Time for the annual beg-a-thon

[Trapper]

I keep asking, in hopes one day I will succeed!

 

Does anyone have any old Acorn hardware sitting around in store rooms, cupboards or attached to some ancient cutting tool that isn't needed any more?

 

There used to be dozens on eBay, now they go for stupid money. I'm afraid a battery leaked into the MOBO of my teenage dream RISC PC build and she is dead.

 

Anyone, at all! Come on these things used to be in every school in the country (up until 1999....)

[difinity]

No chance to clean up and repair your machine ?

[Nixon77]

Acorn Computers - Computing History

 

You could go and look at one. Amazing how much they go for now, to think how many ended up in land fill.

[Trapper]

I got one A3000 from my Sixth Form. I was in Ye 13 when they ditched for PCs.

 

I saw go into the bin RISC PCs, A5000s, A3020s the lot. The gits would only give me a crappy ARM2 A3000.

 

I saw an A5000 with a FP co-processor and a multimedia expansion unit go into the bin. It had two SCSI cards, an MPG2 decoder card, a 17" SVGA monitor, and a very early DVD ROM. If I were to have that machine working now, I know some collectors in the Acorn market who would part with thousands for it. Some would part with 10s of thousands for it. Even after ARM released the StrongARM 233 Mhz card for the RISC PC, this A5000 variant was the most powerful ARM era Acorn machine ever made.

 

It was a crying damn shame.

 

I lost the A3000 given to me. I destroyed my own A3010 by whacking the ARM250 chip package to get a PC. I turned down my mates A3010. Which in retrospect I found out was an early variant, a rare variant. Instead of having an ARM250 SoC, they didn't have enough. So they attached an ARM2 with a daughter board with the MEMC, VIDC and sound controller. This meant you could take it out and put an ARM3 in. As the ARM250 was a SoC, you couldn't do that with the production models. I've seen one of these go for £700 on eBay recently.

 

I let my RISC PC battery destroy the MOBO. It is a good example of a late Acorn RISC PC. StrongARM, i586 co-processor, 2MB VRM, 128MB RAM, SCSI card, ethernet, RISC OS 4.02 in ROM, 4.39 softloaded with 3.70 chips to swap in with an ARM710 card for a proper "old school" experience.

 

I picked up an A7000 for £20 on eBay during 2004. Somehow I shorted the PSU out, so my wife binned it.

 

On comp.sys.acorn.hardware a guy 20 miles away offered me an A3020 for £30 last year. I didn't bother with it, and I am so angry about that! The A3020 was the educational version of my home A3010. I had the TV out and joystick ports, but the A3020 had a built in 2.5" IDE interface. On my A3010 you had to use the single internal expansion bus for a HDD. That meant no co-processor etc.