My Lovely A7000+

Well, it took a massive effort on my part to get my venerable A7000+ up and running again. The machine itself is about thirteen years old and didn't like booting it's original OS. One of the nice things about the A7000+ and pretty much all of it's relatives is that the operating system itself is stored on ROM. You don't need a hard drive in it all really (but it is better if you do). This box was running RISC OS 3.71 the last time I tried to get it up and running, however after years of being stored in the garage, it got a little temperamental. After some careful refurbishment, I ended up having to get a new OS installed.

There isn't that much development happening for RISC OS machines at all at the moment, I managed to find some RISC OS 4 ROMs on Ebay which I fitted myself, after a mornings worth of trying to remember how the network setup works in RISC OS I finally managed to get it on to the Internet. I had planned to do this post from the A7000+ itself, but the supplied web browser just doesn't like Blogger, which I think is a shame. I have seen better browsers for RISC OS, but unlike mainstream OS's they are not free.

There are lots of cool things you can do with a RISC OS machine on a network, but I din't think there is any jobs going in the field just now. I used to work in a school, which at the time had hundreds of these machines. Unfortunately, by this point (2001) there was very little call for the use of RISC OS itself, instead we implemented a Citrix server to provide a Windows session directly to the box. It was a sad thing for me to see really, my first ever computer was an Acorn Election (more posts to come on that one I think) and I grew up using the Acorn Archimedes. the A3000