Acorn A5000 running RISC OS 3.1 (From 1991) - Tour and Look Inside!

In this video we take a look at an Acorn A5000 which was released by Acorn Computers in the UK in 1991. This machine has a 25MHz ARM3 CPU (The ARM architecture was designed by Acorn themselves), 4mb of RAM, a 40mb IDE HDD, a 100mb SCSI HDD and runs RISC OS 3.1.
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[@ianhaylock7409]

Had an A5000 back in the day. Overclocked it to a massive 30MHz by changing the crystal from 25MHz to 30MHz. A few things you didn't mention : RiscOS had anti aliased fonts before it was even a gleam in the Macs, or PC's eyes. It also had unified memory, so was able to throw graphics around without breaking a sweat, whereas PC's of the time had to squeeze their graphics down a 16 bit bus. Also solid window dragging when Windows and MacOS could only do outline window dragging. The scroll bars length was proportional to the amount of window displayed, back then Windows and MacOS had a fixed size scroll bar. How many of these are now in Windows and MacOS ? Oh yeah, all of them!! RiscOS was so ahead of its time.

[@jaqian]

Ian Haylock Also has a start menu that let's you shut down. Pity they didn't last.

[@casperes0912]

A lot of that was also in NextStep though

[@tHeWasTeDYouTh]

why did it fail???

[@GuyHindle]

~38mins RIGHT click is "Adjust" - a bit similar to "Apply" it performs the action WITHOUT removing the menu option

[@seekyou]

Seems to me A3000 and A5000 were legit as Amiga A3000 and A4000 back in 1990. The OS seems better and also the overall quality of construction is miles ahead.

[@TheSophera]

Just came across this video. I'm a big fan of these old Acorn machines, so thank you so much! You've absolutely done your research and that's very easy to tell - thank you for doing due diligence! That said, I did notice a few nitpicky things I'd like to correct: 1. At 22:04, you mention that the computer is running at 800x600. Actually, you weren't running in 800x600 at that point! You were running in 640x480 16-colour mode, or mode 27. If you want to go to 800x600 16-colour mode, you want to change to mode 31. You can do that by clicking MENU on the Palette icon (the colour picker you mentioned), open the "Mode" submenu, then move the pointer down to the blank entry at the bottom of the menu (but don't click). You'll notice that a text caret appears there. Keep your mouse pointing there and type in "31", then press RETURN. You'll go into an 800x600 mode and you should have more space to work with! You can configure this mode as the default using !Configure, if you like. 2. At 23:24 you mention that the desktop is called the "Pinboard". Actually, the Pinboard is only a specific part of the desktop - the Pinboard lets you drag icons onto the grey backdrop, to iconise windows by holding down SHIFT while you close windows, and to put a wallpaper on the background (like !NewLook did). The desktop as a whole is still called the desktop. 3. While !65Host does give you a BASIC environment, it's not actually the normal way you'd access BASIC on this machine as !65Host only gives you the BBC Micro emulated version of BASIC. Instead, you'd normally go into BASIC by using *Commands. If you press F12, you'll find that the desktop slides up a little to reveal a "*" prompt. (If you were to press RETURN here without typing anything, you'll return to the desktop.) If you type "*BASIC" (or just "BASIC" since you're already at a "*" prompt), you'll enter the BASIC environment. You can quit from this by using the "QUIT" command, which will return you to the "*" prompt; from here you can hit RETURN on its own to get back to the desktop. 4. At 31:02, you mention that the only way to exit !65Host is to reset the machine. In actual fact, you can quit it by issuing the "*QUIT" command! That's about all I have to say; you pretty much covered everything else. Very nice video - thank you!

[@sarreqteryx]

ARM has always, and still does stand for "Acorn RISC Machine".

[@andydvsn]

I'm afraid they changed that to 'Advanced RISC Machine' when they were spun out of Acorn, but it certainly started out that way.

[@skonkfactory]

You can force a RISC OS computer to start up in VGA mode by holding down the 3 key on the numeric keypad when you power the machine up.

