If anyone wants a BBC or Electron, they're welcome to mine. I've been trying to find them a good home for over a decade

Well, if you want to relive them, there are emulators aplenty. You may even be able to get ROM images to use it with (though that wold be naughty ). You can also trawl eBay for genuine Acorn hardware if you want the proper kit.

Secondly, RISC OS is still under development. They are on to RISC OS 6 - and there is even rumblings of it being fully open source eventually (http://www.riscosopen.org/content/). There were even computers with ARM processors capable of running RISC OS being sold, by third parties, after Acorn finally succumbed to its inevitable collapse. People are now working on using the Beagle Board (http://beagleboard.org/) to form the basis of a modern RISC OS machine (http://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/document ... eagleBoard). I’m following this from an interested distance. It’s a bit like watching the engineers building the Tornado steam locomotive.

Blog Post of where I am with it at the moment:
http://hairydalek.posterous.com/firing-up-the-electron

[update] Someone form the Computer Museum outside Cambridge has offered to send me a copy of a Welcome Disk. This is the good Twitter does!

Just for kicks, I'm surfing using my old PowerBook G3 400MHz PowerPC, with a whopping 320MB of RAM installed.

It's running OS X 10.3.9, accessing the intertubes with a PCI wireless LAN card stuffed in the side. For something approaching 11 years old, it still has 2.5 hours on the battery, and is a reasonable lappy for the odd bit of word processing. I note InDesign 2, Photoshop, Illustrator 10 and Freeway 3.5 are installed. This used to be my mobile and backup system in case my main system conked out.

This used to be such a fast machine. It seems terribly pedestrian now.

If there was the word “Atom” in that list...

Untitled by hairydalek, on Flickr

Here are some shots of my Z88:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hairydalek ... 529327406/

The bummer here is that the rubbery keyboard attracts dust like no one’s business. I need to find a safe way to clean it. Simple dusting just won’t do it.

Clean it with something like this or an air can at least?:

http://www.firebox.com/product/2243/Cyber-Clean

I was thinking sticky tape - that stuff may do the job. The Z88 keys are rubbery - they have been described as “dead flesh” and they are sticky enough to hold on to any particle of fluff or cat hair that comes into contact with it. A wipe won’t do it. It needs to be something sticky, I think.

Psychadelectron by hairydalek, on Flickr

Haven't seen visuals like that since Yellow Submarine. Groovy!

Just fond and iPad app which does the trick!

OK, so I have finally found an RF lead I can use to connect the Electron to the TV. The picture isn’t as solid as before, but that’s because I’m using the tuner on the TV, not the phono AV jacks (which only give a monochrome picture).

So, it does colour now.


Electron colour test by hairydalek, on Flickr

While on the subject of rescuing old computers, I learned yesterday that the batteries on some Acorn machines, if left unused, rot and leak all over the circuit board. So I got mine out of storage, and the battery is shoiwng minor signs of leakage. Nothing on the circuit board (phew).

So it‘s off to Maplin on Saturday to get a NiCAD AAA battery and a holder - I’ll then be soldering that to the place where the old battery sits, and putting the battery somewhere in the case where it can’t do any harm if it did leak.

I like that. That needs to be on a t-shirt

I set up prints for it on Deviant Art, if you lot are interested.

http://www.deviantart.com/print/18220577/?

I’ll see what I can do about T-Shirts. I think I have a Café Press shop somewhere. I’ll see what I can do.

Today’s job - replacing the RISC PC’s internal battery. It started going furry, so it needed the old battery removing, and a new, modern one, fitting. A standard AAA rechargeable does the job.

However, I thought you’d like to know that the RPC is a a dual processor machine. Here’s the main, Strong ARM chip mounted on the motherboard:

The Strong Arm processor by hairydalek, on Flickr

and, for giggles, here is the other processor, which gets used when running Windows.

Texas Instruments 486 by hairydalek, on Flickr

What is interesting about the 486 processor is that it’s mounted on the wrong side of the carrier card - that is it should be facing the same way as the Strong ARM one. However, as it generates so much heat, it would melt the PCB the SA is on, so it was put on the other side! No Windows at the moment - there seems to be a problem with the install - it’s not working at the moment.

What you can’t do is use the 486 as a second processor in the way that a multi core chip would do today, or even a CUDA graphics card. Right now, it’s sitting there doing nothing - probably just ticking over.

The machine has (wait for it) 38MB of RAM. The HD is quite noisy - I understand you can get CF card adaters that can take their place. I may get the RPC running on an SSD before any of may Macs!