Reverie: 1987
I remember going to the Electron & BBC Micro User Show, in November 1987, at Westminster. I was 17 years old, and went on my own (the Tube from deepest, darkest Essex. No, not that sort of ‘tube’ – the underground train). I was mostly interested in Electron stuff, which was the micro I had at home.
And in this great big hall, amongst all this amazing Electron and BBC Micro paraphernalia, was a demonstration Acorn Archimedes. And I swear, in my memory, it now has a halo above it. It was running the Lander demo, and there was a line of people waiting to have a go. So I joined the queue, and eventually had my go. I was rubbish, of course – the little ship was whizzing around everywhere… but the graphics (and speed) absolutely took my breath away.
I decided there and then, I had to get an Archimedes. I’d just started work a couple of months previously, so I saved my pennies, and eventually splashed out for an Archimedes A310 the following year. Some time later, I got an ARM3 and hard disk upgrade, curtesy of the good people at AtomWide.
And that fantastic computer kept me entertained for quite a few years. Alas, I no longer have it (the hard disk eventually packed up), but, fast forward to the present day, and I use Arculator (an Acorn Archimedes emulator, par excellence), to keep my Archie stuff alive in modern hardware (I had the foresight to keep backup disk images of everything from back then).
As it happens, I’d say that nowadays, even though I’m in my fifties, I’m having just as much fun with my Acorn-related stuff, as I did when I was a fresh-faced teenager, travelling into the Big City on his own.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
