Thanks & acknowledgements
This is a collection of old Acorn Archimedes and RISC OS
software, which I originally uploaded in January 2004 to a site I'm trying to abandon.
It's images and Zip files of floppy discs from the late 1980s and early
1990s, when Acorn was making ARM-based computers and ARM was a teeny tiny subsidiary, jointly owned with Apple.
They were quite exciting times in computing,
very different from the commoditised world of today. With the increase in people
seemingly interested in retro computers, I thought I might as well put this
stuff up for download. RISCOS Ltd and Pace Microtechnology, the developers and
copyright holders at the time, officially cleared my distribution of these disc images. My thanks to them.
Thanks also to Peter Miller, who sent the RISC OS 2 Applications and Support discs, and the
Arthur Welcome disc. Markus Huber contributed lots of
Developer discs, and he and Nick Gill both supplied the A3000
Test disc. Alan S, whose surname I don't know, has supplied
the A3000 rolling demo and the Clan discs. The A3010, Tesco and A5000 rolling demos were
provided by Darren, who was on Usenet under the ROS402dn
alias. The disc images have been provided by Ralph
Corderoy. Whether any of these people are still around, I
have no idea. If you're one of them, thanks again.
A brief history
The original A3xx and A4xx Archimedes machines were launched
in 1987. Computers running the latest iteration of the
operating system, RISC OS 4, were still manufactured when the original Archiology site went live.
Castle Technologies owned
the rights to the Acorn brand, RiscStation
supplied a range of eponymous machines, and MicroDigital had a model called Mico.
In late 2002, Castle Technologies launched a radically new
machine, called Iyonix. This, for the first time, broke
dependence on Acorn's original chipset design. There wass
also a machine called the Omega from MicroDigital.
Now, RISC OS Open Ltd has taken over the development of RISC OS, and
the operating system is available free of charge. RISC OS 5
runs on modern ARM hardware, such as the BeagleBoard and
IGEPv2, and on the Raspberry Pi. RISC OS 4 is still available
for older hardware.
The various software programs I used to build the original site are all still available, although the sources have changed for most. The links below will take you to the current locations.
The discs
All data is stored as zip files. Each zip contains the
contents of an original floppy disc. Archive names are the
names of said floppies. As and when I get round to it, I'll
put up disc images too.
If you've got to download to a PC and want to unzip on an
Acorn (because all the filenames will break horribly if you
don't), you need to download
DEARCHIV.BAS. Copy this to an Acorn-format
disc or whatever, set its file type to BASIC and run it. Its
name doesn't matter, by the way.
A major caveat is that:
if you try to run applications
from any of these discs on current generation RISC OS machines,
you could cause yourself a problem. If you do, power
the machine down and restart while holding down the Delete key.
This should get you on the path to a fix.
Most of this stuff should also run under emulation on a
Windows PC. There is a commercially available emulator called
VirtualAcorn. You can buy from
here.
Having been all chuffed with the pun in the page title, I was
horrified to find that lots of people actually use it as a
spelling for 'archaeology'. Go check on
Google, although Google is better at correcting spelling mistakes than it was 20-odd years ago. Also, there's now someone selling lighting using the name.