiece by RetroBytes! Your videos should be displayed in schools and on a retro computing events. I love them.❤

[@JaccovanSchaik]

Man, I thought the Amiga used some dirty tricks, but this is on another level. Amazing video!

[@blakecasimir]

The correct answer to Atari ST or Amiga is: Acorn Archimedes. Deeply underrated, under appreciated computer that deserved better than being another educational system.

[@dannyhilarious]

Totally agree!

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

It had its revenge even if it was served cold. Its ARM architecture is everywhere in mobile devices now, whereas Amiga and Atari ST are niche enthusiasts’ tinker toys

[@IcyTorment]

@@little_fluffy_clouds True, although ARM's days seem to be numbered with the rapid uptake of RISC-V. It's amazing how fast RV has gone from zero to where it is now.

[@SnakebitSTI]

I don't think RISC-V is an existential threat to Arm, just a financial one. Arm went from having effectively no competition to having to compete with RISC-V vendors in some market segments.

[@jameshodgetts7541]

@@IcyTorment it still has a way to go though. ARM is literally in everyone's pocket, on wrists, in cars, on desks, everywhere. RISC-V is only really avaliable to the masses in SBC tinker boards right now. Until a big manufacturer bothers to port their gear over to it (I imagine in things like TVs and streaming sticks, where the user is pretty much agnostic to whatever the TV actually is and rarely if ever actually installs any third party software to it) it will only really be seen on the desks of hardcore nerdy computer types who like the pain of dealing with weird flavours of linux on single board computers - and i'm willing to bet even then their main machine will remain an x86 based machine, or perhaps and ARM one going forwards.

[@urlgoon]

outstanding work! thank you. Have a great xmas.

[@TheOoblick]

You always know it's going to be a good Saturday when a new @RetroBytes video drops.

[@markusjuenemann]

facts...

[@thenebula6980]

Thanks for making my Saturday morning mate. Blessed us with another extremely interesting 45 ish minutes of computer history

[@chipos81]

Another amazing video. Thank you. Loved it

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it.

[@EmyrDerfel]

My memories of playing Chocks Away! on an Archimedes during rainy Welsh lunch breaks in primary school in the mid-90s are much more graphically impressive than the tank games shown. Lemmings and James Pond were also popular. In year 6, my friends and I won an inter-school quiz held at Trawsfynydd Magnox Nuclear Power Station (decomissioned), the prize being an RM voucher which funded the school's first Windows 95 PC, and my first experience of the internet.

[@daveme3582]

Being a viewer from across the pond, I really enjoy seeing what computer life was like over in the UK. Being a kid in the 80s then teen in the 90s (for me), it really was Apple / Commodore then PCs took over by the 90s.

[@TheEulerID]

There was a precedent for a 32 bit computer using a reduced address space and reserving the other bits for special purposes, and it was a huge one. The original IBM 360 mainframe architecture had a 24 bit address space in an otherwise 32 bit machine. That lead to a program address space of 16 megabytes. Of course many programmers exploited those 8 bits for many other purposes besides holding processor state information, which was probably more to do with that than holding the processor status as the IBM 360 had a separate, 64 bit program statue register (the PSW) of which 24 bits were for the current instruction address. Virtual memory addressing was also to come along with the IBM 370, to allow much larger physical memory spaces, but that 24 bit addressable programming space was to become an issue later with later versions of the architecture moving to 31 bit addressing and, later 64 bit, whilst retaining backwards compatibility. This is, by now, a familiar pattern with x86, SPARC, ARM treading comparable paths, albeit from different starting and end points. Whilst IBM 360s did use DMA, and did not use register banking, there was a competitor company that took the IBM 360 architecture a computer which was compatible at the user programming (non privileged) level, which did have it. There were no less than 4 levels of full or partial register banking used to speed up interrupt handling. That was the ill-fated RCA Spectra 4, the development od which was to all but bankrupt the company. RCA was to licence the Spectra to English Electric Computers, which when merged into ICL was marketed as the ICL System 4.

[@stevenclark2188]

Program counter for MIPS was 26-bit. So it's pretty normal in RISC too.

