By Andy McCue, 3 September 2008 15:26
The UK's cash-strapped National Museum of Computing is based at Bletchley Park, home of World War II code-breakers and the Colossus code-cracking supercomputer. One of the museum's exhibits displays the best of British personal computing through the ages. Here, silcon.com takes an exclusive look at some of the exhibits.
Research Machines RM 380Z
Dating from the late 1970s, the RM 380Z was an 8-bit microcomputer with 56KB of memory used predominantly in schools.
Peter Chilvers, volunteer at the National Museum of Computing, said: "They produced research equipment and as the microprocessor became available they designed their own computer and the RM 380Z is the product of that work. It is the only real British computer company to survive."
Photo credit: Andy McCue/silicon.com
Comments
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1. John Dixon
I went all nostalgic with the Commodore PET. Of course that was the good old days without all this easy off-the-shelf applications. Back then if you wanted a work processor, you wrote it yourself - although you obviously had to take time out every half hour or so to shovel coal into the back.
Good days, good days...
2. Richard Sarson
Wot no ICL One per desk, alias BT Tonto?
A magnificent machine. I've still got one if Bletchley want it.
3. Lionel A Smith
Picture 6 is of an Acorn A3020 and not an Acorn RISC PC as such which had a variable number of main case slices (the one I have here has two slices with two internal hardrives fitted - one a SCSI) and a separate keyboard.
Sure the A3020 is based on the ARM RISC chipset but is only one of a number of such computers which began, in 1987, with the A310 (1MB RAM) and A305 (512KB RAM) with separate keyboards and running the 'Arthur' OS. RISC OS came later as RISC OS 2 , C 1989, which had a rich featured WIMP interface and excellent vector drawing (DRAW) and pixel based (PAINT) graphics software in the OS ROMS.
RISC OS 2 introduced a high standard of text antialiasing not seen on Windows before 95 and even then RISC OS was better.