This RISC OS Webring site is owned by Chris Whytehead
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This site is primarily about Acorn computers from the first (System 1) to the last (DeskLite), OEM Acorn products (i.e. made by Acorn and badged for someone else) and Acorn badged OEM products (i.e. made by someone else and badged by Acorn). It also includes Acorn's successors, including Advantage 6, Castle, Microdigital, Pace and RiscStation. It is built around my collection so it is more personal than just a catalog drawn from the internet. I have examples of all the items included in the site, perfomance comparisions are between my computers in the configuration stated and I took the potographs are of those items.
One problem to consider when building a collection of Acorn computers is "What is an Acorn computer?". Over 20 years Acorn produced a large number of models and most of those models had a variety of types with different memory, disc or operating system configurations. Some models were made by other companies and rebadged by Acorn. Some computers have been produced since Acorn's demise, either continuing production and development of Acorn's final models, or new designs using RISC OS and ARM CPUs. To find a long answer click What is an Acorn Computer? but the short answer is that an Acorn computer is what I have decided it is!
I have created this website using WebWonder by David Snell. I have never tried to create a web site before. I always found HTML to indimidating to get started. Now creating the site has been easy and I feel more confident about editing the generated HTML if required to get the desired result. The site has been tested using these browsers: Netsurf, Webster XL and Oregano 2 on RISC OS and Opera 9 on Windows 2000 Professional.
I have taken all the photographs on this site (with a few exceptions, such as Acorn publicity pictures of Phoebe) and they remain my copyright. If you want to use them please ask me first, I don't like seeing a familiar picture on ebay and finding it is one of mine. The computers are all in my collection. On occasion I have created a link to another site which has pictures and other information for a computer I have not yet acquired.
The photographs are all taken with a Canon Powershot S30 and then cropped and further processed using Polyview by Polybytes on a PC. I am new to editing photgraphs and so the quality of some photographs may not be as good as you would like. I plan to migrate from Polyview to Photodesk, Imagemaster or other suitable package on RISC OS when I get the time to learn to use it.
I have started to add HiRes pictures for interesting items as I add new items I shall continue to do this. I will go back and review some of the earlier entries and add HiRes pictures. These pictures are as downloaded from my camera and cropped to remove extraneous bits, so they can be large (typically 250K - 400K).
The Document section contains Acorn, and 3rd party, documents, most of them are in PDF format, but some are in TEXT format. Unless the document was originaly supplied as a PDF, I have scanned them using a Canon CanoScan N650U into ScanSoft Omnipage 11, OCR'ed and saved them as PDFs. On 3 March 2008 my Canon CanoScan N650U died, it has been replaced with a Canon CanoScan 4400F. Meanwhile Scansoft Omnipage 11 has been upgraded to Omnipage 15. A subsequent upgrade to Omnipage 16 was unsuccessful ,and I had to revert to Omnipage 15, because the final PDF files were corrupted if I had to adjust the formatting. and Nuance Technical Support could not correct the fault.
At some point in time I will try using !Sleuth 3 to OCR the documents, and RiScript to convert to PDF so that as much of the site is built using RISC OS tools.
While I have made reasonable checks on the accuracy of the OCR conversion, there maybe some errors both in the text and the layout. I will attempt to correct these if the result is loss of meaning in the document.
If you are reading PDF files on a RISCOS computer, you will need !PDF which is available from www.pdf.iconbar.com.
Navigating Chris's Acorns has developed as the site grew. The main navigation path is now via Acorn and RISC OS Collection then select Companies to get an index of companies active in the Acorn market. Beneath each company are links to Computers (only for companies which made computers), 8bit upgrades (i.e. mainly BBC micro upgrades), 32bit upgrades (i.e. mainly RISC OS computers) , Software and Documents, each of which are organised by company.
Alternatively you can go to Acorn and RISC OS Collection and select Computers, which is an index of Acorn computers and links to them. There are also 8bit and 32bit function indices on the Acorn and RISC OS Collection page which group upgrades by their function (e.g. Memory upgrades or SCSI cards).
There are many other web sites about Acorn and Acorn computers, I do not intend to duplicate them (see Links for some I have found useful). For a history of Acorn, possibly the best site is Robert McCordie's Technical History of Acorn . For a definitive list of Acorn computers try Philip R Banks Full Acorn Machine List . There is also lots of Acorn information in Wikipedia .
The About page is a very little about me, but more importantly will have the obligatory pictures of my cats .
| This RISC OS Webring site is owned by Chris Whytehead Click for next| previous| random| index Or learn more about the RISC OS Webring | |
This site was designed by Chris Whytehead using David J Snell's WebWonder.
on an Iyonix PC runinng RISC OS 5
Copyright Chris Whytehead 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009
Site last updated 20 May 2009