[@TheEulerID]

@@stevenclark2188 It was a sensible compromise back in the days when memory was expensive. It was extremely common for code to use tables of pointers, or linked lists using pointers, and using a few "spare" bits to contain various flags would save a significant amount of space. Certainly I used to make use of it when writing assembler code back in the day. The IBM 360 was designed back in the days of ferrite store, so 16 megabytes would have looked like a monumental amount of memory. Of course it also locked code using that technique into a particular version of the architecture.

[@paul_boddie]

@@stevenclark2188 That doesn't make any sense. The MIPS architecture has a full 32-bit address space, with the upper 2GB being reserved for kernel and supervisor mode and the lower 2GB being available for user mode. There may have been implementation-related limitations imposed by certain products, but the address space partitioning is fundamental to the architecture.

[@neilmartin83]

Had these at school in 1993-6. Learning software like Ovation, Lego LOGO programming and other awesomeness. And Lemmings, SWIV, Zool etc. Way ahead of their time and I loved learning on these things.

[@DasIllu]

I just held a Raspberry Pi in front of the monitor and said "Look, there is your grand ... grand granddaddy." 😀

[@micktaylor9332]

😂😂😂😂

[@ZuluRomeo]

🥰😍🥺😭

[@GadgetUK164]

Brilliant video =D That tear down of the A3000 - was that your own machine, if so - please remove that NiCad battery!!!!

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@GadgetUK164 It a recently installed leak proof one, put there by the previous owner.

[@3rdalbum]

We got BBC Micros here in Australia too. I remember them up to Year 3 before they were replaced with Risc PCs. The desktop-y one you showed during the video that came after the Archemedes. It was a major leap over the primative-looking (for the 1990s) BBC Micro.

[@Jimmer3035]

Such exciting times these were! Thanks for the awesomely detailed info and love the old fashioned background music 😂😂

[@filecore]

Nice, we bought ours in February 1991. I still have it, boxed (learning curve edition), with boxed AKF12 and all the software. All still work as I cut the battery out years ago. Brilliant machine. Got me to where I am today. ❤

[@tomwaller6893]

Former Tower Electronics here. A former Acorn Dealer in Fyvie Aberdeenshire. I sold mostly Risc PCs in the early 90s while keeping the cash flowing with PC custom builds.

[@dannyhilarious]

ATARI ST afficionado here! Yes, the 3000 was really as fast as it could even software-emulate a ST a original speed. A shame this machine didn't made it's way into the homecomputer market as it should.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

Obviously ARM took over the world. And Acorn died (mostly) RISC OS was the big loss, it was so far ahead of its time. However, you'd be correct in noticing that RISC OS and Windows 95 look _awfully_ similar.

[@mjouwbuis]

@@MostlyPennyCat though RISC OS was true multitasking and ran circles around Windows at the time.

[@AnonymaxUK]

The BBC Micro was what my UK primary school had in the nursery when I was there (4-5 years old). 3 years later, I was using Dorling Kindersley on PCs in the same school. It was wild how much progress was made. This was in the 90s.

[@marvellousleopard]

I still have a RiscPC under the bed. It's on my list to one day see if I can get it going again. It was a wonderful machine.

[@wimwiddershins]

We had a few of these in the library at college in the 90s. They were leftovers from some earlier teaching program. I used to tool about with RISCos and play a bit of Zarch/Virus. It felt like my A500 with a bit more power, I was quite impressed.

[@davidp4456]

Theres so much going on in this video that I almost overlooked the Stefan Grappeli background music. This is a cool video. Many thanks.

[@AcornElectron]

Love getting these suggestions in my feed. ❤

[@summerlaverdure]

this is excellent, absolutely great explanation of the system

[@julianregel]

Fascinating video. This channel is definitely one of the best when it comes to retro documentaries and you have carved out a niche for doing technical deep dives on some very interesting machines. Love it! I am also in awe at the number of machines you have displayed on your table in your videos. Everything from the humble Electron to Archimedes, Amiga to Sun SPARC, SGI and NeXT workstations. Just how big is your collection?

[@erikhaugan3043]

I remember seeing an ad for the Archimedes in a magazine where it was doing a take on the Mac commercials where a Mac would be depicted with the word ‘hello’ written on the screen using the mouse in Mac Paint. But in this ad it was an Archimedes with the words: “Sorry Mac” The intention being to show that the Archimedes was better than a Mac.