[@bobbyprog]

Well that’s been a nice trip down memory lane. My mum was a teacher and we got one of these as our first home computer back in 1991. I spent most of my spare time on it for the next few years. Brilliant machine and there was so much going on in the demo scene back then! Thanks for the video

[@iainbanachowicz8318]

I loved these computers back in school, One of my fav games on the acorn was Twin World.

[@101wut2]

Fanfare from !Maestro was one of the first pieces of music I learnt to play on the piano when I was a kid. I haven't heard it in over 25 years. Thanks for the nostalgia!

[@camerongray1515]

You can actually hear the full version of it without the middle cut out at the end of this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hXvXpHmtftJ6o6c

[@davidisherwood81]

Thanks for this great vid, full of nostalgia! We had these at school though they were getting on a bit. A few memories: *Quit should get you out of basic mode and back to desktop All Apps were prefixed with ! (Carried over from the BBC) !NewLook was to make your machine look like it was running a later version of RISC OS - the one that shipped with the RISC PC (3.2 I think), because the OS was on chip it wasn’t so easy to upgrade so this was a popular bit of window dressing You mentioned the copy protection from books. For expensive apps like Impression Publisher and Artworks, Dongles that hung off the parallel port were used to prevent unauthorised copies (we’d have to fight each other for the machine that had an artworks dongle on it) A couple of oddities in the way RISC OS worked - When you saved a file, a window would pop up with an icon for your file in it, you’d have to drag this to the disk you wanted to save it to - Printing worked the same way - you would drag the icon onto the desired printer, handy if you had say a B&W and a colour printer on the same machine - If you had a document from an application, for example you put in a floppy disk that had a file created in impression publisher on it, and you double clicked the document, if the application that created the document had not been displayed on the screen it wouldn’t open - you’d get a weird message that said something like « this document cannot be opened because the application !Impression has not been seen by the filer » We used to run an app called « FreeRam » which would display available RAM on the taskbar so you could make sure you weren’t running out / about to hang the system The « ADFS » was short for Advanced Disc Filing System (whereas the BBC Micro ran Acorn DFS) I always thought it weird that these machines had a model name sticker on the keyboard where normally you’d have the lights for caps lock, num lock and scroll lock. I believe its because the original Archimedes units had disc activity lights in this area but I could be wrong The Pinboard was often used to create a menu system as you could « iconize » programmes to it and use a paint file as a background, creating boxes around key applications for example - once you had your pinboard how you wanted it you’d save a copy of it to the !Boot folder and it would load on start up. This was helpful in schools to have the same presentation on each machine and to get around the fact that some of the applications you wanted would be in the built in Apps folder and others would be on the IDE drive, putting them on the pinboard meant you didn’t have to check two places for your apps.

[@Archimedes75009]

The 'podule riser' is called a backplane. The 5th column ROM is intended to get software which will be executed when booting up the machine. The best example is the Wizzo filing system (for IDE hard drives), which enhances Acorn standard filing system. RISC OS was not developped 'for' Acorn but 'by' Acorn, and yes it is very important.

[@Archimedes75009]

The podules on the Archimedes were of the highest quality and all made in the U.K. or in Germany when it was a German manufacturer. Having a bigger socket isn't an error of design : it is on the contrary part of an intelligent design ! It is for the podule's ROM, so it means if a new version is made available and it needs more space, a bigger ROM will fit in the card ! Have you ever seen an Archimedes fitted with RISC OS 2 ? The ROMs don't use the full sockets space ... RISC OS 2 takes 512 kbytes. With RISC OS 3 (2 Mbytes), all sockets space is used.

[@Xesh001]

Interestingly enough Apple had a 43% stake in ARM when it was started. They had approached Acorn about using a RISC chip for their planned Apple II style computer, and saw the value in the RISC architecture. The A3000 you mentioned was an earlier model of RISC machine. It used the ARM 2, and RISC OS 2, if I remember correctly. Funnily enough the ARM 1 co-processor was used on the BBC Master to help accelerate design of the ARM 2.

[@Lachlant1984]

The irony of your story is that Apple now use ARM chips in their Macs. You probably already knew that anyway.

[@MegaManNeo]

Back when computing still wasn't all standardized and therefore interesting for the reason of seeing different solutions. Definitely enjoyed the video although I'm late to the party.

