I never used the Acorn apart from once at a summer school I taught at, though I used the BBC Micro at the technical college I went back to do do "A" level computer science. It's a defining feature of British geeks of a certain age that we sigh and say "Ah, the BBC Micro - a wonderful machine." And it was. As you say, best version of BASIC ever, not to mention a Pascal compiler. And, of course, there was Elite ;-)
I also played around with Atari machines in the '80s. I had a 120XT, which had good graphics for it's day but was otherwise a flop, and later used my flatmate's ST, which was great. I'm thinking of buying one if I ever move back to England just so I can read all the stuff I wrote in those days and stored on floppies. It was the machine of choice for musicians on a budget because it was the only home computer with MIDI - it was the brain of the studio our band recorded in.
The ST used the PC/MS-DOS 720kB disk format. You should be able to read 'em on any PC. You may want to recover those media now -- magnetic media deteriorate with age
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The problem seems to be that they're single-sided disks.
Maybe I was a bit harsh on the 120XT, but I ended up wishing I'd bought an Electron (there were dirt-cheap second-hand ones around then) or saved up a bit and bought a BBC Micro. It wasn't bad as a games machine (I spent some happy hours with Missile Command), but it got eclipsed by the Commodore - and later by the ST, of course.
I guess I always had a soft spot for them. All the models were good in their way. CBM only had a few hits & many many failures and flops.
In the '70s, the PET. In the early '80s, the VIC-20 and C64 (the latter in various models). Then the Amiga and that was it.
And there were downsides, especially to the C64. The VIC-20's 20-column text was horribly blocky. The C64 had a terrible BASIC, the disk drives were dog-slow, etc.
I also played around with Atari machines in the '80s. I had a 120XT, which had good graphics for it's day but was otherwise a flop, and later used my flatmate's ST, which was great. I'm thinking of buying one if I ever move back to England just so I can read all the stuff I wrote in those days and stored on floppies. It was the machine of choice for musicians on a budget because it was the only home computer with MIDI - it was the brain of the studio our band recorded in.
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Maybe I was a bit harsh on the 120XT, but I ended up wishing I'd bought an Electron (there were dirt-cheap second-hand ones around then) or saved up a bit and bought a BBC Micro. It wasn't bad as a games machine (I spent some happy hours with Missile Command), but it got eclipsed by the Commodore - and later by the ST, of course.
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https://strecover.codeplex.com/
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I guess I always had a soft spot for them. All the models were good in their way. CBM only had a few hits & many many failures and flops.
In the '70s, the PET. In the early '80s, the VIC-20 and C64 (the latter in various models). Then the Amiga and that was it.
And there were downsides, especially to the C64. The VIC-20's 20-column text was horribly blocky. The C64 had a terrible BASIC, the disk drives were dog-slow, etc.
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