[@Ice_Karma]

13:45 "There are two hard problems in computer science: cache coherency, naming things, and off-by-one errors." 🤣♥

[@headwerkn]

Such fond memories of the A3000. The Tasmanian state education system was one of those weird non-UK outposts of the Acorn/BBC Micro throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989-90 we started seeing Archimedes A3000s slowly replace many of the Model Bs that were the default "classroom computer". I don't think we appreciated how radically advanced they were for the time... the hi res colour monitors, desktop GUI, the mouse, the fact that almost all of them came with a HP InkJet 500 printer, which were the first inkjets I'd ever seen - every BBC Model B invariably had a Star NX10 attached to it. Even a few years later, our computer lab for keyboarding and office apps classes were all still 286s running DOS on monochrome monitors, prehistoric by comparison. The BBCs and Archimedes managed to live on into the mid/late 1990s... in 1995 I was still programming BASIC on a Master Compact, and doing CAD work on an A410/4 driving a Roland plotter. Good times.

[@DrJatzCrackers]

Tassie kid here. I remember the PC lab, 486/33s with windows 3.11 next to the Archimedes lab. Those PCs looked and behaved like they were prehistoric when compared to the Archimedes computers. I always preferred the arch's. Loading an OS from ROM always seemed so much more civilised

[@shaun5552]

And every Model B also had the picture displayed on a modified Rank Arena TV. Modified with a SCART socket added and two switches, one for TV / Monitor and the other for Colour / Green although if positioned half way it also had an informal Orange setting. For those in the rest of the world - the Tasmanian state education system, in a place with not much over 400k people in total at the time, did its own hardware modifications modifications. Those TV's came from the factory with no input other than an antenna, that was it, the addition of the SCART socket being one the education department came up with itself as a workaround to the practical problem of wanting one device that worked as a computer monitor, could be attached to a VCR without messing about with tuning, and still worked as a TV. Which lead to the odd situation of schools having arguably the best VHS pictures anyone had seen at that point since basically no household TV, in this part of the world, had any sort of component level inputs back then. Most VCR's in home use were connected via RF on a spare channel (which wasn't hard given we only had two TV channels......).

[@headwerkn]

@ Yes! I remember those huge (and worryingly top heavy) TV and silver Panasonic top load VCRs on a trolley we use to push around between places. This was well before every classroom had 3x TV displays and a projector whiteboard. To this day I don’t think I’ve seen any other TVs in Australia with SCART connectors, beyond those units at school. A friend of our family was part of the Tas Education Dept. computer systems team that ultimately selected the Beeb, I believe in mid 1982 was when they started rolling them out, over other options such as the Australian made MicroBee which of course won a similar contract in NSW state schools. Ironically I was given two MicroBees by a coworker not long ago, keen to restore the viable one and see what they were all about. Much, much less sophisticated than the Acorns, though I believe a lot cheaper as well.

[@plast3r]

As someone who used these in schools in the early 90's really brings back memory's i remember running Maths circus on a3000 when i was really young then our county kept acorns in schools all the way upto the a7000 which i loved using then they switched to rm pc's.

[@cdl0]

WOW! Epic video! I ordered and bought one of the first A310s from and ordinary high-street computer shop in the UK when it was launched in 1987. Its serial number is very low. It still works. The 6502 emulator runs software faster than a real 6502. There is also an 8086 emulator which can run DOS.

[@adammace935]

Quite a different beast but BBC still do a micro, the BBC micro bit, also arm based 💪

[@TheRenegade...]

I wouldn't say "still" because the micro:bit came out decades after this computer was discontinued

[@adammace935]

I guess so. I'm glad they brought back the BBC micro name though, so nostalgic!

[@mtpaley1]

I had a BBC Model A SN 230 ordered many months before they became available. I slowly upgraded it to almost B spec and loved it. I had single stepped the OS top to bottom and knew everyhing about it to a degree that is not possible these days. Happy memories.....

[@charlesjmouse]

Ah, excellent! Another RetroBytes video. A wonderful series of machines, in many ways years ahead of the competition... although Acorn didn't have the capacity to stay ahead for very long the descendants of these computers are everywhere and RiscOS is still being actively developed and used. The excellent OS kept me on the platform with a heavily upgraded RiscPC long after 'x86' surpassed it's headline specs. (I also have a stupidly upgraded A3000 because...)

