I tweeted this blog post and it emerges that a friend of mine was an Acorn engineer, which I didn't know, and was involved in a machine that I mention in passing there, but was actually far more significant
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On the CommunicatorbellinghmanApril 25 2016, 16:35:00 UTC
I was involved with that translation into Italian for Olivetti. They had an Italian client that wanted a lot of them. So we had a project to translate View and other programs from Italian to English
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Re: On the Communicatorliam_on_linuxApril 29 2016, 13:32:43 UTC
Thanks, Alan!
Sounds like a nightmare job. This, of course, is why out-of-band message tables were invented -- but then, in the early days, space (and time) were at a premium.
A (now retired) professor of mathematics education here at Warwick once told me a story about how in the late 1980s he was visiting some colleagues in the US to demonstrate some new educational software his research group had produced. "This is a new 486 PC. You've probably not got them in the UK yet," said one of his hosts, showing off a bit. "Are you kidding?" he replied. "We've got 32-bit RISC machines in our primary schools."
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.
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Sounds like a nightmare job. This, of course, is why out-of-band message tables were invented -- but then, in the early days, space (and time) were at a premium.
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https://plus.google.com/108984290462000253857/posts/GavXzpHPKGw
HT for the info to pndc.
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A (now retired) professor of mathematics education here at Warwick once told me a story about how in the late 1980s he was visiting some colleagues in the US to demonstrate some new educational software his research group had produced.
"This is a new 486 PC. You've probably not got them in the UK yet," said one of his hosts, showing off a bit.
"Are you kidding?" he replied. "We've got 32-bit RISC machines in our primary schools."
Reply
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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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