Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

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I sometimes wonder what the world would be like today had the UK govt decided that our computing future was too important to be left to anyone else, and had just bought a few million Archies for the civil service, MoD, NHS etc. Of course given that critical mass/economy of scale, and the obvious superior power compared to PCs of the time, the private sector would have adopted them too. We'd be 10 or 20 years ahead of the state of the art now.

The untapped capabilities of some of those old systems were quite astonishing. It would have been cheaper to replace every dumb VT100 type terminal with an Atari ST (which had a built-in terminal emulator) and given every user a powerful machine on their desktop. The Amiga just destroyed the contemporary Mac in terms of not only price/performance but raw performance - to say nothing of the PCs of the day! It makes you realize for all the numbers of gigabytes and gigahertz, just how little actual progress has been made, since the world settled on x86 as the lowest common denominator. Windows, OSX and Linux have far more in common than Archie, ST and Amiga, where is the radical thinking in systems design now?

Of course what would actually have happened is that obsequious little weasel Alan Sugar would have foisted his word processor abomination on us, but it's nice to dream.

Actually, it died not because of Sugar (who didn't produce a product that was even considerable), but RM PLC who chucked out a load of cheap, unrelaible pile of shite clone PCs and took the contract away from Acorn basically through lying, cost cutting and cash backhanders.

Mr Weasly Weasel (Sugar) is just an asshat anyway though.

Never a truer word was spoken. I remember RM "PCs" from schools and they absolutely sucked. It's a wonder kids didn't go blind from looking at those horrible curved 14" monitors that they probably charged £100s for.

You don't really need to wonder. Just look at France.

The news from France is mixed: Minitel could be argued to have held back the internet in France. Nuclear power research and trains pushed them to the forefront ("10 or 20 years ahead" as you say). Home-grown OSes like Chorus failed after spending lots of money.

On the other hand the French pay more for everything from energy to computers.

In retrospect, I think that had the UK adopted the Archimedes, it would have been the bargain of the century. Enough software gets written here that compatibility with the rest of the world wouldn't have been an issue (esp. since at the time we were in a world in which incompatible systems were the norm) and in fact once the Archie's superiority was demonstrated we'd have been exporting it. Esp. considering the change in the national mental landscape, that every (user-friendly, GUI) computer you encountered was easily programmable to a professional standard in BBC Basic - now only 25 years later is that kind of democratization of computing entering the public consciousness, we could have had it all the time!

Much as I loved the Archie, I don't see it working like that, largely because if the UK is going to play the protectionist game then it would simply have encouraged others to do so.

Arguably the main problem was never working out how to sell them into the US, but ARM aside too much of the rest of the platform may have been superficially nice, but wasn't really the foundations of a long running computer platform.

What really still amazes me is Acorn didn't put the RISC OS front end on NetBSD back when it became clear running BSD was far more interesting to most of Acorn's own staff than RISC OS was. By then it was probably game over anyway.

Erm they ported BSD to Acorn machines (RiscIX).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX

I wasn't arguing for protectionism (e.g. a tariff on competing systems) - just that if the govt had bought Archies instead of PCs and dumb terminals, that it was buying anyway, things would have turned out differently for the whole country, if not wider.

but wasn't really the foundations of a long running computer platform

Interesting, how do you mean? Esp. in light of the state of PC OSs at the time. If you had to restart computing what would you take as your foundation, MS-DOS or Arthur?

While BBC Basic was kinda fun, I'm not sure I'd be in a happier place right now if I had to work with 100 million lines of legacy BBC Basic :-)

Pop quiz. What did the following commands do?

    *.
    P.
    *OPT4,3

* causes OSCLI to handle the rest of the line. Dot was an abbreviation for Cat, short for catalogue, IOW ls(1). P. is presumably at the BASIC prompt; it abbreviated the PRINT keyword. OPT had the filing system set some options stored on the current disk; 4 was how to handle the !Boot file. 0, do nothing; 1, load; 2, run; 3, exec, i.e. pretend it had been typed.

Was P. shorthand for PRINT .? No idea what the other two commands do I think *OPT was for addressing a serial port or the screen but my memory is very hazy.

BBC BASIC on the original RISC PC was my first experience writing code. I think that machine is still in my parents' garage along with the 6 volume BBC BASIC reference manual.

Yes, in BASIC you could enter keywords abbreviated with a . to save typing. The tokeniser would turn it into the byte or two representing PRINT ready for it to be interpreted.

I think you're thinking of the four volume RISC OS Programmers' Manual, plus slim index, that came in a big white cardboard sleeve. Augmented later by a Volume 5 of changes with later OS versions to save re-printing costs. BASIC itself was introduced in the User Guide that came with the machine IIRC and had a one-volume reference manual of its own at additional cost.

Further to other comments, you would never see P. in the output of LIST. It would be expanded automatically to PRINT.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't P. being expanded to PRINT at the time of LIST but the byte representing the tokenised PRINT being expanded then. The P. was turned into that byte earlier.

Don't worry, you'll be able to run RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi! Maybe they can deploy that into the ailing NHS project (it's probably about all they can afford now @ $35/board).

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11...

Unfortunately, nothing seems to be available yet, unless you want to build it yourself -- but then you have to buy the dev tools from them! (WTF?).

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