Journal Alioth's Journal: Retro Reunited 4
Last weekend was Retro Reunited, in Huddersfield (Yorkshire, England). Of course I went. I also brought a VAX (well, MicroVAX) which was a file server to my ethernet connected Sinclair Spectrum
There were lots of fun things happening - I didn't know "Acorn World" was being held at the same time, and I don't think I've seen so many BBC Micros in one room since I was at school. It's funny, just like "back in the day", there was a sort of BBC Micro/Everyone else divide. The kids who had BBC Micros at home were typically the slightly more serious types, and those of us who had Spectrums or C64s were generally sort of
I got to meet a few of the people from the World of Spectrum forums, did plenty of gaming, and drank beer. Saturday evening, games of Rock Band II broke out in the games machine room, and we formed the WOS band and were absolutely appalling
Since I was flying, Sunday was a quieter day for me (incidentally, flying a privately owned aircraft was about £100 cheaper than taking the car on the ferry from the island!) - 8 hours bottle to throttle of course - so I spent more time going to the presentations. The most fascinating one was the one given by Steve Furber. It's not every day you get to see someone like him. If you don't know, he's one of the designers of the world's most popular CPU. No, it's not an intel chip, it's the ARM. Developed by Acorn in the mid 1980s, it's gone on to be dominant in the embedded world. Steve Furber talked of Acorn from the development of the first Eurocard systems, the Atom, the BBC Micro, and of course the ARM. He also spoke of the projects he's working on now - a *massively* hugely multiprocessor system called SpiNNaker with *thousands* of ARM cores.
An interesting tidbit came from the talk in the Q&A section - where someone of course asked: Does RISC matter now that Intel chips are effectively a RISC core and a hardware translator from x86 instructions? The answer...well, yes of course. Just the circuit that finds out the length of the next x86 instruction is as big as an *entire* ARM core. This means an x86 chip is wasting the space that could be used for another core just to deal with the untidy x86 ISA, which means x86 will never be able to compete in massively multicore low power devices with chips with cleaner instruction sets.
The other interesting tidbit was the original ARM CPU was specified with just 818 lines of BBC BASIC.
And a further one. Acorn needed the CPU to be low power, because they needed it to be cheap. This meant it had to work in a plastic package, not ceramic, because plastic chip packages are about a tenth of the cost of ceramic ones, and this meant a maximum power dissipation of just one watt. Having no tools in the mid 80s to estimate power dissipation, they did everything they could to make the chip low power so it'd dissipate less than one watt. To their astonishment, the first chips used 0.1 watts! They had massively overachieved. This set them in good stead for the embedded market when it became clear Acorn desktop computers were fading away... and of course, for Apple to buy the chip for the Newton. Although the Newton was a market failure, the business relationship with ARM International and Apple meant other firms started taking the ARM seriously.
The Icon Bar has a write up of the show here, too. http://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?threadid=11209&page=1
For the next show I go to, I'm hoping to get some cheap second hand TVs off ebay so I can have three or four Spectrums on a LAN, with the VAX fileserver of course
Fun and nostalgic (Score:2)
I love me the pizza oven.
Ah, memories... :) (Score:2)
I had a ZX-81 (with wobbly RAM-pack!), then an Acorn Electron, and finally a BBC Master 128, before finally joining the PC-using masses in the early 90s.
The Electron was a nice system, but seriously hobbled by being incompatible with a lot of BBC Micro software due to lack of Teletext mode and expansion ports.
I ended up with both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, a 6502 coprocessor, a 20MB Winchester drive, *and* a Music 5000 synth box to go with my BBC Master, along with a shedload of software. Sadly, it all g
Commodore SX-64 (Score:2)
Yep. It's a Commodore SX-64. I sooo wanted one back in the day, but they were targetted at business users, and were silly money, so it never happened.
just like "back in the day", there was a sort of BBC Micro/Everyone else divide.
Heh. Nothing's changed then. When I was at school, Beebs were the sole preserve of the kids with rich parents. Everyone else had a Speccy or a C64. And yes, the two communities were very different. But despite being in the "other" camp, I still love th
Amazing memories (Score:2)
Whoa, thanks for the pics and the write up. Many of those machines bring back lots of memories. The one that surprised me was the Vectrex. I only ever saw one of them and remember thinking how cool it would be to have your very own little arcade game setup.