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My dad made me learn BASIC and tested me before I was allowed a ZX Spectrum in 1982.  After gaining O and A Levels in Computer Science I was sponsored by GEC-Avionics to do a 3-year HND course (on the premise that if I passed I would be immediately employed by them) which involved writing an in-house tool for them. At the end of the course, I had to do a presentation detailing the tool and having just got an Amiga 500 I decided to do all the slides in Deluxe Paint III and Sculpt 3D, with animation and some flash logos and whatnot that I mixed in audio and recorded to VCR.  Having seen all the other students stumble thru their presentations using a whiteboard, the GEC staff and lecturers were totally gobsmacked with my video presentation, showing off graphics and animation they'd only ever seen on TV.  Within 6 months the Amiga 500 had gone, replaced by an A2000 I still have, sitting a few feet away from me.  As for the presentation... yep, I've still got that original VCR tape from 1991 ;-)

Funny that this video comes out just when Acorn Archimedes' great-great-great-great-grandson, the Raspberry Pi 400 arrives on the market for under $100.

I had an Archimedes A410, and I fully credit it for teaching me how to think like a developer. I used it to write games, do a 3D animation project (in 1995!) and learn BBC BASIC. Now I have a multi decade career in software dev. Thanks, Acorn... 😅

@10.00, the ARM processor is marked GPS 9241. This is a truly British machine, GPS is GEC Plessey Semiconductors, who were the 2nd licensee of ARM after VLSI. I worked in their Swindon site in 1992. The ARM devices were fabbed on the 6" CMOS line at their Roborough (near Plymouth) wafer fab.  9241 is the date code of chip testing - 1992, week 41 (second week in October). I wasn't directly on the ARM project at GPS, but I shared an office with a couple of guys who were. I remember the buzz when the license was signed. Sadly, it wasn't enough to keep GPS going, although it has recently been revived as a new company with same name. Now, simply Plessey Semiconductors.

Every time our IT "teacher" left the room for a cigarette break we'd put sensi soccer on one of the arch's in our lab. It even ran decent PC emulation, any A level student of the time will have wrestled with PC DOS and Turbo Pascal on a 3020.

I loved Commodore as well. Started with a VIC-20, moved up to a C= 128 and finally an Amiga 2000HD in 1990. Those were the days!

My entire childhood computing experience was Acorn.  I was lucky enough that my family could afford to buy me an Electron, then a BBC B and then, after they were released, an Archimedes.   I then spent two great years with a Saturday job during 6th form helping out in an Acorn specialist shop called the Data Store in Bromley.   Those experiences shaped my entire future career and are the reason I became a software developer.  

The Archimedes was criminally underrated.  It was, by far, the best machine when it was first released but was hampered by its price.  Until watching this video, I didn’t realise it was also apparently hampered by an image of being a school computer only!

I was at the point of buying an Amiga 2000 in 1987 when the Archimedes was released. I bought an A305 with 512k RAM (and the Arthur 0.2 operating system in EPROM, later upgraded to RISC OS 1.2 in ROM), upgraded to 1 meg RAM within a month, and then later had it upgraded to 4 megs (sent it to a guy in the UK who de-soldered the RAM chips from the motherboard and put sockets with new chips on it). The ARM assembly book arrived a couple of weeks before the computer, so by the time the A305 arrived I had already memorized the ARM instruction set. In terms of raw CPU power, it was  running circles around the 80186 and 68000 - the Archimedes had a quite usable IBM PC emulator which I used to run WordPerfect, dBASE II and the TopSpeed Modula2 compiler on MS-DOS. Fast scrolling was easy using the ARM block copy commands immediately on the video RAM. I never regretted choosing the Archimedes over the Amiga.

I was taught A level computing on acorn machines, the A5000 mostly. My gran bought me an a3010 so I could "study at home" although I usually just  played speedball 2, lemmings and Zool. What I loved about the system was the modules, you could rip out game music or sprite routines and program them through basic very easily. The tracker modules that played amiga like music were often in the !pling directory of the game and easy to use for yourself. The basic onboard was so much fun to play around with, a great open machine indeed. I have an A3010, A7000 and a Risc PC sat here now, all great machines. BTW my A3010 has 4mb of ram not the 2mb you said as max ;)

Always wanted one of these beasts back when I was 14 years old. The Amiga and ST were the big boys in the playground, whilst the Arch was like the geeky kid sat in the corner doing 'important things'.

