Those StrongARM Days at ROUGOL, Mon 21st June 2021

The next meeting of the RISC OS User Group Of London (online) is:

RISC OS in those StrongARM days, presented by Mike Stephens, ex-Acorn and Pace programmer

Monday 21st June 2021, 7.45pm

Online via Zoom, meeting open from 7.30pm

http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/

Mike Stephens worked at Acorn from 1994 to late 1998 as a Principal Programmer. He left Acorn soon after Phoebe & Ursula were cancelled. About 2 years later, he rejoined colleagues at Pace to work further on RISC OS. His talk will be a mix of reminiscing about late-Acorn and some low-level technical details.

Some things that he worked on include:

- Assisting ARM with validation of prototype ARM 810 processor
- RISC OS 3.7, the substantial low-level OS update to support StrongARM
- RISC OS 4/Ursula kernel for Risc PC 2/Phoebe
- Hardware abstraction and 32-bit-clean plans for RISC OS at Pace

Mike left Pace soon after they cancelled all RISC OS work, and is excited to see there is still a love for it and that there is active development after all these years!

This meeting will be held online via Zoom. Please contact us to receive a link to the meeting on the day. If you have last month’s link, it’s the same one!

http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/contacts/

I really hope Mike talks at length about the ARM 8xx series designs. So little is known about them; just that they had to go back to the drawing boards and start again on the an entirely new architecture design ARM 9xx series.

Another cracker of a meeting.

Reminder!

Had a “quick” test of run of this meeting the other evening, and ended up chatting with Mike for over two hours, so I can confidently say this is going to be an interesting presentation :-)

Hopefully it was recorded, I couldn’t make it this time due work.

It was a good talk, it brought back lots of happy memories of StrongARM Risc PC’s being faster than contemporary x86 PCs again for a bit, and sad memories of almost Pheobe.

It certainly was a good talk, and I always enjoy hearing the ex-Acorn guys talking about their work. Mike was particularly interesting because of the love many of us have for StrongArm.

However, I’ll play devil’s advocate to Druck’s post about Pheobe above. Although I was super-keen to get my hands on one, and was looking forward to the possibilities, I fear the reality might have been rather too little, too late. I think it would have been a merely “OK” computer at launch, and eclipsed quickly, merely prolonging Acorn management’s death spasms for a year or so. I remain fairly convinced that management didn’t see any value in the OS, merely desktop computers as a whole (or NCs, or STBs), so I suspect RISC OS may have been further starved of manpower/resources. What Mike achieved with limited time/manpower was quite remarkable!

Whatever happened to the replacement RPC Motherboard displayed at some the Acorn shows?

(Do you want to be a Millionaire)

About the time of RO4?

@ Druck and Andrew

Guys you’re making me jealous now lol where is the video???? :D

I had the pleasure to actually see the StrongARM (both the SA110 and the SA1110) working in their full glory when worked for an FPGA company that was using them as a controller CPU on the FPGA board (these were the early days of FPGA revolution, before integrating the FPGA with the General CPU was even a thing!) and yes with the right motherboard they were both impressive even after few years from their introduction on the market I would say.

@ Andrew

Yes the Phoebe was an “hardware” fix that would have been too little too late, I agree with your point of view. However if it would have been done before (at least the board bandwidth) oh man that would have been a total different thing at last for a good 6 years. For instance at the moment the SA would have been introduced the RiscPC (with high bandwidth) would have had a new youth and also the 2nd CPU slot would have been was more “useful” (imagine creating FPGA boards for the 2nd CPU slot)

Anyway, we have the Pi revolution going on, so we do have a new “sensation”. I guess we just need to improve the OS now… you know… nothing fancy! XD

I fear the reality might have been rather too little, too late. I think it would have been a merely “OK” computer at launch,

It was seriously “too little too late”, and may well have not even managed to be even “okay” at launch. Oh, sure, some would sell, but for the bright future of Acorn, Phoebe just wasn’t.

I savage analyse the proposed specifications: https://heyrick.eu/blog/index.php?diary=20160926

Whatever happened to the replacement RPC Motherboard displayed at some the Acorn shows? About the time of RO4?

Millipede Imago ?

http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/AfterAcorn/Millipede_Imago.html

Thanks for that – could have been some machine :-)