Hi, I'm Steven also from Bracknell.
My Acorn history, well...
I was fortunate(?) to receive an Acorn Electron has my first computer when I was around 6. Of course I really wanted a BBC Micro!
I taught myself to program in BBC BASIC and progressed into 6502 assembly language following the excellent manual. I played far too much Elite (which has been a recurring theme throughout my life!) I finally progressed to an A3000 as a teenager, where I learned to program in ARM assembler, and eventually got myself a Risc PC 600, which I upgraded to a StrongARM as soon as it became available. On those latter machines, I dabbled as a Public Domain author, and spent more time cracking copy protection than actually playing games--this was for hard disc install purposes, and StrongARM compatibility! Most of my software only saw limited circulation, you might remember the volume utility which shipped with the Aleph1 !PC software, I wrote that.
I was on the Phoebe waiting list. By that point my main interest had moved onto ARMLinux on my Risc PC, and I was extremely keen to see what I could do with Phoebe.
After Acorn was gone, I jumped ship and became a F/LOSS Linux developer, although I did keep working on ARM systems, I built one of the first ARM EABI Linux [Gentoo; new architecture from stage0] systems targeting the PXA270 based Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100, before later becoming a Nokia N900 community developer.
I've been involved in the emulation scene. I wrote the XDG Base Directory patch for RPCEmu, which sadly wasn't integrated: https://github.com/sjnewbury/emulator-h ... dirs.patch
What's recently brought me back: I was preparing to write a book on Acorn, but in the end I started a Substack on a different theme, and I happened to find myself writing a series on computing history, which frames Acorn as a pivot actor, the research came in handy. If anybody wants to read my part on Acorn history, which has a slightly different focus to anything else out there, it's available here: https://theuaob.substack.com/p/the-war- ... he?r=r7kv8
My Acorn history, well...
I was fortunate(?) to receive an Acorn Electron has my first computer when I was around 6. Of course I really wanted a BBC Micro!
I taught myself to program in BBC BASIC and progressed into 6502 assembly language following the excellent manual. I played far too much Elite (which has been a recurring theme throughout my life!) I finally progressed to an A3000 as a teenager, where I learned to program in ARM assembler, and eventually got myself a Risc PC 600, which I upgraded to a StrongARM as soon as it became available. On those latter machines, I dabbled as a Public Domain author, and spent more time cracking copy protection than actually playing games--this was for hard disc install purposes, and StrongARM compatibility! Most of my software only saw limited circulation, you might remember the volume utility which shipped with the Aleph1 !PC software, I wrote that.
I was on the Phoebe waiting list. By that point my main interest had moved onto ARMLinux on my Risc PC, and I was extremely keen to see what I could do with Phoebe.
After Acorn was gone, I jumped ship and became a F/LOSS Linux developer, although I did keep working on ARM systems, I built one of the first ARM EABI Linux [Gentoo; new architecture from stage0] systems targeting the PXA270 based Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100, before later becoming a Nokia N900 community developer.
I've been involved in the emulation scene. I wrote the XDG Base Directory patch for RPCEmu, which sadly wasn't integrated: https://github.com/sjnewbury/emulator-h ... dirs.patch
What's recently brought me back: I was preparing to write a book on Acorn, but in the end I started a Substack on a different theme, and I happened to find myself writing a series on computing history, which frames Acorn as a pivot actor, the research came in handy. If anybody wants to read my part on Acorn history, which has a slightly different focus to anything else out there, it's available here: https://theuaob.substack.com/p/the-war- ... he?r=r7kv8
Statistics: Posted by TheUAoB — Wed Dec 10, 2025 9:47 am