Re: Acorn System Computers

System computer software (especially for a System 5 Econet server)

The pictures of this were quite interesting. It was my understanding
that the use of the systems as Fileservers in the UK was very limited,
with Acorn promoting Level2 (BBC+65022nd processor) in preference,
while on the other hand the System 4 predominated in the Australian
server marked until Level 3.

The Australian variant of System 4 seems to be a little different. It
has a shorter back plane, MPI disk drives (later units had Mitsubishi
half height drives), and a linear power supply. Mine still has price
labels on the electrolytic capacitors which indicate they were locally
sourced, I vaguely remember there was legislation at the time
requiring a certain level of 'local content' in order to be eligible
for government approval for use in schools.

Unfortunately mine no longer boots, I suspect the ram cards, so I have
been having a bit of a go at upgrading a single CU static ram card
with 8K chips and the OS & NET roms, thus replacing all the other
memory boards.

The other possible cause is bit rot in the ROMS.

There are a couple of pictures here
http://marketing.linkme.com.au/ajw/system4/
Of my system 4 on the last occasion that it did boot.

Also in that directory is a zip of the disc image of the fileserver
boot disc which I posted last year for Jules.

If you have a working system 5 I would give that a go. I doubt that
its much different except that the CPU is faster.

The disc also has as atbasic (atom basic for systems) and sbasic (BBC
Basic 1 for systems)

I do still have the manual to the fileserver, but not a technical
reference manual for system4. The best I have is the A5 booklets on
some of the cards. Which includes

The systems catalogue
200.002 Visual display interface board(25x40 Teletext)
Laboratory interface manual
200.014 Acorn Analogue Interface
200.007 Prom programmer board
100.101/3 Acorn 32K D.RAM
Atom colour board
Atom technical manual
Errata to Acorn monitor roms

I have also found system resources here
http://bjh21.me.uk/acorn/

Alan
.

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