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peeb · May 31, 2007, 04:02 PM

I had an A440, 4mb RAM, 40mb (sic) hd.
It was a sweet machine, so far ahead at the time, the first real 32bit desktop.
I don't think I've found a better simple vector editor (!Draw) or page layout / word processor (!Impression).
Ah, those were the days. I've been in the wilderness, but coming to OSX was a little like coming home.

cla · May 31, 2007, 06:02 PM

Mmm... saw one at an exhibition during the eighties and was really impressed. Risc processor, that's about all I can remember.

Wonder what they did wrong.

Spook E · May 31, 2007, 08:17 PM

we had them at my school all the way through K - 12 in one form of another.

I remember when the top of the range model came out in 1995 / 96 and it had a CD tray, scanner and you could have a background pattern on the desktop, it was awesome!

Best things about the Archimedes was that game Lander, best ever.

peeb · May 31, 2007, 11:43 PM

It was cool, the OS was so sweet, and came with some wonderful apps. Their marketing department sucked hugely though, and they suffered because they were expensive compared to competing gaming platforms, and had few well known games.

- - e r i k - - · Jun 1, 2007, 12:27 AM

*cough*

Background Patterns weren't exactly news in the mid-nineties. A certain fruit-vendor have been peddling those since the eighties.

peeb · Jun 1, 2007, 01:36 AM

Right you are. Background patterns were not the most innovative thing. I'm not sure it was even the innovations, just the way the whole thing worked, and made sense, and the apps were easy.... Pages is the closest thing I have found to !Impression. After that word was painful.

Spook E · Jun 1, 2007, 01:37 AM

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

*cough*

Background Patterns weren't exactly news in the mid-nineties. A certain fruit-vendor have been peddling those since the eighties.

yeah but all we had up till this stage in the classroom was Acrons, BBC Micros, and some 386's running Windows 3.x. And I had an Amiga at home, so the Archimedies was pretty tech at the time.

I do remember the computing teacher raising $$ to buy some mac's the year after i left though, typical!

peeb · Jun 1, 2007, 12:47 PM

The ability to drop into a command line at the push of a button was also cool. Very much like terminal now.

olePigeon · Jun 1, 2007, 12:59 PM

Originally Posted by peeb

It was cool, the OS was so sweet, and came with some wonderful apps. Their marketing department sucked hugely though, and they suffered because they were expensive...

Sounds like Amiga. Years ahead of everyone in technology, but couldn't market anything.

olePigeon · Jun 1, 2007, 01:12 PM

Stuart Cheshire had designed his version of Bolo for the Macintosh based off a game of the same name on the Acorn.

peeb · Jun 1, 2007, 01:46 PM

I still wish there was something as easy as !Draw on the mac, I goess OmniGraffle is the closest I've found.

moonmonkey · Jun 1, 2007, 07:20 PM

Preemptive multitasking blew the macs out of the water, and the 3D graphics were much better than macs of the time. Still not as friendly as the mac.

peeb · Jun 1, 2007, 07:22 PM

Yes, the multi-tasking was cool, and it was the first 32bit machine. I remember being able to drag-rotate bitmap images in Impression in real time, years later I still could not do that on PCs. Lander was a demo version of Zarch, coded by the same guy who did Elite.

Mediaman_12 · Jun 1, 2007, 07:59 PM

I remember it booting quick too, as the fairly complex GUI OS was all in ROM. There was an OS upgrade the required an engineer to come out and physically swap the chips on the motherboard for the newer ones.

Super Mario · 03:25 PM

Originally Posted by moonmonkey

Preemptive multitasking blew the macs out of the water, and the 3D graphics were much better than macs of the time. Still not as friendly as the mac.

I had that game on Amiga. So hard to control.

peeb · Jun 2, 2007, 01:35 PM

It had 4mb roms that held the os, so it booted in a second or so. I remember doing the os upgrade and replacing the roms myself - they had incremental updates that swapped in patches in ram from disc.

moonmonkey · Jun 2, 2007, 02:43 PM

Originally Posted by peeb

Yes, the multi-tasking was cool, and it was the first 32bit machine. I remember being able to drag-rotate bitmap images in Impression in real time, years later I still could not do that on PCs. Lander was a demo version of Zarch, coded by the same guy who did Elite.

It does look a bit like a Cobra Mk2

peeb · Jun 2, 2007, 03:44 PM

I think it used a lot of the same polygon ship routines.