The first ARM processor powered up 35 years ago

[HEXUS]

Now Arm silicon partners ship over 6 billion Arm-based chips every quarter.

Read more.

[Rad77]

Yep, my second "home computer" after the BBC Micro was an Acorn Archimedes 310 with 8MHz ARM CPU. It was a very early model with a stop-gap version of the OS on EPROMs, which you had to send back to Acorn once you received your RISC OS upgrade ROMs.

It was a total revelation, so fast for the time. It was more powerful than the £20,000 ICL Perq workstation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ) that I had been using at work just a couple of years before.

Eventually I upgraded to an Acorn RiscPC but it was only a few years before the writing was on the wall for anything with a niche OS and so I reluctantly bought my first PC (the only pre-built PC that I ever bought - I've built them all myself since then)

But the legacy lives on - there are a lot more ARM CPUs dotted around my house today!

[DanceswithUnix]

Given the current lockdown, after reading this is it wrong that I now want to go play Virus? (Yeah I know it was called Zarch on ARM, but I think I only ever had a copy on the Atari ST where they renamed it).

[Rad77]

That game was so bloody hard! I don't know about the ST version but all I remember is that you could only see a few tiles around and the controls were really twitchy.

Here's a random bit of gameplay footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXypBxNGMo

[DanceswithUnix]

That game was so bloody hard! I don't know about the ST version but all I remember is that you could only see a few tiles around and the controls were really twitchy.

Yep, I remember lots of crashing.

There should be a VR reboot.

[persimmon]

All hail to Steve Furber for still being in the game after all these years. Maybe the trick is to make every new project bigger than the last. Or is Spinaker a cluster of 2 million Arm chips?

[DanceswithUnix]

Or is Spinaker a cluster of 2 million Arm chips?

Nope, though at the rate of change in the AI world an architecture from 20 years ago seems way off the leading edge.

[philehidiot]

Given the current lockdown, after reading this is it wrong that I now want to go play Virus? (Yeah I know it was called Zarch on ARM, but I think I only ever had a copy on the Atari ST where they renamed it).

I found my first ever pirated game a couple of days ago. In the bottom of a filing cabinet with a copy of "PC Survival Guide (c)1988". It's a 5.25" floppy with a bit of paper taped to it with "Frogger and PC Golf" written on it. I miss text based golf.

[DanceswithUnix]

I found my first ever pirated game a couple of days ago. In the bottom of a filing cabinet with a copy of "PC Survival Guide (c)1988". It's a 5.25" floppy with a bit of paper taped to it with "Frogger and PC Golf" written on it. I miss text based golf.

Lol, is text based golf like a text adventure game?


> Hit ball with club
With a satisfying thwack noise you see the ball sail off into the distance
> N
You are North of the Tee.
> Look
You can see nothing.
> N
You are in an area of grass blades, all alike.
> Cheat
With a subtle flick from your pocket, "Oh look, there's the ball!"
You see a ball lying nearby.