And just look how important those things were to our modern world. No one should ever underestimate just how crucial these computers were to our present day technology. If you sit and think about it, it actually hurts your brain lol XD

The A3010 and 3020 were SO well designed, I loved the keyboard action on them too. I was lucky enough to own a RiscPC as a teenager (which I still have to this day) and the modular design was groundbreaking. Those machines never got the recognition they deserved outside of the education market.

Hey Dan,  I worked at Krisalis back in the early 90's, it was my first job out of Uni (actually started while at Uni).  We did loads of ports, I think the hardest one was SimCity2000 because it was't straight 68000 assembler. Porting asm was easy but this was mostly C and the Acorn compiler was crap (at best). That game was weird because it was originally wrote on the Mac, it got ported to DOS which butchered a lot of the code, then we ported the butchered DOS version.

Strangle when most schools adopted the Archimedes, my school choose to go the Mac and Amiga Route. Being a rebel, I later bought an Atari Falcon.

I have always been interested in the Acorn machines - here across the pond in the states there was barely a mention of these machines at all, and certainly nobody was importing them.  The 1991 gaming scene here was either consoles, or on the computer side the Amiga, the PC, and to a much lessor extent the Atari ST (I never saw one in the wild).  I had an expanded A500 by that time, with an 80MB HD, 16MB of RAM, and an 030 accelerator card.

Wow, I was thinking the green buttons reminded me of the one we had in primary school, but maybe not as I have a vivid memory of seeing "32-BIT" emblazoned across it and thinking how advanced it must be... but then you showed the stickers 😁 Thanks for confirming that hazy memory for me! Pretty sure we got it from the Tesco "Computers for schools" scheme and it was shared between all the classrooms.

I'm from South Africa, my dad got us the Archimedes A3000 if I remember correctly, which was a step up from our previous Acorn we got in the early 80's. I can remember Archimedes, already having it in 1987, it had fully functional 'windows' on it too. At our primary school we didn't even have computers at the time. And in high school everyone was still using DOS. Though I didn't have much of computer teacher. All we were taught was how to pull up a directory horizontally or vertically. The rest of the time we played games. But working with that after the Archimedes at home, it was pure torture.

Later was highly disgusted when told the Archimedes were no longer been made and we had to swap it out for windows 95 machine, when my dad got our next pc. That was like having your sports car taken from you and given a skate board. Not fun :-(

Heck I think the last feature that Windows eventually got, that I can remember about anyway, the Archimedes already had back in the 80's were 'apps' You didn't have to go digging for and execution file to have your program run. If you wanted to see what the program consisted of then all you needed to do was click with the middle button on the icon to see the files inside. Windows 8 was when they finally started introducing apps to windows for the desktop, though not for every program used, even now and then you can't look inside them.

As for the games, I played almost all of those.  That brings back so many good memories :-)

I still have fond memories of sitting in the classroom at lunchtime playing Lemmings, it just blew me away at the time!

Micro Men was an interesting docu drama, I really enjoyed it. I remember first setting eyes on the Acorn BBC micro in the corner of the class room and then having my first experience on the machine at 5 years old. At Secondary school we had 3 computer rooms. 1) BBC micro 2) Amiga 500 3) Amiga 1200. I remember staying behind aster school and using the video camera with video digitiser and 3d rendering software such as Imagine & Real 3d.  We also had some Acorn Archimedes and A3010s spread over a couple of Tech class rooms. It was great that the OS was built into Rom and boots up straight away.  The RISC processor was very advanced and ARMs chip designs are now used in smart phones & tablets etc. They definitely knew how to make computers. If they sold the lower end machine with game pack ins like the Amiga did with Batman, Cartoon Classics, Wild Weird Wicked pack etc then it would have sold better to the home market.  Then again the price point was a lot higher than the Amiga machines if I remember correctly.  Great video Dan. Your videos always spark memories. Cheers.

Ok, it's been a few years since this was posted, but it took until '98 for my A3010 to feel underspecced. And for a machine released in the early '90, that's impressive!

It's nice to see people rediscover that ARM processors aren't just power efficient, but fast too!