Reason for ARM (Acorn Archimedes at 30) - Computerphile
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- čas přidán 15. 07. 2017
- Another home computer hits the big 3 0 ! But even if you've never heard of it, the Acorn Archimedes is the reason the ARM chip exists...
Virus vs. Zarch: • Virus vs. Zarch
Programming BASIC & Sorting: • Programming BASIC and ...
How Graphics were Created for BBC TV Programmes in the 90s: • How Graphics were Crea...
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/ computer_phile
This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at www.bradyharan.com
"We should have done an Amiga video but we didn't"
I'm more upset by this than I thought I would be
think what we see here is a pice of british nasionalism where ANYTHING that is british is great but anyhting else is not. Anyhting that is british is junk and cheap.
I'm British and I love the Amiga. I regularly watch Dave Haynies Deathbed Vigil film for the feels.
That game must have opened a LOT of eyes in 1987.
yes it did, just as Elite had three years earlier. David Braben for the win!
And the man is still kicking ass today. Makes you feel a bit small, doesn't it.
Yeah i have a fantasy that FD add Zarch to Elite Dangerous as a cockpit mini game .... I'd buy another ED account if they did that :D
That's pretty basic uni CG stuff. Most of the algorithms were developed by early '70s.
so many computer lessons with these and the joy of them being so much more powerful than BBC micro. The main joy in our school was when it was found you could right click (mouse had 3 buttons so one of them) and edit the sprites of any software so many a kid that made humorous images in the paint program and then swapped them out to animate in the games.
Searching for working floppy is so lovely. Amazing work you guys are doing. Cant forget transferring Warcraft on 3.5 floppy disks to friends 386 machine with colored SVGA display. Being there at that time made me on top of IT industry today.
THAT'S WHAT THE DUDE BEHIND THE CAMERA LOOKS LIKE!?
+THE WORLD YES!
A handsome fellow.
Computerphile it's so surreal. you look very powerful and strong
That really throws me.
You know how you can develop a picture in your head of what someone looks like based on their voice?
Well, it can be rather disconcerting when the person looks nothing like you imagined they would. XD
THE WORLD Dangit I wasn't going to watch the whole video. Now I have to watch the whole video
There's a sound you don't hear very often these days: the raspy clicky noise of someone flicking through a pile of 3.5 inch floppies.
My Archimedes 310 was my favourite of all the computers I've ever owned.
I loved the Arc. (I had A3000 / A5000). Basic V was the most elegant, powerful, best-structured version of Basic I ever encountered. And the Acorn Assembler language for the RISC chip was, also, so perfectly logical and consistent. And having an assembler built into Basic V made it so easy to use - write the program in Basic, then just convert the most intensive bit-twiddling parts to Assembler. It all made programming (almost) a pleasure.
oh god. The nostalgia. That game absolutely blew my mind as a kid. When I saw that, I knew anything was possible in computer games.
Yes I remember the Acorn Archimedes around 1992, at school, It was the first computer I had ever seen and interacted with. It truly blew my mind, it was the first computer that really got me interested in computing. I also remember the game lander, it was next level at the time.
Um... at 8:30 you relay some folklore that the Windows 95 start menu was inspired by the Arch, and I'm wondering if you have a reference or link to that, because I'm actually the author of an early RiscOS app called !Launch which was a application menu utility (With a little white and red TinTin-style rocket for the icon. I also wrote !Boot, which had a brown boot.) so these revelations mean it's entirely possible that I'm partly responsible for the Start button. So thanks for that.
I really would like to know the rest of that story. While I'm atoning for my sins I think it's important to know what they are.
i guess he didnt know
It was a chap from Colton Software who specialized in writing Acorn Applications, that joined Microsoft to help develop Windows 95 that showed them the Acorn RISC OS iconbar. The rest as they say is history.
Acorn had so much cool technology, but unfortunately for them they were based in England, and not Silicon Valley in the USA, so did not get the huge following they deserved.
Fortunately, the RISC OS is still being actively developed and is showing great promise for the future.
I am in the USA and my first thirty-two bit computer was an Acorn Archimedes A310. My current primary computer is a Raspberry Pi B+ running RISC OS 5.24. I know others that used Acorn Archimedes through RiscPC systems here in the USA, there was a small but well together movement of Acorn RISC OS based Computer users over here, with many softwares that I think were only in the USA (I wish I could find the original authors to attempt to get permission to share there works).
