I used to work for Exacta Circuits Ltd. We were a PCB manufacturer in the Scottish Borders. We occasionally made (unpopulated) PCBs for Acorn, and I think that this A3000 may have one of our boards in it - judging by the "EXC" manufacturer code in the silkscreen legend. As a home computer enthusiast it was always cool to see boards from Acorn or Apple in the factory, and I do remember seeing the A3000 boards at the time. I hope you can rescue this one!

Absolute beast of a machine for it's day. When I clean a solid state board etc. with water, I always rinse it thoroughly with demineralized water afterwards, and let it dry completely somewhere warm.

Brings back memories of secondary school, we were right near Cambridge and were one of the first schools to have a room full of Archimedes machines. Later there was a network, and when I was a prefect I swapped to get computer room duty when I could. We also had a local user group that met in the room during the evenings, and somehow floppy disks were being passed around with the latest games... I also remember two of the lads trying to convince the older uses they had written an artificial intelligence that could talk to another user. In reality they had a null modem cable and someone at a second machine was typing in responses...

Grew up with a BBC Model B in NZ. Was great to learn to program Basic on it. Never had any instruction on Assembly via Basic which is something I would have liked had I been able to wrap my young child brain around it, alas I never learnt it or was much aware of it, only learning about the assembly capability within Basic a few years ago. In boarding school, living onsite, far away from family sucked. The older kids were tough on us which sucked. But what didn't suck was the oasis of a school computer rooms with one hosting networked BBC Masters and the other adjacent smaller room hosting Archimedes. Was great to get away from the hardship of boarding school, hidden away in these rooms - it's how I survived. In later years I was given the keys and often had the whole place to myself, being the geek that I am. Was great to have a place where I didn't have to be wary of who was approaching around the next corner or with eyes in the back of my head. I could relax, program and play games too.

Well done taking a hose to the main board. I find people treat electronics far too gently when wanting to clean unpowered boards. A bit of washing up liquid works wonders as well. The really important thing is to make sure the board is fully dry before powering on. Obviously you did that. In my first job, we cleaned boards intended to measure moisture (resistances in the gigaohms range) by immersing them in a strong solution of washing up liquid in an ultrasonic cleaner. All surface contaminants were removed and the full range of the circuit could be opened up.

This makes me feel so old i remember my Jr school getting it's 1st BBC, Schools where still using them at the time I finished Sr school.

Glad this Acorn is getting some love! I hope you can get it going :)

I used to play Lemmings all the time on the school Archimedes.

We wouldn't realize how important Acorn would be, until the smart phone.

Used to have an A310, got from my mate when he got the A5000, he had it back when it was Arthur (which was not a multi tasking OS) and not RiscOS, that was a nice upgrade!

I got this in 1989 for Uni to do work at home in my Maths & Computing course. I did Turbo Pascal programs via the pc emulator. It ran slowly like the PC XT but I could cope! Loved the graphics and sound on it!!! It was amazing at how fast it booted even a fast NVME cannot boot that quickly!!

It was lovely to see one of these again. As a school kid, I missed these. However, my first I.T. job was in a shop where we sold these along with the earlier Archimedes machines. Later, I moved to school I.T. support and supported these then older A3000's as well as the then newer A3020's. Really solid machines. Nothing ever went wrong with them that wasn't abuse from the kids. Mice and monitor wires were an issue as usual with faulty connections due to constant movement. But the machines themselves were great. The BASIC language was easy to use too. I even managed to reverse engineer part of a virus to allow a screen capture of a computer to he saved to the server and check what was being done on a kids computer. Only used to show a teacher with evidence that someone was doing something they shouldn't. But great machines none the less.

Since the ARM is the dominant CPU today I'd say the BBC program was a smashing success.

Ah, takes me back. I remember replacing my model B with one of these and a monitor - followed by months of haggling with Watford Electronics who seemed incapable of replacing the DOA monitor and then accused me of trying to con them out of another monitor when I had in fact left it at their shop for repair (suffice to say I never bought anything from them again). The A3000 was so great putting the Ataris and Amigas to shame, it's a real pity they never gained any real traction. A few years later I 'acquired' an unwanted RISC PC from a work project but the A3000 was my first modern computer with multi tasking, windows and a mouse.