[@RECORDthenRETURN]

Typing *QUIT at the BASIC prompt should get you out of 65Host and back to the desktop. Also, you can usually get an application's help file by opening a menu over its icon in the Filer and selecting the Help item from the App. submenu. So, for NewLook, go to the App. '!NewLook' submenu and select Help. Or you can Shift-double-click on the icon and find the !Help file inside the application's directory.

[@Soruk42]

Also worth noting that you didn't need to use !65Host for a BBC BASIC programming environment - RISC OS has its own version - BASIC V. Hit F12 and type 'basic' at the * prompt. To exit, type QUIT then press ENTER twice.

[@CommodoreFan64]

Great video, and as someone from the USA it's nice to see machines we never got to experience, and too see the roots of where ARM came from, but I'll have to get a Raspberry Pi and try out RISC OS at some point.

[@NaviciaAbbot]

It's really an interesting experience for us here in the States. Do at least try and emulate RISCOS 5 with RPCEmu.

[@Obviousthrowawayaccount]

@@NaviciaAbbothonestly a shame the Archimedes are exceedingly rare here Some RISC PCs floating around which are compatible but even those are exceptionally rate

[@MarkParkTech]

The key above the £ is a generic symbol for currency, if you're curious. It doesn't stand for any currency in particular.

[@RobertHazard]

They handed out New Look on free floppies at the Acorn Show in Olympia or Earls Court. It was a free update by Acorn that loaded on top of the rom. Still looks beautiful

[@hpbifta]

!newlook works because of the !boot file inside it's folder. An application is defined by a ! being at the front of it's folder(directory) name. Inside it uses several files to define it as an application, !run is basically a .bat file telling the app what to do when the app icon is clicked on, !runimage is the main program of the app launched by !run, and !boot is what defines the app icon etc usually !icon or !sprite within the folder if i remember right and also can hold other commands which are executed the moment the OS sees the apps hosting folder. So when you open the dir holding the app folder !newlook it will execute any commands in the !boot file, including changing your desktop. then click on the !newlook icon and it will read !run to set up it's environment variables then !run will usually finish with the command !runimage which is the program which launches in the taskbar. where you can define what !newlook does to your desktop. Using this system you can create an app in the root of any drive which can define your pallette, wall paper, or even auto launch any necessary apps you wish. !pritt or !sticky were very common as they enable you stick icons and apps to your desktop. Any help?

[@MoonMaster78]

Мы здесь в странах (республиках) бывшего СССР хорошо знали: zx-spectrum, commodore-amiga, atari st, ibm pc и прочее. Но практически ничего не слышали о компьютерах Acorn. Я только знал что существует такая фирма. Почему такая хорошая машина была так мало известна у нас ???😮

[@DazrahT]

1992 - 1999 These computers were literally my life at school, we were lucky as my Secondary School literally had hundreds, models varying from the A310, A440, A3000, A3020 and if your were geeky; the only place for the 'grand daddy' of Acorn at the time, a few A5000s in the school library. A few years ago I bought one off eBay a few years ago so I could own my very own Acorn, an A4000, something I'd longed for when I was at school, my very own Acorn. Need to fire the old girl up one day. One day, I'll get myself a proper skool machine,. the A3000 - network them, one day!

[@johnflano]

I spent so much time on the A3020 in primary school in Ireland. Those things were so ahead of their time, quite formative for me. I would love to purchase a good A3020

[@DigitalDiabloUK]

My high-school invested in a RISC PC in about 1995, and it had an IBM PC emulator inside it. Although it wasn't quite a software emulator as it had an x86 daughter board. I think it might have been a 386 processor. After school,my first job was at an Acorn dealer doing upgrades and maintenance.

[@JasperJanssen]

DigitalDiabloUK I think that daughterboard was 386SX, wasn't it? Although they might have had a version with a 486 as well.

[@patdbean]

They did 486sx boards they you could get for 25 pounds with a RISC pc . And later 9697 time they did 486DX 2s and 4s at up to 133mhz for about 100 pounds. You could run Windows 95/98 in a RISC OS 4 window and print and share folders and files from one OS to the other. At what for the time 94-98 quite a usable speed.

[@aliabdallah102]

Serviceable, that's something you don't see a lot nowadays.

