Re: free software mini pc

[Dom <toyer@rpdom.net>]

On 16/02/12 20:16, Joe wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:16:09 +1100
> Andrew McGlashan<andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au>  wrote:
>
> > I had some small ARM machines which worked very well on Lenny, but
> >
> > In history, I remember a P133 machine being "quite powerful" and it
> > was at the time,
>
> I had one of the first ARM computers, an Acorn Archimedes running a 4MHz
> (!) ARM1 with half a meg of RAM. I remember upgrading to a 12MHz ARM3
> and being rather impressed, and also upgrading the RAM to 4MB and
> installing a 40MB (yes, 'megabyte') MFM hard drive. The joy of escaping
> from floppies! Mind you, the OS was in ROM, so you had the desktop up
> within two or three seconds of power-on.
>
> In its 4MHz incarnation, it was (briefly) the fastest PC around,
> beating the 16MHz 386 machines of the day.

I had one of those Archimedes machines too, great to program, especally 
when the original "Arthur" OS was replaced with the first RISC OS.

Just one small correction, the Archimedes was originally fitted with an 
ARM2 chip. The ARM1 was mostly used in the prototype development 
systems, such as the ARM Co-processor for the BBC micro - which I was 
lucky enough to get my hands on for a while. It was fun to see the 
normal "BBC Computer 32K" message replaced with "Acorn OS 4096K" :-)

It cost around 4000 UKP in those days for the 4MB version.

--
Dom