Such fond memories of BBC's and Archimedes at school. Bit odd when I went to college and it was all PC based! Luckily I had a PC at home, so not the biggest of jumps. But in comparison the Archimedes so much more useable than the PC, this was 1993 after all! Still makes me wonder what could have been though.

I was lucky enough to own an A3000, got one of those packs which came with games and TV modulator. Really loved that machine, games, 3d graphics programs, ray tracing, DTP software, programming.

Saw the corrosion. Nearly cried! (Also if you use a quadrature to PS/2 mouse converter, just be aware that Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical 1.1 is not compatible with the middle mouse click. Nearly drove me mad working that out)

You've got RISC OS 2. Upgrade it to RISC OS 3.11, that's the latest ( British ) OS for these machines.

Very minor note - the A420 (and A440) used an ST506 interface for their hard discs, instead of SCSI. Actually, in the A400 series IIRC there was never an A420 - only an A410, which was announced but I don't think ever shipped, and an A440, which had a 20mb ST506 HD, and 4mb of RAM. The A400/1 series that replaced them had an enhanced memory controller, and had A410/1, A420/1 and A440/1 models. The second digit indicated the amount of RAM. Only the A420/1 and A440/1 shipped with HDs, but all included an HD interface.

What I like about RISC is that you can basically guarantee it being mentioned in the usual "RISC is better because reasons" way in any Acorn or ARM related video. It's weird that no one brings up RISC and ARC when talking about Star Fox (ARC is another RISC processor developed in the UK that has its roots in the SuperFX chip).

ahhhh 1989.......about the time I swapped floppy's for spanners......love seeing what i missed out on😀

2:27 There is a bit of misinformation peddled here. The A540 (introduced in 1990) was not sold alongside the initial A3X0/A4X0 models in mid-1987, nor did the ARM3 exist at that time. The ARM2 was the high-end option in ‘87 and not the “entry level” option. They didn’t start manufacturing of the ARM3 until the tail-end of ‘89, and even then it took a while longer for it to reach consumers in the form of CPU upgrades or complete systems. Just thought I would let you know in case you had not found out already. Sorry if I come across as harsh.

My dad was the founding Head of Computing for a school in Cambridge, starting back in the seventies with electronics, teletype services, then NASCOM, Acorn System 1, some of the first BBC Model As, Econet with an in-house coded fileserver by him and one of the students. We had loads of upgraded BBC As, BBC Bs, then Master ETs; and a multi-segment campus-wide Econet, with a lot of bespoke stuff developed by him, me, and other students. With a good relationship with Acorn, we got a lot of early access; hardware, software, pre-release and proprietary documents, and we managed to get one of the first Archimedes A305s on launch day... I can't remember the serial number, but the important bit was in single digits. By the end of the first week, we were manually upgrading the RAM to 1MB. We standardised on a slew of A3000s with internal hard drives; we found an internal product that used early 2.5" drives, IIRC, mounting in the main body of the case above the mainboard, taking up some space where the (removed) floppy drive would sit. Eventually, we got a four-slice RISC PC with ARM3 and (ooh! ahh!) a top-of-the-range "Multisync" monitor, which (as the son of the Head of Computing) I duly borrowed during summer holidays, along with the school's precious LaserWriter IINT. When my dad retired at the end of the century, I think they ended up junking the whole lot and switching to PCs across-the-board. :(

My mate had a wedge Archimedes in the late 80s/early 90s. Got it at a discount while at Uni, I believe. I'm fairly sure he had one with green function keys. (Not sure which way round the public and educational variants were). Nice machine - but it cost an arm and a leg, it must have had a hard drive as well as the colour monitor. There wasn't ever that much software for it. All he could do was code and play Zarch (Virus) on it. I stuck with my Amiga for a couple of years longer before getting a Dan 486/33. He traded his Arch in shortly afterwards for a 486/50 (grr!).

I just discovered the channel. Great video. I left school in 1969, so am way too old to have had the pleasure of using anything like this. Also, as I moved from Coventry to the USA 30+ years ago, there’s not much chance of me finding such a machine locally. Looking forward to part 2.

Can't wait for part 2 :) I have an A3000 with 4MB and fitted a gotek drive to it, and made up a VGA cable, so fair number of improvements are possible. Oh and mine also had battery leakage, fitted another battery in the mouse connector compartment.

