Date   : Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:51:59 +0000
From   : jgh@... (Jonathan Graham Harston)
Subject: Archimedes in Australia?

Anders Carlsson wrote:
> How common were Acorn BBC and Archimedes computers in the
> Republic of Ireland? Canada? Hong Kong? :-)
 
I worked in Hong Kong for three years, and worked for Acorn
(Far East). We maintained Acorn equipment in the English
Schools Foundation schools in Hong Kong - a federation of
about 18 primary and secondary schools that taught in English.
They had hundreds of BBCs, Masters and A-series RISC OS
computers - the A5000 had just come out when I came back to the
UK.
 
Additionally, as the Stock Market Channel, AFE supplied loads
of Acorn equipment to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and to
remote traders. We had two main products - an information feed
fed along dedicated cables as an RF TV transmission wholly
containing teletext data (ie, in 600 lines, not in 30 lines!),
and stock trading and information terminals. These were BBC
model Bs, Master Compacts or, latterly, A-series RISC OS
computers running Stock Exchange Hong Kong terminal.
Importantly for Hong Kong, these displayed the stock names
in Chinese - yes, Chinese fonts on a BBC!
 
On the 8-bit machines two ROM sockets held 32K of 16x16 icon
data representing 1024 chinese characters. These were accessed
directly by the terminal program in another ROM socket.
 
Additionally, again, the Hong Kong Oceanographic Institute had
dozens of Beebs networked together to do harbour hydrodynamic
monitoring and modelling.
 
I also encountered a few BBCs running as CNC control systems.
The few I encounted was probably due to them running forever
with no problems, not due to only a few being around.
 
-- 
JGH