Excellent video: the Archimedes was amazing. The lift at Computerphile's home base is made by Kone Oyj, which is a Finnish company, so all letters in its name are spoken, including the 'e'. The word 'kone' means machine in the Finnish language. You can hear how it sounds using Google Translate. The Finnish word for computer is tietokone, literally meaning 'thinking machine'.
Archimedes was the owl in the 1960s 'Sword in the Stone' Disney movie, Arthur Pendragon was the main character! Is that why the operating system was named this??
Amazing informative entertaining stuff as always. I look forward to your videos every week.
Yep, my secondary school was full of Acorn Archimedes machines. Used to enjoy playing games like Fervour, Moonquake (Bomberman Clone) and a demo of horizontal scroller Technodream!
Lander, chocs away, many a school lunchbreak was spent playing these.
Allegedly, Arthur meant 'A Risc operating system by THURsday'.
Sounds like eternal Thursday to me :)
Great machines. Long time ago I worked porting Amiga Scala MM into one of those amazing RiscPCs, all in StrongARM assembler. Greetings from Spain. StrongED FTW!
The Amiga (1000) was released in 1985, and the 500 in 1987 (in Europe).
I'm not sure if the Amiga 1000 only reached the UK by 1986 though. Does Dr Bagley know?
I had an Archie A3000 from 1992 and most of the 90s. Amazing machine.
I loved buying the magazines, and typing some code into BBC BASIC V, or loading the magazine disks.
I still have four of the disks somewhere. (along with an Archie A3020 with HDD).
The story of the ARM is one of THE most important in computers and the modern World.
I asked Jason at CCH to ask the Director of "Micro Men" if they could think about doing a spin-off / sequel where Steve Furber, Sophie Wilson and the others went to the US to visit WDC etc.
They assumed WDC would be in some big factory somewhere, but it was practically being run from a suburban garage. lol
The Acorn guys thought "we can do that!", and so the ARM CPU was born.
(now of course, the most succesful CPU core on the planet, in terms of sheer numbers and widespread use.)
Sadly, the Director of Micro Man said that a sequel is " not on the cards".
We can live in hope. lol
I loved my Archimedes. I wrote a quick demo of an Asteroids physics engine in about 150 lines of BASIC using graphics string primitives to draw all the objects. Amazingly efficient interpreter.
MY school was full of A3000s and I loved them. Took me 24 years but I finally got myself an Archimedes this year.
these are sure gems.
Eyyy! This was my first computer!
What made the Archimedes game so significant was not that no other machine could do it (they could) it was that the game was written in BBC BASIC. You could stop the game and list the code to the screen and even change it if you wanted to. It was just a regular BBC BASIC program. It really was something special.
Not strictly true... BBC BASIC supported inline assembly, which is what most of the code was actually written in.
Does he personally own all this cool retro hardware or did he somehow persuade the university to buy it?
Sirius Cybernetics? I wonder if that lift had Genuine People Personalities installed...
A clue as to why the OS was named 'Arthur'? As in 'Dent Arthur Dent'?
Feeling all nostalgic from my college days. Had one of the few Archimedes I've ever encountered.
We had a whole bunch of these at our primary school here in New Zealand.
I loved❤️ using Acorn Archimedes Computer when I was at School always wanted one at home to replace my BBC micro model B Computer which I also loved, I used to play Lander at every break I could at middle school so I got quite good at it, and pleased when I could fly it better then everybody else, I remember once a friend jokingly put the screen to green on the monitor when playing Lander saying filling her up with Unleaded when Lander was refuelling on Launch Pad, also I loved fact I could still write programs in Basic like on the BBC Micro.
I think any Archimedes Computer Today should immediately have the Internal battery taken out and Changed as so many have leaked with age, causing terrible damage to the chips components and PCB, also makes me feel old seeing this, as it seams like only yesterday I was playing and using this as a kid, also I loved drawing on it.
1:08 imagine the floors in this building were named after programming languages. The ground floor would be assembler, second is C then C#, Python...
I remember Virus on the ST, circa “88. It was ground breaking. There was also things like carrier command and captain blood (that was bonkers) the sound track by Jean-Michel Jarre was incredible, for the time. Happy days.