[@RobSchofield]

@ 44:35 - the StrongARM was used in the empeg in-car MP3 audio player, developed in Cambridge by a team of serious ARM hobbyists and engineers, many of which are still in use today (I have a couple). Great video, most enjoyable!

[@nysaea]

"still no news on knitting patterns though sadly" Me with knitting needles and an unfinished sleeve in hand: "Man, targeted advertisement sure is something these days!"

[@mistie710]

My A3000 sadly succumbed to battery damage some years ago. I would mention, however, that the A3000 was replaced in the range by the A3020. Arguably that was the very last Beeb.

[@farmersteve129]

The A3020 didn't, as far as I am aware, every carry the BBC branding & so whilst it was a successor to the A3000, it doesn't qualify as a BBC Micro

[@charlesdurrant]

at 18:50, when talking about the IOC, you imply that it's handling all the keyboard and mouse scanning. Actually, there's an Intel 8051 microcontroller that handles all that, and it talks (via the UART) to the IOC sending (and receiving) keyboard and mouse data.

[@mrrolandlawrence]

21:40 i remember in the "demo scene" of the time, using the multi register read / write to speed things up a huge amount. i was only a kid at the time and it felt like id just discovered warp speed with some assembler optimisations :) i also remember when the 3010 came out and the VIDC / MEMC / IO integration on the CPU package. we were blown away with how that was possible. It really was the first ARM SOC!

[@edumaker-alexgibson]

The demoscene stuff from people like Brothers in ARM, The Chip Duo etc were amazing, as they properly exploited the advantages in a way that some of the games could have, but didn't.

[@PassiveSmoking]

I didn't have much exposure to this machine, but my college (where I did my A-levels) had a few which we mostly used to run Mandelbrot generators in our free time. For the time they were impressively fast for that.

[@ZuluRomeo]

Heh, the Mandelbrot programs were my first personal contact with an Archimedes, or at least what little contact I ever got in the educational environment. I got to have a go at them during a university open day.

[@georgestroud764]

Really enjoyed this, thx

[@OldPoi77]

These Retrobytes are more like RetroGigabytes, going way beyond the next level on these amazing videos.

[@stbmunky]

Heh. I remember excruciating “type a letter” lessons on an RM Nimbus. The good news was that it was easy to take the network down and spend an hour dossing around by judicious application of a drawing pin with the old skool coax network cable..

[@mattsword41]

Ah yes, the removal of the magnets on a rm coax network point - take a whole pc area down. (tbh, I liked school and computers and that annoyed me!)

[@ZuluRomeo]

Our primary school's RM Nimbus was used almost exclusively for Front Page Express, where we could write our own newspaper front pages. That changed in P7 when they changed all the classroom computers (we had ZX Spectrum instead of BBC Micros) into BBC Master 128s, and that had its own version of Front Page Express as well.

[@kyle8952]

I remember these at school. They were "the *good* computers", and so we were never allowed to use them in case we ruined them somehow. They sat there, switched off, for years, until one day someone from the LEA asked "what are all these old things still doing here? and they got chucked in a skip, replaced by a few beige Dells. I have a lot of contempt for teachers.

[@ZuluRomeo]

Absolute philistines. They should have given them to you for free.

[@kissthefishHiHoSilver]

Liked and subbed. Love your content. Thanks and HH from KC!! 😀

[@JonDoe-zi3mh]

Great video with accurate descriptions and explanations throughout, really well researched. 48 minutes of that old timey music was quite irritating though, so I'd be grateful if you didn't use it anymore, or just have a bit less of it, at least.

[@johnrickard8512]

I find it fascinating that this most premier of educational computers in the 90s happened to be ARM based. Talk about a head start!

[@marcoose777]

Great overview, you got me reminiscing about other innovative British products... have you got plans on an Inmos video? There's a lot of fascinating early computer history in Bristol.

[@barrycheesemore2928]

Wow, that was fascinating, brilliant video!!

