[plug] Slightly OT.. 5 1/4 Drives

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2003 at 10:19:49PM +0800, Ben New wrote:

| Ahhhh memories...
| 
| Acorn was the company and the computers were called BBC Master 
| Compacts.  They were standard issue in WA schools I think.  They had 
| those dodgy ribbon cables between the box and the keyboard, and that 
| submarine game with the wierd caterpillar thing.

Yep.  Kraken was the game with the submarine - I think it was supposed
to be a giant squid, not a caterpillar.  I vaguely remember some of the
other games too - there was that gold rush one with those !"$£%^ flash
floods in the cave that sent you back to the start, and a
text-adventure-with-pictures involving being stranded on an island
somewhere...  I remember learning BASIC and LOGO on those things, too.

We also had a number of Acorn Archimedes, a RiscPC and a few Macs at
Davallia...  and they've probably all been chucked out and replaced with
PCs running Windows :(

| Of course the C64 was the most popular but they always had those
| horrendous tape drives (they had floppy drives but nobody seemed to
| have them).  Very resistant to physical punishment, though (probably a
| requirement caused by the tape drive...) and it also had a cartridge
| slot on which Wizards of Wor could be played ;-)

Used to have one of those... remember playing Wizards of Wor... had a
floppy drive too.  And a monochrome monitor 'cos it wasn't hooked up to
the telly...

</reminiscing>

Daniel:  as it happens, I have a 5.25" drive sitting unused, along with
cables et al.  Now I have no idea whether the drive still works, and I'm
not sure whether I have any floppies to test it with.  You were the guy
SoR who had ADSL issues a while ago, right? *checks archives*  So the
downside is, I live rather a long way from Canning Vale and can't
guarantee that that I'll actually be able to help you :-/  You may want
to wait to see if there's someone closer, and/or with a known-good
drive.

Cameron.