wow, they sound expensive and a lot more rare than i imagened. thank you so much for all that VERY useful information! you got a deal of the centry with those atoms and systom 3s! i think i will look out for one at a resonable price but for now not actively seek one. bit off topic, but looking to get an archie a4xx with keyboard akf something monitor and mouse and was just wondering if you possibly had one to sell for around may time (birthday) before i put a post on the wanted thread? thanks a lot!AFAIK, official number produced isn't known. However, since a System 3 cost in excess of £1400 back in 1980 (nearly £6k now), I doubt too many were bought. Since Acorn would have judged selling 12000 Beebs as a runaway success it gives some idea what their System sales figures might have been. I'm not sure the majority of Acorn fans even knew of their existence BITD (although everyone had heard of the Atom).
The target market was industrial/academic (I know Cambrige Uni had a few, in various labs), which won't have helped their rarity any - such institutions tended to just scrap anything which was past its useful life. In the early 90s anything and everything just got skipped - Osborne 1s, MicroVAXes, all sorts of fun stuff.
Back in '93 I managed to persuade my Dept (Experimental Psychology labs in Cambridge) to sell me their Atoms (£5 each) and System 3s (£10 each, including 9" monitor with horrendous burn-in) for a nominal charge rather than bin them. They actually had Lab Interface cards, and the labs were equipped with the wall plates/wiring/etc for that system. I suspect the wall plates will have been ripped out and skipped since my time.![:shock:]( "Shocked")
So I suspect any Systems still remaining owe their continued existence to lucky enthusiasts being in the right place at the right time. I don't fancy the chances of there being an undiscovered cache in someone's attic. It's also why they don't appear on Ebay very often - they'll only appear when collectors downsize their collections/die.
In terms of what to go for, you should count youself lucky if you find one at all, and even luckier if it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Price will vary, depending on what cards come with it - 8K static ram cards seem to be pretty plentiful; not sure if the 80 column display was more common than the 40 column Teletext; there seem to be a few VIB cards around, whereas I've only ever come across one ADC board.
In terms of what they could do, the ones I rescued were being used in the labs for experimental data collection/storage - by '93 this was more because they were already there rather than because they were particularly good at it. One had previously been used as fileserver for an Econet of Atoms in one of the teaching rooms, but both it and the Atoms had long since been retired.
have a good rest of your day 
Statistics: Posted by Cruxinc — Sat Mar 09, 2024 4:01 pm