SDCard -- install here and deploy there?

You were clearly posh. I didn't have a car. I road my bike to pick up my first RAM extender and I didn't get to ride on the Marylebone road, I had to ride underneath it.

Actually true, a trip to Watford Electronics via Edgeware Rd, a shop that specialised in bits for the Acorn BBC B.

Oh now that's a familiar trip - going back to before the BBC B when I used to go there to get transistors and suchlike.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

The Elliott 503 was fast for its time. As well as its 8kword 39-bit 3.6uS ferrite core main memory it had another 16Kwords of 39-bit 50uS ferrite core memory that could be used as workspace for large matrix operations but was normally used as fast external storage: during normal operation the Algol compiler was loaded from for each compiler run.

I was using the Elliott to analyse spectra output by a Mossbauer Spectrometer which used a 400 channel Multichannel analyser to capture output from a scintillation radiation detector. The Eliott was fast enough for me to analyse the results from a 24 hour spectrometer run during a standard 3 minute testing slot rather then needing to book time on it. Three minutes was more than enough time to read my program from a

3 - 3.5 inch roll of paper tape, compile it, read in the data tape output by the multichannel analyser, analyse it and print the results.

But the Elliott was a physical monster occupying six 2m x 1m x 0.6m steel cabinets, each weighing 465Kg. In addition there was an operators desk and full-size 1200 lpm lineprinter. The machine was pre-integrated circuit technology, so was built entirely from discrete transistors.

Its most unusual feature was that its FP arithmetic operations were 5-10% faster than integer operations and it stored 2 instructions per word.

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--   
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Yes, Ahem and I made various errors/typos: Ahem wrote Mb (10^6) when he should have written Mib (2^20=1024*1024 or *approximately* 10^6). I did the same with MB which should have been Mib (not only did I confuse M with Mi but I also mutated bits into bytes - the latter was a typo). Then to compound my error, I also couldn't divide 256 by 8 ;-)

You could well be right. I thought at first I already had the computer when I started at university in 1982, but I may have got it a year later. In which case it wasn't just after I'd passed my driving test (in 1981) but a while later. Probably still the first time I drove in central London *on my own* as opposed to having my dad for moral support and to navigate.

Anyway, CP/M3, BBC Basic (which had been ported from 6502 on BBC Micro to Z80), Perfect Office (Writer, Calc, Exec) office suite, Prestel display and modem. All in a very heavy case that was "luggable" (though it left you walking lopsided!) because the unit with the motherboard, PSU, screen and floppies could be slid back to expose the keyboard or slid forward to a lid could be clipped over to make a self-contained unit with a (strong) carrying handle.

I was quite proud when I managed to write a Z80 routine (embedded in and called from a BASIC program) for bubble-sorting an array - which it did

*many* times quicker than the same algorithm in BASIC. I found a listing of it the other day and was quite impressed with what my younger self had managed ;-) I also made little circuit boards which plugged into the parallel port and interfaced with a) a digital-to-analogue chip and b) an analogue-to-digital chip. Not long ago I came across a sound recording I'd made this way from a CD player - Dire Straits' "Why Worry" - and it was a perfectly good 8-bit WAV file once I'd added the necessary file header. I also made an RGB-to-PAL converter (again, using an IC which did the job, with a suitable 4.33 MHz crystal) so I could display colour on a TV from the RGB port, since the Wren only had a monochrome amber screen.