[@Archimedes75009]

Impression is not basic DTP : it is an awards winning full DTP software used by professionals, which ranked better than PC or MacIntosh's counteparts. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_(software)

[@brucegoatly]

Indeed, it was brilliant for its time and was definitely of professional standard. It was developed and sold by Computer Concepts, a firm latterly renamed Xara (who then developed the Xara graphics programs for the PC market). Good people. One thing Impression lacked, though, was any form of Undo function - so if you accidentally deleted something it stayed deleted...

[@j.williamkay2771]

Bruce Goatly I’m happy to say I remember your name from the Acorn magazines of old, and so good to see the community still active. Impression II, and latterly Impression Publisher, were fantastic programs which left their PC counterparts in the dust. It has taken a long time for InDesign to win me over, and there are still plenty of things which were much simpler in Impression than they are today. One major thing I miss from RiscOS is the ability to right-click a menu item and have the menu remain open. There are so many unnecessary clicks in today’s Mac and Windows applications because of self-closing menus!

[@brucegoatly]

J.William Kay Thanks - never knew I was famous... :) Agreed on how advanced RISC OS was. It's still much in evidence here: I currently have three separate machines running RISC OS (ARMX6, A9 Home and Raspberry Pi), and Virtual Acorn installed on all the others!

[@paulgascoigne5343]

I remember when our school got rid of the BBC micros and got some of these Acorns in. They were all networked together (impressive for the day) and shared a caddy CD ROM drive and Hard Disk over the network. They were very impressive machines really. They could have easily outdone Amiga/Atari if the market had been right and the drive to do so had been there. One thing I do remember were sneaking into the computer room and groups of us playing a flight simulator over the network. Trying not to get caught as the school were insistent they were machines for serious work and not games!

[@wishusknight3009]

podules used essentially a NuBus type protocol. The 3 row connector is 32 bit, and the 2 row is 16 bit. and runs 10 mhz.

[@tackline]

(All of this very much IIRC...) Podules are standard Eurocard PCBs (the pinout is proprietary). Millipede Electronics had an expensive "broadcast quality" full width video podule called Apex. It had four "pixel pipeline processors" at around 13.5 MHz. Some RISC OS 2 programs would only run if you resized a memory allocation. I think System Sprites is the culprit. RISC OS 3 made many of the allocations automatic, so you don't get to drag many of the bars in the Task Manager window. The 5th Column ROM was the equivalent of ROM on podules. The relocatable modules (operating system extension) were copied into RAM and then run (obviously that ROM socket is 8 bits and the podules are either 8 or 16-bit, whilst the ARM requires 32 bits). The textured 3D look just missed the RISC OS 3.10 ROM, though that did allow you to place sprites over the drawn window borders. The WIMP deserves a longer look. I much prefer it to what we have today.

[@dlarge6502]

All my raspberry pi's are running on risc os 5 (apart from one running on debian). I program my pi's in bbc basic :). As for real Acorn hardware I have an Electron and a Risc PC 600 which I'm searching for upgrades on ebay.

[@Behindstage]

Chocks away, artizan,pipedream, haunted house...and others I'd love to see run on this machine...so nostalgic

[@yjk_music]

I started using RISC OS 5 on my Raspberry Pi 2. And as you mentioned, due to cooperative multitasking on RISC OS, system may lock up for a while or forever, especially when installing or updating new packages through !PackMan. (I experienced when I was installing G++ through !PackMan)

[@maxxdahl6062]

Using it on my Pi Zero, it's still blazingly fast even on the zero.

[@BollingHolt]

RODIME!!!! I forgot about those!!!! Now all you have to do is find a Kalok hard drive, and trip back in time to 1991 will be complete LOL.

[@HardwareHackers]

Excellent video, I remember being 6-7 years old and being so interested in these machines, and within weeks going from being shown how it works to suddenly doing things the teachers couldn't lol!

[@camerongray1515]

Nice, was similar for me although for me it was on iBook G3s running MacOS 9.2, then later iBook G4s running OS X 10.3 (I think, could have been 10.4).

[@HardwareHackers]

I managed to catch Micro Men last night with my dinner! fantastic suggestion, really enjoyed it!

