Date   : Sat, 04 Mar 2006 17:47:59 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Warning: Sad case on list!

Fragula wrote:
> 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".

Blimey! I remember you well - around ten years ago, you gave me an awful lot 
of useful advice regarding a Cambridge Workstation that I'd slowly been 
putting back together from bits.

> 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).

You sound like the sort of person we need over at Bletchley...

> (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?) 

I know the seller locally, so I definitely know he'd give an honest 
description on the auction. Given that the unit initialises OK then all the 
basic CPU, TUBE comms, and at least some of the memory's happy. I seriously 
doubt there's anything at all wrong with it; about the only thing that could 
be up with it is if any of the memory areas not used during initialisation are 
bad.

> 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.

Ooh - what? :-)

It was that ACW along with an ARM Evaluation kit many moons ago that got me 
started in the Acorn collecting game; I tend to only keep an eye out for the 
really oddball stuff in order to preserve it nowadays though (the count of 
Acorns is getting close to 50, and enough is enough! :-)

Welcome to the list!

cheers

Jules