[@RobSchofield]

@ 4:56 - "one sherbert dib-dab short of committing a war crime". I never knew it was possible to inhale and exhale half a cup of coffee through the mouth and nose at the same time, until now... 😆👍

[@mojojomo6750]

No mention of the RTC battery-leak debacle. I never owned an A3000 myself, but I did inherit one from a relative. Long story short, on opening it up for a looksie, I discovered the battery had leaked, badly. Things got worse when I tried to clean things up somewhat, with an anti-static brush and isopropyl alcohol - a bunch of inductors surrounding the battery fell off! Still have the A3000 knocking around somewhere, minus monitor.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I think debacle, might perhapse be some what overstating it. Every computer manufacture from the period with an onboard RTC has the batter leak issue, some got more lucky than others with there battery placment. None of them thought 10-20 years later poeple would still be using these machines. The Amiga 500 plus has the same problem, as does the Amiga 4000, the compact portable 2, a whole buch of sun workstations, and countless other machines. Modern machine have the same battery issue that will impact them in the years to come, although with them using lithium chemistry future version of this maybe far more dangerous.

[@mojojomo6750]

@@RetroBytesUK Perhaps, but when I opened the A3000, and saw the mess the leakage had made, the word seemed apt! Most of the 'youngsters' will probably envisage a tiny button cell, with limited potential for damage, whereas the A3000's battery is a big rectangular box of a thing with loads of potential.

[@SproutyPottedPlant]

Raspberry Pi has RISC OS so maybe that is a modern day Acorn? The Apple Mac is a little bit like an Acorn too with its ARM chip and Mac OS is a little bit like RISC OS if you squint hard enough! I heard even a popular music notation package came from the Acorn? But I wouldn't know about that because it's to do with sheet music and prefer a DAW 😅

[@little_fluffy_clouds]

RISC OS on Raspberry Pi is indeed the modern spiritual successor of the Archimedes. macOS, on the other hand, descends from NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and BSD UNIX, so it doesn’t really share any ancestry with RISC OS.

[@talideon]

You're thinking of Sibelius, which originated on the Archimedes before going multiplatform.

[@robmcleod2876]

Intermediate school in NZ in the early. 90's, we had a class split with mac classics and bbc micros. The centrepiece though, was the acorn Archimedes. I have no clue which model it was but i remember it was mostly used as a flashier bbc micro during most classes (edutainment games, wooo!). Lunch time on a Tuesday though, that's when the games came out. I remember playing james pond and lemmings on the acorn but it was always a fight to get to that to play lemmings or the one mac LC to play prince of Persia in colour instead of grayscale like the mac classics

[@synaesthesia2010]

i remember the A3000 well. i was the first to try it at my primary school and it was my introduction to using a mouse controlled GUI after years of using the older BBC computers

[@DanielFSmith]

The sound was the most interesting part of VIDC/MEMC. You had to resample your own sound buffers at interrupt time into an interlaced dma block which would shuttle it out to the DACs. (These days no one would blink at that concept, back then it was a big change to let the cpu generate sound.) The machine slowed down quite a bit with multi channel audio. Exciting times!

[@syrus3k]

The A3000 was incredibly powerful for the time and massively underrated. RISC OS was incredibly well thought out. It's a real shame it fizzled away

[@zoid9969]

I've still got my A3010, bought in 1992 from a branch of Dixons. The very early A3010s didn't have the all-in-one ARM250 chip - instead, they had four separate chips like the A3000 on a daughter board (known as "Adelaide"). Mine has a keyboard fault (not sure whether it's a broken trace somewhere on the motherboard, or an issue with the keyboard membrane), which I'd really like to get fixed.

[@TerribleFire]

I loved these machines. Its amazing how (many) Amiga fans still refuse to accept the speed of this machine.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I think that school yard rivalry is still alive in many in the community. I loved my A500+, and it was the right choice at the time for me, but I would have loved an A3000 as a kid.

[@jeffreyjoshuarollin9554]

I don't think it's so much that, it's that as RB says we "weren't disappointed to get an Amiga." I myself had apparently asked for an Atari ST that Christmas I got an Amiga 500, and again, wasn't disappointed. Of the three I'd say the ST was the least capable, unless you wanted to do music. Given better decisions, was there room in the marketplace for more than two architectures (PC and Mac)? Maybe. But I suspect the Amiga would have won out over the other two anyway, as the Amiga's most dedicated fanbase was apparently Europe as a whole, whereas despite a presence in Australia (a much smaller market despite the geographical size of the country), Acorn never managed much of a presence in North America, plus the Amiga had an established place in the North American broadcasting industry. Still, I would have liked to have seen the Archimedes live on. It did get the last laugh though as ARM chips are still around and in every mobile device, most SBCs and now Macs whereas new Amigas and Ataris are a niche product at best.