[@oisnowy5368]

Oh and pinboard isn't the whole desktop - the pinboard is the background. You can put icons, shortcuts on there and you can also "iconize" windows. Reduce existing windows to icons temporarily.

[@wallflips]

Wow this is a pretty creative OS, also impressively reactive for a 25Mhz cpu machine, I just love the idea for the memory management, man, british technology is the best in the world.

[@Mikeywil0003]

The expansion card connectors look like NuBus connectors. That is a great design that expansion cards install sliding into the rear of the chassis, without having to remove the cover.

[@tygattyche2545]

My first Acorn! Initially bought with ARM@25 MHz, FPU10, 4MB RAM and a 170 MB Connor HDD and later upgraded with SCSI Controller with a fittng HDD and a 2nd hand Colour Card Gold I loved that machine - till i broke trying to solder a second RAM Controller for fitting a further 4 MB of RAM. Well, bought a RPC-SA then...

[@ChaosEmerald85]

I have very fond memories of using one of these at primary school in the mid 90s

[@stevec00ps]

At 35:18 - it can run Crisis :)

[@sp00kiestchannelevah76]

Of course, any computer can run Crysis. It's well known for having low requirements

[@itsGeorgeAgain]

Crisis, not Crysis. Different thing ;)

[@psycho0815]

@Steve Cooper Thats bollox and you know that. @itsGeorgeAgain It is indeed Crysis... And Warhead. ;-)

[@thecaptain2281]

Wasn't "Crisis" a shareware game for Acorn PC's back in the day?

[@florian76]

Rodime 15:15 in Scotland (founded 1979) was big in hard drives and brought even world's first small 3.5 inch HD to market. They struggled being profitable after 1985 and stopped production in 1991. Keep your Acorn in good shape to show it your kids some day.

[@BollingHolt]

I had one of those Conner 40 meg IDE drives (first hard drive I ever had, actually), and I held on to that thing forever! Mine never failed as long as I had it. It came on a hard card that I got for Christmas in 1991 to put in my Amstrad PC1512DD. I probably kept that drive at least through the late 1990s or early 2000s. Hell, I may still have it in a box somewhere LOL. I'll never forget the distinct sound those Conners made when you fired them up.

[@romankrylov605]

Truly amazing thing made in truly amazing times. Ok, my next project is a time machine to go back to 1992. Nothing makes sense to me here and now.

[@michaelheinrich44]

take as many smartphones with you as possible. You will return as a rich man.

[@lilithcross2980]

Love your videos dude! Keep it up!

[@KiwiHelpgeek]

School in NZ and Australia used BBCs and the RISC machines like the A3000. I have a BBC Model B, A3000 and an A4000.

[@GuyHindle]

Ahhhhh, I miss various RiscOS features... Menu button in particular

[@holnrew]

My school didn't get PCs until around 1998, when I was in year 8, but I still had to do some of my IT GCSE on Archimedes computers. Eventually they all got replaced with PCs. Before that it was all BBC Micros in schools, and there weren't many to go round. I have a soft spot for Acorns.

[@thelovertunisia]

What got me into vintage a bit was the amstrad pc with an 8086 chip

[@ChrisMcKeown560]

On RISC OS, Apps (things that begin with !) are actually directories - if you hold down Shift and double-click them, you can look inside the program's directory to see what's inside. Most apps will have a !Boot file which is executed when you enter the directory containing the app - this is why the !NewLook app changed the skin. It's a really interesting (and dangerous - most RISC OS viruses spread by leveraging !Boot files) feature of the OS.

[@deivuuk]

So that's much the same as Apps appear in macOS these days.

[@Damastes76]

I got banned from the school computer labs for a week for writing a simple virus in basic, fond memories :D

[@roybixby6135]

It was a facinating machine when it came out - I'd love to see how it compares with modern computers...

[@nicholasthetaylor]

39 Station road in Northants is now a pizza shop. Maybe they sell Acorn pizza. Wok wok wok

[@iainbanachowicz8318]

I loved this machine because I played my favorite game on this computer and that was twinworld.

[@Fredboot1]

Still got my Electron, love it.

[@Mr_ToR]

one of the best videos I've seen recently. very well done. thnx a lot.

