It's disc images and Zip files of floppy discs from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Acorn was making ARM-based computers and ARM was a teeny tiny subsidiary, jointly owned with Apple. They were quite exciting times in computing, very different from the commoditised world of today. With the increase in people seemingly interested in retro computers, I thought I might as well put this stuff up for download. RISCOS Ltd and Pace Microtechnology, the developers and copyright holders at the time, officially cleared my distribution of these disc images. My thanks to them.
Thanks also to Peter Miller, who sent the RISC OS 2 Applications and Support discs, and the Arthur Welcome disc. Markus Huber contributed lots of Developer discs, and he and Nick Gill both supplied the A3000 Test disc. Alan S, whose surname I don't know, has supplied the A3000 rolling demo and the Clan discs. The A3010, Tesco and A5000 rolling demos were provided by Darren, who was on Usenet under the ROS402dn alias. The disc images have been provided by Ralph Corderoy. Whether any of these people are still around, I have no idea. If you're one of them, thanks again.
Castle Technologies owned the rights to the Acorn brand, RiscStation supplied a range of eponymous machines, and MicroDigital had a model called Mico.
In late 2002, Castle Technologies launched a radically new
machine, called Iyonix. This, for the first time, broke
dependence on Acorn's original chipset design. There was
also a machine called the Omega from MicroDigital.
Now, RISC OS Open Ltd has taken over the development of RISC OS, and
the operating system is available free of charge. RISC OS 5
runs on modern ARM hardware, such as the BeagleBoard and
IGEPv2, and on the Raspberry Pi. RISC OS 4 is still available
for older hardware.
The various software programs I used to build the original site are all still available, although the sources have changed for most. The links below will take you to the current locations.
If you've got to download to a PC and want to unzip on an
Acorn (because all the filenames will break horribly if you
don't), you need to download !Sparkplug. The original is here: DEARCHIV.BAS. However, I've found this to fail on
RPCemu,
so here are SparkPlug 2.26 and SparkPlug 2.29. Use the latter on 32 bit systems.
Copy the relevant version
to an Acorn-format
disc or whatever, set its file type to BASIC and run it. Its
name doesn't matter, by the way.
A major caveat is that: if you try to run applications
from any of these discs on current generation RISC OS machines,
you could cause yourself a problem. If you do, power
the machine down and restart while holding down the Delete key.
This should get you on the path to a fix.
Most of this stuff should also run under emulation on a
Windows PC. I would recommend using Arculator, as it comes with
every version of RISC OS from Arthur to 3.11.
Having been all chuffed with the pun in the page title, I was
horrified to find that lots of people actually use it as a
spelling for 'archaeology'. Go check on Google, although Google is better at correcting spelling mistakes than it was 20-odd years ago. Also, there's now someone selling lighting using the name.