Prototype Acorn Unix-powered A680 lands on eBay

By Daniel Jones. Published: 16th Aug 2009, 15:11:46 | Permalink | Printable

A rare Acorn A680 running an ARM port of BSD 4.3 has hit online auction site eBay with a minimum opening bid of 100 quid. According to the seller, believed to be ROL's Paul Middleton, there are only a half a dozen of these pre-production systems left in existence. The A680 was developed by Acorn for Olivetti in 1988, and features an ARM2, 8MB of RAM, a 66MB hard drive and an early version of Acorn 4.3 BSD Unix kernel in ROM.

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Discussion

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Drools...

Charlie on 16/8/09 6:50PM
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Way more than 6 left, I bet. I know at least three people with A680s! (One of them has the M4.) Surely the "ARM port of BSD 4.3" is RISC iX? And I don't recall the UNIX kernel ever being in ROM; even the M4 which was purpose-built to run RISC iX boots RISC OS from ROM, and you then boot the UNIX kernel with !RISCiXFS.

rjek on 16/8/09 9:15PM
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rjek, it would be good if you get some photos and technical details of the M4 machine, as as far as I know, there are no details/images out there!

jonesd98 on 17/8/09 4:10PM
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I'll see what I can do. It's basically similar to an A680 except in a large rack case (or hernia inducement cabinet, as it was refered to) with space for loads of SCSI discs.

rjek on 17/8/09 8:07PM
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Great stuff, would be ace if you could. Sad as it may sound, but I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to old Acorn tech, hence my curiosity!

jonesd98 on 18/8/09 4:47PM
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rjek's right. I've an R140 and RISC iX was supplied on the hard drive. There's a RISC OS !RISCiX application that will boot into RISC iX, replacing RISC OS. Given that the 50-oddMB Rodime ST506 hard drive the machine shipped with was nearly completely filled with RISC iX, with a tiny RISC OS partition, and using squashed binaries at that, it was never shipped in ROM instead.

A 66MB hard drive? Given ST506 only went up to 56MB I guess that's SCSI.

ralph on 17/8/09 10:44AM
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It is a Rodime RO3000S SCSI drive according to boot screen

egel on 17/8/09 11:41AM
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I'm curious as to why anyone would want this now. What software will run on it? Or is it merely a toy for RISC OS fans who also happen to be unix geeks (like me!)?

cables on 18/8/09 12:02PM
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Yes. And also remember that its UNIX predates DNS. There's a patch available to RISC iX to add DNS support, but it's actually more hideous than doing all name resolution via YP and having a modern UNIX box do the DNS on its behalf.

rjek on 18/8/09 2:11PM
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DNS predates both the Archimedes hardware and RISC iX, having been standardised by the IETF prior in 1983 and DNS software became available on numerous Unix systems in 1984, in 1985 it became BIND.

tialaramex on 20/8/09 4:15PM
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Sorry, DNS becoming common place. It really wasn't a standard feature everything should have in 87.

rjek on 20/8/09 9:19PM
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Ended with no bids. Quelle surprise.

jymbob on 25/8/09 12:07AM
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Arf. It's rather niche, innit?

diomus on 25/8/09 12:09AM
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