[@mark12358]

Nice reviews and presentation for this A5000. And what a nice old Olivetti original monitor! Cheers, M

[@Archimedes75009]

Newlook is by Acorn.

[@turbolenza35]

Excellent presentation. Hello from Singapore !

[@richtea615]

This was my first computer.

[@bobbyprog]

Same 🥰

[@rsturbolad26]

What a trip down memory lane! I was a big fan of Impression II so was a bit teary to see it in this video :) (oh and it wasn't THAT slow if you ran it from HD (or Nexus shared drive!), if not then swapping of font discs was a right pain).

[@lemagreengreen]

Used these in 1997-1998, obviously at the end of their lives. Strangely the only place they were still in use at my high school was in technical studies.

[@mistie710]

One slight niggle - you could buy an A5000 without a drive. I bought mine from Watford Electronics as a replacement for my A3000 to which I later added a 105MB drive. I eventually traded that system at Beebug for my first Risc PC.

[@gschnuuget]

This computer boots faster than any Windows version ever!

[@xyzzy3000]

The ColourCard series were a kind of display adapter for the pre-RiscPC Acorn 32-bit machines.

[@pfloydphanatic]

The first computer my family had was an IBM XT and it had an Acorn monitor. First time i'm hearing about that name since I think.

[@Archimedes75009]

Thumb up, overall a very good review, thank you.

[@SidOfBee]

Today I learned that the old Acorn icon is very similar to the Android icon of today.

[@Kppot]

I am totally outside U.K. but I started with BBC model B back in 1989 and now I got A3000 RISC pc

[@MicrophonicFool]

We had a few BBC Micro machines in junior high-school in Canada. Some were later replaced by the Ontario equivalent QNX machine

[@paulharrison8379]

"Wi-Fi Sheep" channel's video series on RiscOS on the Raspberry Pi is a good introduction to the Archimedes RiscOS operating system. The first video in the series is entitled "RISC OS Direct EP1 - Getting Started With RISC OS". The RiscOS Direct distribution is the best RiscOS download for the Raspberry Pi because lots of optional utilities are crammed into its 7.5 Gb SD image.

[@alex301980]

My parents bought one of these. Mighty 40meg harddrive and it was never filled as far as I remember. lol

[@EdgyNumber1]

8:06 Bill Gates saw ECONet on the BBC Micro and had never seen anything like it before, the idea of a LAN was a far off distant dream to most manufacturers in the USA - even to Apple, which touted itself as being ahead of the curve. And that ARM chip! If they'd been able to create a decent VESA compatible video/graphics card able to handle more complex instructions, there's no doubt this could have been a very useful video playback/editing tool. They should NEVER have released the Electron, and in fact if they'd bumped up sales of their CD players they would have been in a better position than they were when Olivetti took over...

[@hcddbz]

Commodore PET, Apple II had LAN when used in class so they could communicate and share network and drives starting in the late 70's . Later TR-80 added support. Microsoft sold Xenix that use 10Base5 and 10Base2 networking in 80's.

[@XtremeKremaTor]

Shows how M$ Windoze was lacking and behind

[@IkarusKommt]

In 1992, Windows was leagues ahead of this. In particular, it could run in more than 800x600x8.

[@MichaelSmith-us9ch]

The AV folder is really AU for Acorn User... the magazine for the Acorn computers.

[@jameswilliamson4315]

This is going very far back in to my memory... but I think !NewLook was developed for (or at least around) the time of the RiscPC and RiscOS 3.2. As you can see, it just makes everything a bit prettier. I never understood why the A5000 had the 'chubby' window icons. !NewLook went 3D and much more like the A3000/3010/3020 style. You should be able to put a reference in !Boot to run !NewLook at boot time.

[@jameswilliamson4315]

Extra note - I'm pretty sure if you double-click !Boot it does nothing (it might just flicker the screen while it loads "stuff" again, even though it's already loaded), but if you open the folder (any "Application" with a ! starting the name is actually a folder with text and binary files inside - like Mac OS X does today with .app folders) there will be a file in there that can be modified). I found this newsgroup thread from 1993 making reference to the availability of !NewLook - groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.acorn/_tWgrayXblo/_PfvDJ5_LFcJ

[@artisticgoose2609]

Turn off press R and power on to detect monitor!