[@Galahadfairlight]

No, we don't refuse to accept anything. For 3D vectors the Arc had the Amiga beat, not just the faster processor but also the bitplane display on Amiga didn't lend itself to vectors because of having to write a pixel or line to potentially 4 or 5 different planes to get the correct colours. However, the Arcs speed whilst impressive wasn't about to do Brian the Lion or Mr.Nutz Jim Power or any of the other 2D tour de forces that were on Amiga because that's when the ethos of offloading to custom hardware really came into its own, the speed of the cpu wasn't a concern. A shame that the blitter in the Amiga that whilst fast, wasn't blisteringly fast to overcome its shortcomings in 3D, after all, 3D wire frame existed on 8 bit machines, the designers knew that filled vectors were becoming a thing (built it into the blitter) but outside of the demo scene, were never as fast as they should have been.

[@TerribleFire]

​@@Galahadfairlight Absolutely. For me the weakness of the ARM2 is code density. Its appalling.

[@germansnowman]

This was once my dream computer. I even made a paper model of it :) I still remember the flight demo app.

[@MaxQ10001]

The ST with a different CPU is actually a very good comparison 😊

[@ZuluRomeo]

I remember seeing the magazine double page spread advert for the A3000, which branded it as "The New BBC Micro" - and the physical similarities to the Model B base unit struck me completely. I wanted one. I never got one. I still want one.

[@ZuluRomeo]

11:55 Our music department in our school kept using an Atari ST for the longest time. It was the definitive music making home computer in the 1990s. I don't think they ever got rid of it, even when all the BBC Master machines were eventually replaced by PCs.

[@talideon]

STM and LDM were super useful, they helped a lot with fast copying of memory, so helped a lot ehen you needed to blit graphics, and also made procedure calls so much less painful. Along with the condition flags, they helped an awful lot with code density.

[@Martinit0]

I have to admit the BBC did a fantastic job to bring computing to the masses. Didn't know the Archimedes was also part of that program. Heck I even bought a BBC microbit a few weeks ago for my kids to play with (I didn't look specifically for a BBC computer, but a friend recommended it and kids can program it with Scratch).

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

Superb work sir!

[@ChristopherWoods]

I still have my A3000 plus boxes of diskettes. The PSU is a bit tired and it won't power up at the moment, but I'm determined to repair it and get it back into service. It's a fantastic machine that turbocharged my early love for computers, computer music and games! Who didn't love Pacman, Lemmings and Cannon Fodder back in the day...

[@BAgodmode]

Quality upload again, champ.

[@GodmanchesterGoblin]

At 21:15 while talking about DRAMs with row and column addressing - a picture of an Intel 1103 DRAM chip, just 1024 bits, with no row and column addressing and dating from roughly 25 years before the A3000 was produced. (The first RAM chips I worked with were 1103s, back in 1976-77.) But this is a fascinating account of the A3000, thank you. Also, I was unaware of the logarithmic style audio DAC implementation. That's very similar to the DAC used in the Music 500 peripheral for the BBC Micro (an AMD AM6070), which also produced sound of a quality much better than its 8-bit hardware would suggest.

[@ngolian]

IIRC StrongARM did still support the 26-bit addressing mode, but it was dropped in all subsequent ARMs, including the one that would have gone in "Phoebe", the Risc PC's successor with the notorious yellow front, which is what prompted a lot of software to be rewritten shortly before Acorn sold up. StrongARM had a different backwards compatibility issue caused by its split data and instruction caches.

[@timmturner]

It's like watching lifestyles for retro tech. I've never heard anyone sound so much like Robin Leach, I'm guessing you grew up around London. As a huge fan of ARM this video was enlightening with plenty of technical detail without being boring.