Loved that you took the garden hose to the MB 😁.

I remember school had a couple of these in the actual tech class then dozens of shitty RM Nimbus machines (glorified typewriters) in IT.

There were a few of these scattered around College here in Australia. Usually in some nook, ignored and unused. I'm sure they would've eventually been junked.

Nice machine! Interesting that it has the external podule slot, my school didn’t have any and instead had many A3020s, the amazing A5000 and later A7000 and RISC PCs

I remember porting my 8086 ASM Mandelbrot code to RISC on one of the Archies at school - it was truly incredible to see the performance boost and I knew at that point RISC was a "thing".

I have an Acorn A3010 with the stylish green function keys.

Great episode. I have always had huge respect for these machines. It is a damn shame they never really reached their potential. I can only imagine how good they would of been as a creative workstation. We never got them in South Africa in any official capacity, so they are only ever machines I saw in pictures. Looking forward to a long series on this machine and would love to see you cover the emulation and RiscOS options available today.

Such great memories. Thank you for this.

Great stuff, looking forward to the series on this machine. My own machine has some batt leakage but not as bad as that so might inspire me to fix it. Definitely some damages traces on mine though.

Loved my Archimedes 310 after the ST days, just wish I'd done some more coding on it, such a capable machine. Looking forward to the refurb on this model.

I like Acorn even though I'm not a squirrel :) I hope it won't take too long for the second part to be released, Thanks

i've been playing a lot of a star wars video game recently, so when you made the "smuggling rebels past imperial blockades" joke i got really confused for a hot second

This is in my top 3 machines at home, it’s the one the kids always ask about when I fire them up…..great video as always

Very interesting! Acorn fairly rare here in Australia, I never see any pop up for sale.

Great video, fun fact Element14 the maker of the raspberry pi, is also a reboot of Acorn Computer

You could literally make a video about going to the toilet, and that 4 second intro jingle would save you

I was part of the Doomsday project in the 80s that was launched on the Archimedes laser disc library vault collaboration project. I liked the Archimedes as it truly attempted to improve on education and disc based information libraries.

Keep up the great work

so to do a modern recreation of these Acorns would consist of reproducing the case and keyboard, and then a Raspberry Pi booting RISC OS Direct - voila! Acorn reborn!

I miss my A3010

As it's got no RAM expansion drop me a message when you get it running. I'll post you another 1MB stick.. I've also done a PCB repair with a similar level of corrosion if you need any advice. I have part numbers for the mouse connector etc as the contacts are probably corroded. If the ribbon is dodgy (usually loses little patches of conductive material) let me know - I have a connector you can attach to the ribbon to solve this.

It's amazing that a lot of the retro channels tend to start with the BBC, then go on to mention the electron and then the Archimedes, but none cover the Acorn Atom which was Acorns first computer and a prelude to the BBC machine. Like the ZX81, the Atom was available as a kit or ready built and tested, but it featured more memory, high res display and a real keyboard. They are also quite rare these days, which might explain why its seldom featured, but in its day it still had a big following in its day

you sprayed the board with water from a hose, EH ?

I’ll not lie, I’m slightly biased.

So what’s a Microbit if not a) a Micro and b) a bearer of the BBC name?

Replace your BBC B..? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat? :D

That keyboard needs cleaning.

Did you specifically look for the dirtiest specimens? I wouldn't dare type on those :D

The Archimedes was just too far ahead of its times to succeed.

Love the video, I'm really looking forward to how this one turns out. About five years ago I refurbed a couple of A3000s I got from eBay. In all cases I caught the corrosion just in time (and by the looks of yours, you have too). I did have to replace most of the components and sockets in that area but fortunately they are relatively inexpensive parts with the custom logic over to the other side of the board. I exchanged one A3000 for an Amstrad 6128 Plus and the other I've kept in my collection. Since then I have upgraded the RAM to 4MB and added an IDE podule from www.cjemicros.co.uk/. I've also installed a PS2 converter to allow a PS2 mouse to be used and installed the PS2 socket on the back of the machine (that mouse port underneath is a right pain). As luck would have it, there is a mouse port header near to the original port which you can use to attach the wires for the PS2 adapter.