[@oisnowy5368]

We had a A310 upgraded later to 4Mb, 25Mhz ARM3, eventually a 250Mb IDE HDD and RiscOS 3.1. The mouse that came with it, didn't have the "depression" around the mouse buttons, so I suppose it was the A5000's.

[@Rroff2]

On the other hand all the A3xxx and A5000 I've ever seen came with a lot more modern looking mouse - though it is possible that was bundled by whoever was selling them such as Castle Tech where most of mine came from and other companies and/or earlier releases of the A5000 used the older mouse.

[@manut4963]

You obviously have no idea what you're doing, with regards to RISC OS. For starters the PC emulator is quite fast not slow. It emulates a standard IBM PC 8086 running DOS (in this case it was supplied with DR-DOS 5.0) with EGA-graphics. For a completely software based emulator it was very fast as later clone-PC's only ran at 8MHz. Only AT-compatible PC's (80216) ran at higher speeds 12MHz and 16MHz (and were a lot slower than an A5000 using native RISCOS apps). It took Pentium class PC's to finally surpass the speed of these Acorn's. And by the time 3D accelerator cards and soundblaster-compatible audio was standard in cheaper PC's, it was clearly the end for computers like the Amiga, Atari and Acorns from those days. Impression Style, the one on your system, is the successor to the original Impression (an advanced wordprocessor). There was an even more advanced version called Impression Publisher geared towards printing houses and, you guessed it, publishers. This full-blown DTP application had full CYMK-separation, Styles, fonts,full WYSIWYG with real time onscreen anti-alliasing (both fonts and vector graphics). And because it was so fast, its press-colour-corrected CYMK-colour seperation could be seen real-time onscreen! Also that remark about cooperative multi-tasking being bad is ridiculous. In 1991 there weren't many home computers with multi-tasking and the ones which had multitasking all used cooperative multitasking including Windows 3.1 which was released in 1992. Even more advanced OS's with some form of pre-emptive multitasking were in reality a LOT worse than Acorn's Archimedes and A-series (e.g. Amiga). Even Apple's own cooperative multitasking (macos 9) was severely limited compared to what an Archimedes or A5000 could achieve. In 1991 the A5000 was the best personal home computer you could get. Unfortunately, it also costed a arm and a leg (pun intended). It was priced between a "clone PC" 80286 and 80386-PC's and Apple Macintosh Quadra-range (the top-range of apple mac's in 1991). Later as 80486 (especially the clock-doubled versions from late 1992) came to market, the raw computing speed of Intel cpu's became apparent. OH an most importantly. Can you speak a little bit slower please? So that non-native English speakers (like me) can understand you easier. Thanks.

[@BenHelweg]

He's hard to understand sometimes because Scottish.

[@tziuriky86]

Thanks for the video, Cameron. It appears RiscOS had a very nice and easy to use User Interface, all in all it looked pretty efficient for its time! I love thinkering with different OS's and I wish I could get hold of an Acorn computer, for my retro collection, but I guess I'll resort buying a Raspberry Pi :-) PS: I wonder why your accent sound closer to the Irish than the stereotypical Scottish accent? :-) Cheers

[@Naitoraven951]

Very cool startup!

[@Archimedes75009]

You are wrong about the BASIC : you are using the BBC B BASIC ! If you want to use the Archie BASIC, simply type F12 and then BASIC !!!

We had BBC Computers in our senior school, but I never got to use one. It was only for pupils in the Top Set of maths and I was definitely not one of those. Shame, because I remember seeing them operate a Turtle on it drawing a picture (very slowly,) and it was really cool!

[@GuyHindle]

Other observation.... The mouse cursor is a hardwire 'sprite' hence ZERO cpu cost for writing onscreen

[@willproctor7301]

I know this is an old video, but you can enter basic by hitting f12 and typing basic at the prompt. You could also run basic in a taskwindow on the desktop.

[@kbhasi]

(20:35) You probably needed an adaptor that blocked the EDID pin of the VGA connector, as that was originally used to detect when a monochrome monitor was connected.

