Birthday celebration
Posted by Steve Revill Tue, 15 Apr 2014 11:44:00 GMT
Today ROOL are celebrating the 20th birthday of the launch of the revolutionary Risc PC.
Codenamed Medusa it was Acorn’s replacement for the A5000 and a final break with the Archimedes product marque featuring a customer upgradeable dual processor capable motherboard.
At launch, it was equipped with a 30MHz ARM610 with 4kB cache. These were subsequently upgraded to a 40MHz ARM710, and finally various StrongARM based upgrades running at 200MHz and above, culminating in the Kinetic from Castle Technology.
The support act in the Risc PC comprised VIDC20 (video controller) and IOMD (input/output memory device) custom chipset. These were later integrated onto a single device to make the ARM7500 and ARM7500FE chips used in the cost-reduced A7000, A7000+ and several rebadged clones.
The Risc PC shipped with RISC OS 3.50, though this was a rather basic implementation squashed into only 2MB of ROM. Later upgrades from 3.60 onwards shipped in more spacious 4MB of ROM with support materials on the hard disc.
Many users still put these machines to daily use, a testament to the robust all-plastic case design. The total cost of ownership, even accounting for the eye watering £1702.58 purchase price for a mid ranged machine back in 1994, still works out at less than 25p a day.
To celebrate this milestone why not spend a few pounds treating yourself to a Risc PC upgrade or two from ROOL? The ROOL Store includes the latest stable release of RISC OS 5.20 on two ROMs, which includes a copy of the RISC OS 5.20 install CD, as well as ROM upgrades for some common expansion cards.
In any case, many happy returns Risc PC, have a glass of champagne on us!
