Signatures shrunk?

[Guest]

Mind you, back then we never had trouble with shrinking signatures

[Maria]

:laugh:

[Guest]

Not to mention when the PC was using 720K and 1.44 Mb discs we were using 800k and 1.6Mb formats on the same media. Imagine a time when 160k was a lot of storage space! But it made a lot of difference. Especially as at a time when Word 6 was about 40MB, Impression publisher on the Acorn, an equally powerful package weighed in at about 4meg!

I've heard that to achive the 1.6MB format, the drive spun the disk at half speed, like a VCR in LP mode. I think that's why it'a incompatible with anything else. Don't know how true it is. I've got one or two Arc's tucked away, A3000, A3010, A3020 and a A7000. Marvelous machines!

Programs for the Archimedes/Acorn range of computers were so well written and so simple to use. Games, if you had any, were excellent at the time. A little company called 4th Dimension made some classics. For example 'Chocks Away' 'Stunt Racer 2000' and 'E-type' of BBC fame.

RISC OS may have been the better system but not always the most popular, i would assume due to cost. It's like Betamax and VHS. Beta was the far superior system, but they couldn't make the machines to meet demand and VHS took over.

Dean

[SimonR]

I've heard that to achive the 1.6MB format, the drive spun the disk at half speed, like a VCR in LP mode. I think that's why it'a incompatible with anything else. Don't know how true it is. I've got one or two Arc's tucked away, A3000, A3010, A3020 and a A7000. Marvelous machines!

Nah, that's an urban myth. High density Floppies can hold up to 2MB. ADFS on the Acorn was using a different sector size and also wrote the File Allocation Table in a more ingenious way and thus more of the disc was able to contain data.

A little company called 4th Dimension made some classics. For example 'Chocks Away' 'Stunt Racer 2000' and 'E-type' of BBC fame.

He, he I remember those. A lot of them were written by people who started on the BBC so the gameplay was often as good as the 8-bit classics. A mate and I also spent many hours hacking the copy protection out of those games. It worked by hiding a file at the end of the disc and then trying to read data off it. The later games were so cunning that most of the game data was held on the hidden file so when you copied the game you got about 3k out of the 800... A good idea, but easy to hack out when you know how it works.

RISC OS may have been the better system but not always the most popular, i would assume due to cost.

Sadly the might of the American company put the kibosh on it but it was also unfortuate the Acorns were associated with schools only. How short sighted was that?! Anyway, it's immaterial now, we now have to put up with spyware, reinstalls, bloatware etc. It's not progress is it?!

[e692wtt]

... an RM380Z, Commodore Pet ...

Jeez, yesterday leave me alone! A family friend from the church I attended (that's the second time I've mentioned church in this thread... what's going on?) had a Commodore Pet from the school he taught at in 1979 (I think), and my dad used to bring home a Research Machines 380Z from his school (1981 on) - I did my first programming on that 380Z, plotting and drawing a cube (not sure I could do it now :laugh: ).

I can remember my dad looking at computers in Tandy around 1978, they were £500 or something at the time (I was 8). He also had a programmable calculator in 1979 that he used to play 'moon landing' and games like that on...

Oops, sorry for hijacking the thread again .

[Miracle maestro]

If it's a rubber key Speccy, it's worth a bit of money! I've seen empty boxes on fleabay go for silly money!!! So if it's boxed as well

Just out of interest there were at least 36,070 games released for the Speccy and roughly 15,000 for the C64. Just shows how popular the Speecy was, even though the C64, in my opinion, was far superior.

Dean.

Yes Dean,
It is a rubber key job (bought Dec '83) in box with all manuals and bits and bobs
If my memory serves me right the 48k spectrum cost about the same as a Vic 20? the C64 was quite a bit more, which inevitably dented its popularity.

[Guest]

hmm... i thought the multi-tasking Amiga workbench (1984) predated multi-tasking RiscOS...