[@hartpa]

Impression! ❤

[@Vlad-1986]

Maybe if you play with the screen options you'll be able to boot up with a more modern monitor...

[@patdbean]

16:41 the floatine point co-processors were great, if you veere in to math intencive stuff like ray tracing. Real floating point hardware could give you a 5-10x speed up. Something the later risc PCs had no option for, as far as i know.

[@burtholiday1573]

Good job, always interesting.

[@MarkAJAgi]

The mouse that came with the A5000 is not square like the one in the video. It is the same shape as a modern PC one. There is no scroll will. The three buttons where called Select, Adjust and Menu.

[@bobbyprog]

The A5000 I had as a kid came new with the square mouse as shown in the video

[@rizdigital]

Wow UI so cool

[@Storm_.]

Are you sure those Podules are not actually VME? They look exactly like the industry standard VME bus.

[@xyzzy3000]

The pinout is different but the boards themselves conform to the euro card standard. The very earliest Acorn machines had rackmount variants for industrial use and were made up of boards like this. The Acorn System 3/4/5 are what you should search for if you'd like to see pictures!

[@MarkAJAgi]

Try typing *DESKTOP and press the return key should take you back into the Desktop from !65Host.

[@suvetar]

I think you can also use the F12 key? Or you can in RiscOS Direct! Hope this helps.

[@MarkAJAgi]

@@suvetar From my memory, you could press F12 in the desktop to leave the desktop. It added a blank line at the bottom of the screen with a * prompt. You could then type *BASIC to enter BASIC in single tasking mode. *Help, *Cat, *FX0, *ROMS and any other * command. I still have my A5000 but not working, so can't test this.

[@rchaffer]

30:45 Narrator: Look around you... Look around you... Look around you...

[@pianokeyjoe]

The old Apples did the same with the DELETE key I remember in school. The NEW LOOK of the Risc OS is what I love, and yeah, the selective multitasking making the OS unstable due to problem app code is why I never really gave Risco OS a chance. Windows NT and Linux just works better. I was also under the impression that with a ROM based OS you can just switch the power off with no ill effect? Like on Atari ST and Amiga OS? Guess I was wronga dong dong! But still, would be nice to toy around with this OS.

[@systemchris]

I think the pc emulator uses a 386 or 486 processor on an expansion board

[@tarstarkusz]

I've never seen a SCSI card (and I've seen hundreds) with a Centronics connector on it. They have come with many different connectors, but never that one, though it's not a big deal because Centronics to Centronics cables were the norm for daisy chaining the SCSI devices.

[@suvetar]

@Cameron, I think you might try pressing F12 to exit the emulator, or at least you can in RISC OS Direct ... Thanks for the great video, even if I'm 4 years too late :D Cheers!

[@suvetar]

BTW, Auto-Running folder on a hard disk? Sounds like quite a virus risc (badum tsh) to me! :D

[@b3ntleg]

We had these at school until about 97/98

[@gmcmaster1985]

The mouse you have there is definitely one of the earlier ones

[@Lachlant1984]

What other vintage computers do you have? Any Atari or Commodore models or any Amstrad or Sinclair machines? What's the oldest computer you own?

[@immortalsofar5314]

I never had one (got a 2nd hand A1000) but I always loved this machine, not least because I hoped the decent chip would unseat Intel's 4040 variants. I even got an ARM netbook a while back. I was really disappointed when my parents got my kid brother a BBC master instead of one like this which would have been worthwhile.

[@MrBigStoop]

Irvine made Seagate and Connor drives. The A1200 and Aptiva PC's too. Somewhere I think Connor made keyboards. Most PC cases came from Irvine too. Now there is NOTHING thanks to the SNPee.

[@TheTechGuyYT]

Im still looking for a Acorn computer . But they are rare in Australia

[@Dex99SS]

1080p50 eh? Nothing like drawing hard lines, damn... That said, "not easy to get off, as it's quite tight and old". Well... ... ...

[@Archimedes75009]

You could install the set of hi res icons and fonts when you use hi res modes ...

[@jammi__]

Here's the expansion podule specification, so they're all the same and so is the included expansion thing. They're using the Eurocard physical standard and cards can contain memory, coprocessors and various other functions. www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/riscos/docs/PodInfoR1.txt