[@PaulGrayUK]

I recall seeing the A3000 in a shop window in Tottenham Court Road (in its electronics heydays) and was working at the time, yet all I could do was drewl at that price. Was also some rumours of a cheaper model out soon shenanigans. Much like why I didn't buy a C5, even when I worked at Eastern Electricty Board at the time and could get staff discount at their shops back then, I got to see the brother for the C15 and was, that's more like it and another purchase that never happened back then. We all have those stories.

[@frstesiste7670]

Super interesting video. Remember wanting an ARM-machine in the mid/late eighties, but it was expensive for a student and it wasn't even sold where I lived. I'm curious about the relative speeds of different processors you quote. I used a Sun, Dec and PCs and remember the speed claims from Sun when Sparc was introduced but a lot had changed when they shipped. Can't recall any test results so I'd be interested to see how different processors from the late eighties compared if you have a link to a site with benchmarks.

[@PhilWare1]

The speed difference between the Archimedes and Amiga is really clear when looking at 3D games such as Zarch (Virus on Amiga) or Elite. The 16bit Amiga versions of both of these really chug along and run with small "letter boxed" graphics whereas the Archimedes versions ran blisteringly fast and full screen. Great machines, I had several starting from A3000, A5000 ending up with a RiscPC. Sad day when I reluctantly migrated to a PC.

[@Galahadfairlight]

The main reason for the Arc being faster at 3D vectors was faster cpu and it used a byte per pixel display whereas Amiga used bitplane, so whereas Arc could set a pixel onscreen with only one write, on Amiga for a 32 colour display, it would have to write that pixel 5 times to the different planes and use bit shifting which added more overhead on the cpu. Amiga obviously more than made up for that with the 2D stuff.

[@Martinit0]

@@Galahadfairlight Not really as you'd use the Amiga's Blitter to draw lines and polygons and it would blast out pixels at its memory bandwidth. Of course you had to repeat it for every bit plane but then you'd also write 16 pixels in one operation. However the 68k had rather slow integer divide and multiply instructions and those are quite important for 3D calculations.

[@Galahadfairlight]

@Martinit0 it's exactly really as I wrote it. Using the blitter instead of the CPU was barely faster, which is why there is no discernable difference between the same vector game on the Atari ST that had to do it all with just the 68000. If the ST'S higher cpu clock speed was enough to neutralise the blitters advantage, I think we can safely say the blitter in that instance really didn't offer much extra. What you're forgetting is the overhead of writing to 4 bitplanes, switching to different blitter modes for line draw, then filling etc which the code to alter all that could be writing pixels instead using the 68000. Other than using the blitter to clear the screen, there wasn't much advantage, and then, throw real fast memory and a 68020 into the mix, and the last thing you want is the bottleneck of the blitter when the combination of the former is going to be faster.

[@LUNATIC75]

I saw the grand total of one of these A3000's at my grubby old secondary school. The computer department was full of old skool BBC's and a room full of fancy networked RM Nimbus machines. I've never really given the these old Acorn systems much thought.

[@jeffreyjoshuarollin9554]

Used one of these at school when I was about 15. Never played games on it but I remember it being a pretty nice machine. Apparently RISC OS now has wifi support, so I will have to try it again on my Raspberry Pi 400 - I'd love a port for RISC-V too, as I have a Lichee Pi 4A (yes, I do have a lot of computer hardware although perhaps not by the standards of any retro-tech KZbinr). I never got to play games on it though, sadly; I assume nobody in the class had one at home to sneak games in. The coolest thing about it for this geek was the memory manager thing where you could change how much RAM each application got. All handled by the OS, now, of course. Now that I think about it, the art department had one too. Sadly I never got good at either art or programming!

[@OneOfThePetes]

Oooh I remember these in school! We had these and the Archimedes machines.

[@bachaplegic]

I remember being taken out of school, next to the barbican, to help showcase the Acorn Archimedes. During a break I went searching for the commodore stand, because I was an undercover Amiga user. I had an A500 at home.

[@BrooksterMax]

Didn’t Tesco Computers for School get quite a few of these into schools (perhaps the later ones)? Remember playing the awesome Lander alongside some sensible educational stuff at the time.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Tesco's computer for school did get a lot of them into schools. In the case of my I think it was 5-6. I remember an awkward assembly where our head was trying to tell us they dont wish to influence where our parents shopped but they where very greatful for the vouchers from the supermarket they should proably not name.