This reminds me of every time I dust of the AMIGA. Always a new set of floppy disks in the bin.
Good memories, we used an Archimedes network at work here in NZ and they just worked.
In 1999 or so, I was in primary school. The first computer I ever sat down infront of and used was one of these. I distinctly remember the red function keys, and what RISC OS looked like.
Man I loved those call in shows. Used to call into Adventure Call all the time.
That Lander game looks suspiciously like 'Virus' on the Amiga!
Edit: Shouldn't have commented so early, the video mentions that it was ported to the Amiga
I worked for the people who ported Smalltalk-80 to the Archimedes, and we also sold a variant for 386 PCs. Some mad genius constructed a PC expansion card which contained an Archimedes and shared the display with the PC.
Going from memory, the Archimedes card was clocked at 8MHz while the PC was at least 3 and possibly 5 times that.
The Archimedes blew the PC away speed-wise, even trapped on a PC expansion card ;-)
Heads up: in 2019 the Atari 400/800 becomes 40. The first computer to ever have not one....but two graphics co-processors....
11:44 Probably there was no clipping as such, it simply chose whether to render each polygon in its entirety or completely omit it.
Lander! Wow, I loved that game.
Holy hell! That Zarch demo is amazing! That was from 1987? That seems insane... I didn't see things like that on the PC until many years later!
If you are talking about Lander then yes 1987
I may be repeating a theory already considered for the name of the OS being Arthur, but it could be a reference to the Disney film 'sword in the stone' in which Merlin's owl was called Archimedes.
Great video, and excellent computers. Amongst other models I have a twin floppy drive A310, with RISC OS 2. I only have the system unit and scart cable, but I've tested it, and it works perfectly. I really want to get the correct stuff to go with it.
good vid i like the behind the scenes look
so, akechi was the villain all along and the cameraman is not james grime. what a perspective-shattering day.
Very neat!
we had this demo at my school circa 1992/93 or so. We played it so much.. very difficult game though.
Oh the memories of being a kid in the 90's. I was given so many detentions for playing lander
The RISC-PC was the only computer with an integrated pizza compartment…
Beside, when talking about the 305/310 don't forget the A3000.
Ah, the Rocket Ship, which I saw in operation at shows. Ten slices, including multiple TV and camera cards, lots of other stuff, as well as that pizza oven and even the proverbial 'kitchen sink' on top, all controlled via an infra-red handset.
Our resource teacher in Wynnum Australia had two Acorn Archimedes machines, I think every other computer in the school was a pc or mac.
When he was shuffling through the stiffies, it brought a tear to my eyes.
Ohh memories. Dead floppies and stiffies.
Most people aren't going to know what a stiffie is (I only know because of a comment on another video). In most of the world both 3.5" and 5" disk were called floppies.
Very interesting. The ARM lives on today.
By why, oh why have you skipped the AMIGA from your series?? So much of it was groundbreaking.
uffffomg did anyone else catchthe hitchicker's guide to the galaxy reference respect doc respect...
10:22 Methinks ’tis time to make a backup of the backup!
I used to love playing lander at school when it was released.
GREAT computer!
Listening to C64 remixes at SlayRadio, watching a movie about an Acorn Archimedes, reading about new Amiga software in 2017, attending demoscene parties... Oh, and just about to play a C64 game (Mega Starforce, then Bomb Jack). Does it make me a (retro)computerphile enough? :D
All of the game graphics and question bank for at least the first few series of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire was done from an Acorn PC.
The TRS-80 was launched in the US in 1977 -- it's its 40th Anniversary year.
The Archimedes was a computer that invited you to hack it. Each Application was its own directory with a !Sprites file containing the Icons shown on the desktop for the application and files. These were easily edited with the !Paint program. Get a group of young programmer types together and their desktops would all look different, you had to read the text to know which applications were which. The BBC BASIC could make operating system SWI calls so you could write full WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse Pointer) programs in interpreted BASIC. There were a few cost cutting measures that gave 'personality'. The graphics memory was in main memory so the high resolution 640x512 8 bits mode left little bandwith for programs to run, slowed down by 90% (?). There were only 16 colour palette registers so the 8 bit mode was a combination of the top RGGB (?) bits and palette registers giving RBWW, 64 colours with 4 grey levels each. That resulted in a quite pastel colour look that's immediately recognisable when you see an Archimedes screen grab.
