Date   : Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:54:59 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Odd looking Acorn board on Ebay.

Andrew Chesterton wrote:
> Hello,
>   Does anybody know what this is?
> 
> http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ACORN-CAMBRIDGE-W-STATION-A210-2nd-PROCESSOR-BBC-B_W0Q
> QitemZ8767527844QQcategoryZ4193QQtcZphotoQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem


It's what it says it is :-)  A 4MB 32016 coprocessor board, as fitted to 
Acorn's Cambridge Workstation - part of Acorn's ill-fated business computer 
range (and often abbreviated to ACW, and technically part of the ABC2xx range).

I'd guess that around 50 ACW machines were built, going by serial numbers of 
current survivors.

There was a smaller copro board for the BBC in the familiar cheese-wedge case 
using the same Natsemi 32016 CPU, but it would only take 1MB of memory on 
board. Two different variations exist for the BBC B, although they both use 
the same board - but say either "Cambridge Co-processor" or "32016 Second 
Processor" on the label.

The OS was called Panos, and several languages were available for them: 
(without digging my disks out) BASIC, C, Pascal, Lisp, Fortran, and BCPL. I 
can't remember if there was officially an assembler or not.

The ACW was never really popular - it was too expensive for its own good,
and people could go out and buy a far more capable business computer for the 
same amount of money.

Be interesting to see what price it fetches actually. I expect a few more 
boards were made than were fitted to machines, but it's still a rare item (but 
of dubious monetary value without the rest of the ACW to go with it)

Funnily enough I've got the exact same type of board on the floor beside my 
desk at the moment as I was taking a photo of it and imaging the ROMs the 
other day!

Blatant plug: I had a spare ACW shell that I dumped over at the museum, if 
anyone buys that EBay board and wants it for free. It's a bit battered (the 
fascia is cracked and needs gluing). And it really is just a shell with a 
monitor and PSU inside (there aren't even any side cradles for the 32016 / 
SCSI boards). Very long way from being an ACW - but someone could make 
something that had the retro look of an ACW out of it if they wanted just for 
giggles. (Good luck finding a genuine keyboard though! :-)

cheers

Jules