[@50shadesofbeige88]

Saturday RetroBytes! Let's go!

[@Born2Rune]

My Primary School AND Comprehensive had the BBC's and Archimedes. The teachers had absolutely no clue on how to use them and completely ignored any kind of teaching material. We hardly ever got to use them. We also had an ST, but you was only allowed to use it if you took GCSE Music, even then it was rare it was used. I reckon that the teachers just thought they was toys used to play games on, because that is all that we wanted to play.

[@just1nj]

Great history of the machine and it's architecture!

[@stephenhall2980]

I'm 47 years old,the BBC micro was my primary school computer,the archemides was my secondary school computer, whilst I had an Amiga at home.

[@ThomTomful]

I wrote an emulator earlier in the year; can confirm that the MMU is backwards in the sense that it maps physical to logical rather than vice versa. I think the reason is simply that it reduces the number of registers required - especially when you consider that different physical blocks may be paged to the same logical area but subject to execution mode, e.g. supervisor code will see one thing at the start of memory but user space will see something else, without adding interrupt latency.

[@RetroBytesUK]

That makes sense, thanks for the info.

[@Martinit0]

But then how did the translation work in practise? Isn't the CPU going to ask the MMU for a particular virtual address? It's not like the RAM comes knocking on the MMU's door, "Physical address #1234 is requesting audience with the CPU, please kindly submit my application as virtual address"

[@peterbiggs4549]

Great video - please consider notching the mid range out of the background music next time as it's quite distracting.

[@juleswilko]

My Uncle got one, and seeing it for the first time, when my daily driver was a BBC B, it was mind bendingly different (hadn’t seen an Amiga or ST by that point…)

[@jamesTMwebb]

I always remember there was a demo for the Archimedes that I think was called "planets" that had various 3D rendered planets. Can still remember the music for it, but not been able to find any traces of it or videos anywhere. I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it

[@qwaH]

Ah the Archie 3000, memories of towards the end of my school days when about 5 of these replaced a few of the BBC Micros, no more getting 'lost in the mist' as we could now enjoy the likes of Zarch & so on. At home I went Amiga of course but the Archie was fun

[@dna9838]

The archimedes was available commercially in 1987, with the developer’s version (a500?) available a little before. The a3000 was 1989, so it wasn’t the first archimedes. In fact, if memory serves, it wasn’t sold as archimedes at all, rather ‘BBC A3000’, albeit with the same stylised ‘A’ from the arch. arthur Os was on the launch machines, but the a3000 only ever came with riscos.

[@CollinBaillie]

FYI, I went to Sanderson High School in Darwin, NT Australia in 1989, and we had a NETWORK of BBC micros. Probably about 20 student Beebs and a couple of server Beebs with hard disks attached. These were seen outside the UK. I think the "computer teacher" who ran the network got an A3000 in and we saw the mythical Lander program. Sadly, we were not allowed to use it, and I was only there for a year, so I don't know if they ever upgraded or went PCs or whatever. If I was to ever get a retro computer, an A3000 would be the one I would get.

[@TheSulross]

How odd is 26 (or 24) bit addressing? Well, the MC68000 had 32-bit registers for holding an address, but its memory addressing bus was limited to 16MB address space. And there was no intrinsic MMU for virtualizing addresses. Even with modern CPUs, such as 64 bit x86, only the lower 48 bits of the 64 bit address is use, while the registers are 64 bit capable, and the address bus of a given computer may be more narrow still than 48 bits.

[@MrWibbleman]

Thanks for the video. I had a newbrain when I was young. I kind of liked it (coming from a zx81)

[@JamieCrookes]

Good video, as always J. :)

[@danieljones9937]

It's funny to see Research Machines mentioned; the area I'm in used RM machines as opposed to BBC Micros. It'd be really interesting to see the original BBC Micro and the RM Link 480Z (which is what we used) compared!

[@Moodymongul]

Never saw this later version of the BBC Micro. However, its resemblance to the Commodore Amiga A500 (i owned) is startling :) I remember my school updating their BBC Micros to Acorn Archimedes. Kids went from playing Elite (BBC Micro) to the game Virus (Acorn Archimedes) Childhood memories :)