“Slowed down by 90%” - I’m not so sure. Yes, at 640x480 50Hz there would need to be a framebuffer word fetch every 240ns on average. But that’s not how they did it. I’m sure that screen would be fetched at least a couple words at a time to leverage the sequential access mode that had 120ns access time, to minimize overhead. So at most it would use up half the streaming memory bandwidth, and the CPU didn’t always access memory. So 90% is not even a worst case, it’s just some made up number it’d seem. CPU could on average have the same RAM bandwidth as video output, and the video chip had a fifo to approximate the average case without hogging RAM for too long. And by the time they got ARM3, the RAM was much faster as well, so this became a non-issue I imagine. You’d “hit it” if all the work the CPU ever did was memcpy data around. Not a typical workload by any means.
@@absurdengineering Mine was an Archimedes 305 with the 4bit wide memory chips. That meant they could do 32 bits of memory with just 8 chips. It could do 3 (static column?) memory accesses at 8 Mhz (125ns?) then had to do an access at 4Mhz to allow for refresh. This was the reason for the conditional instructions in the instruction set to avoid branches that would break the sequential memory access. I never benchmarked the 256 colour 512 line mode but the slow down was VERY noticeable certainly slower than half the speed. Not sure how the VIDC accessed the memory, if it was through the MEMC there's not reason it wouldn't do the same three 8Mhz accesses then one 4 Mhz access trick.
Actually the other folklore about Acorn and Microsoft was that Windows 3.1 was delayed purely because people were hooked on the Acorn Archimedes version of "Lemmings" :) So yeah it's entirely possible that MS "borrowed" the icon bar.
omg lander!! i had forgotten all about that
from 144 to 1328 views in the 12:23 of the video... I'm impressed
I luv me some harware history, it's just... Mr. Riley, you left a high pitch noise (CRT source?) at 3:53-4:03 . Sadly, my hearing is still good and even my cruddy speakers have that much range so I damn nearly had to pop my jaw off to get rid of the ringing aftwerwards.
The TV station in Johannesburg probibly still uses them.
They should make a series where they just sit there and play old games.
Wait ... What ? I thought Brady was filming all -phile series !
I believe the Archimedes was sold here (Australia). I remember it had a reputation of being very fast, but I don't think it sold well here.
hello does any 1 know how to obtain sound from this lander game at all - thanks in 1989 fred harris video there was sound in the lander game - thanks
It always feels weird when I'm reminded that Brady's not the one behind the camera on this channel.
Do you have any numbers for how popular the Archimedes was in the UK? the Spectrum and Commodore 64 were obviously very popular home computers. the BBC model B was standard in schools. in the late 80s I lost touch but I still only remember model Bs at VIth form; in the early 90s I remember one person had a Archimedes, and maybe my uni physics department had some, but the Amiga and Atari ST seemed more prevalent. and then it was PCs & SNES & Sega ...
7:15 wasn't that the same sound in that numberphile video about the best infographic HAHA
1:48 - what's that growing out in the greenhouse?
Hello does lander have sound how do I obtain sound in lander ? Thanks. Also I typed in a write command for the dragon 32 but it doesn’t work can you help thanks.
You should really do the Amiga, even if late!!!
Is there a way to input sound into lander ???? Cheers thanks.
Linux was ported to the ARM architecture on an Archimedes A5000 (no mean feat in 1994 - when Linux had only been out for3 years, since it only ran on i386/i486/pentium when the work was started), by an electronics undergrad student at Southampton University as a spare-time project. If you have an Android phone or ARM Chromebook, you are certainly running some of the code written by that particular hacker - Russell King. Google for "The History of ARM Linux".
I understand the price-point comment, but 4 mips in 1987 was behind the 1987 68020 at 5 mips ~33Mhz, which was the same year as the 6 mips 16Mhz 68030. People forget it wasn't very clear RISC had any advantage at all to start with.
