Date : Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:40:01 +0000
From : Fragula <fragula@...>
Subject: Warning: Sad case on list!
Hi All!
Just found this list yesterday. Was looking for something along the
lines of comp.sys.acorn.bbc (which I'm sure used to exist a long tima
ago!) So let me introduce myself. Wilkins, Martyn aka Mark. One of them
is/was/might be a "professional name". These days online its "fragula",
or "fragz" due to playing waaay to much GMC-UT around the turn the
millenia, and its kinda stuck.
I'm new to the list, but a "returning" Acon/BBC/6502 nutter that went on
a kinda journey-of-life thing, didn't find greener grass, and is coming
back.
Don't get me wrong though. This isn't nostalgic lust, if it was, it
would be for the first machine I ever lusted after (IBM Stretch), the
first machine I ever used (Bourroughs mini with 16K of core and paper
tape, can't remember the model tho) the first machine I owned (Philips
G7000 (with Assembler!) or first machine I bought (TI99/4a).
No. its lust for the BEST machine I ever owned. The BBC Model B. (Yeh, I
have a PDP-11 in the bedroom, a few SPARCs, big AMD powered Linux RAID
servers, works prototype Macs, and even a Tanbug-1. but best is clearly
best!)
I got "too busy" family sometime in the late 80s, too wrapped up in
Fidonet/Internet/cryptology/networking/not to mention work, in the 90s,
culminating in me neglecting the BBS (Dragon's Domain, 2:442/608) from
1997, and closing down in 1998 for "a year off" and only now the kids
are starting to flee the coop (heh!) am I hoping to find some space and
time to do what I want to. Return to gratuitous beeb fiddling! :-D
Only a few items need aquiring.. Far more difficult to find space in the
house to fiddle with things and to find the things i need to make the
things i want to fiddle with fiddlable. (dammit I KNOW i have a BASIC2
ROM someplace, and WTF isn't it in the machine? Ah.. probably had it in
static RAM.. <groan>)
However, last night I did find (not for sale!, but i'm friendly ;-)
three boxed near-mint (not in the ebay-sense, really!) language discs w.
manuals for the 32016 (i'm thinking of bidding on the wedge on Ebay if
it doesn't go nuts, price ways, wanted one for, literally, decades.
Anyone know if its a turkey?) FORTRAN-77, LISP and Pascal that I grabbed
for a few coins at a radio ralley a decade or so ago.
Don't know if these have been scanned and OCR'd to the net, does anyone?
Also a bunch of other probably-rarities which I won't be putting in the
skip, but rather trying to find the time to do the right thing with.
There appear to have been a number of very interesting developments
during my "year off", notably Messr's Harston and Sprowsons IDE hard
disk (impure, but its a dirty world!) adaptor and ARM 2P (I DO see the
point of the emulation code, but that would be better done in 1 FPGA
(c.w. Tube<tm>) with a coupla sticks of commodity SDRAM surely?) But
seriously whats it like going native? BBC BASIC w. inline assembler?
That would probably be *very* convincing on an ARM@...) Not
/quite/ as convincing as a GNU/Linux port, but hey, the night is young!
Right.. Enough prattling.. Off to dig for: BASIC2 ROM, Econet card for
Master, bit-of-paper-with-password for FDFS, box of 2Ps. If I'm not back
in a week send a search party into the attic.
Cheers!
M.