Date   : Tue, 07 Feb 2006 19:54:27 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Disc Fights (WAS: Grammar)

Greg Cook wrote:
> In my first primary school there was one LINK 480Z on a trolley, for
> the entire Infants section.  It had a disc drive (complete with
> cardboard shipping disc - yikes!) but booted off the weird coax network
> (the borough looks to have made a bulk purchase of RMs so these paired
> BNC socket boxes still appear in lots of their buildings.)

Ahh, it was what was at the other end of the coax that was interesting - 480Z 
machines were designed to be networked and to boot MP/M from a 380Z-based 
fileserver (I've got one in the loft). I'm not aware of them being able to 
boot from anything else - although they did have a built-in terminal mode, so 
you could just use them as a terminal to another machine.

Why someone would buy a fileserver and only one client 480Z though, I don't 
know. RML did 'shared disk' software that also allowed a 480Z to be used as a 
floppy-only fileserver if it had a disk drive (although that 480Z then 
couldn't be used as a workstation).

The seperate disk drives for 480Z machines are rather rare by the way.

RML ads from the time made a big deal about their equipment using a single 
coax network and not needing all that clock box malarkey :)

> Strange but this computer seems well matched spec-wise to the Acorn
> Proton.  Looking back I'm surprised that it wasn't put forward to be
> 'the BBC Micro'.

They're reasonably comparable in spec I suppose - the 480Z was lacking in 
decent graphics abilities and didn't have quite the expansion options of the 
BBC. I think I like the RML's keyboard better, though!

I'm not sure if the 480Z existed when the BBC were looking around for a 
machine though - I think it probably came a little too late, and the 380Z 
(despite having very good abilities) was looking a little dated,

cheers

Jules
(With way too much RML kit at home :)