Those 68k MIPS was in most cases purely theoretical because the CPU is half the story. You need everything else done to support that performance, and that was very hard to do cheaply - it’s not as if Motorola could magically divine faster RAM, they had access to the same stuff Acorn’s designers had. The typical “6 mips” 68k systems with dedicated VRAM usually couldn’t match the RAM bandwidth that the ARM2 chipset in the Acorn had while doing screen refresh, and that says a lot. And even the 68000 had more than 2x the transistor count of ARM1/2, while its performance was kinda laughable with that transistor budget. The Acorn machine was a breath of fresh air. It really had to be used next to other typical machines of the day to understand how much smoother it was.
I'd like to see more coverage of Theoretical Computer Science topics and a bit less of museum stuff :)
7:27 - So why can't we have computers today, no matter the size, that are instant on? Why is it that they need to start (i'm guessing now) all kinds of services before having something we can work with? Couldn't we have at least a small portion of the OS on a ROM?
Please make a video about it, if possible, @Computerphile!
EDIT: OMG, I had never seen that Lander demo. I'm in awe!
Hey Sean love your channel and videos but I was a little disappointed that you didn't pull out all the stops and bust the budget on this one re. finding a Doctor Who clip with an Archimedes in it...
Do you know if Novel Netware was supported on ARM ?
Wasn't there also a Bomberman clone? I remember it being hidden in the OS itself but might be wrong. Teachers wondered how on earth we were managing to play each day.
Please explain how the Archimedes auto reads a floppy disc???? Is the Archimedes the same as the Amiga????
hello is some 1 currently trying to add sound to lander risc os thanks?
Ahh the Philips CM8833 CRT. Lovely monitor, had one for my Amiga but it went faulty. I'm curious how UoN keep their old monitors going. The parts are getting harder to find now.
If you change the caps before they get too bad you prevent a lot of problems with the rest of the circuitry
As long as the CRT and the fly back transformer are OK, everything else is common stuff or can be easily bodged in with modern parts.
The computerphile drinking game: drink when anyone makes a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide. Marathoning these would be like having your head smashed in with a slice of lemon. Wrapped around a large gold brick.
There was no bios for acorn PC?
I bet you haven't done a birthday video for the first RISC home computer? The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and the TMS9900 microprocessor.
Really don't think you can call the TMS9900 RISC. It had orthogonal instructions sure, but the 68000 had that and wasn't RISC. RISC was more about how you spent your transistor budget in the processor design. Instead of complex and seldom used instructions you had simple instructions that would ideally execute in one clock cycle. That saved transistors that you spent on large register sets. Your could do more without referencing memory because each memory reference would cost of an extra clock cycle or two. The TMS9900 has only 3 registers and mapped memory as pseudo registers. So you almost always incurred extra cycles to access memory. Really the TMS9900 is anti-RISC. The RISC theory is that only have MOV and STOR commands that access memory. In effect most TMS9900 commands implicitly did a MOV of STOR.
Dont forget to say that it ran rings arround the PC.
At our high school in the early '90s we had the version that looked like an Amiga500 (A3000 I think) with the keyboard built in. One quirk of the OS or file system that I discovered was that you could copy a folder to itself and create an infinite loop until the disk got full! Anyone else find this?
Sounds like A3000 in school, they also had a A3010 or A3020 that had a more rounded look and a newer RISC OS rom for home.
I never knew of the copy bug.
and that is part why we moved from floppy's. they would die the day you bought them, and the 1.44MB was becoming a little thin at a certain point. i mean by the time floppies where fully phased out in favor of CD, we had good HDD's, so it really didn't matter anyway's. hell, even the later DOS versions had cd support.
I like how he says “Seattle” in the same vein as exotic cities like Johannesburg and Moscow 😆
Does anyone know the name of the small wind-up toy computer sitting on the desk?
Never mind, I found it: the Tomy Tutor Play Computer.
10:40 D.J. Braben '87? Is that a prequel to Elite??? EDIT: Ah, you confirmed in the video, cool! Another technical question - this is assembly-coded I guess, but Elite (and Elite 2) are m68k assembly IIRC - did games programmers often learned another assembly dialect to change platforms? I expected them to stick to some platform a bit more, game dev was truly heroic back then!
Which automation ran on RiscPC?
Holy crap that plotter is massive!
its not a plotter, its a full colour printer, probably -> hp designjet t7100
So I had to look up the difference between a plotter and a printer because of this comment (I thought large format printers were called plotters). I've learned something today thanks to you :) Cheers!
I'd love to see lander on the SNES via the superfx chip.