I own an Acorn R260, an early Archimedes designed to run a BSD variant called RISC iX. The installed OS is broken and I’ve not got round to fixing it. I’ve occassionally tried to find install disks on the net so I can reinstall from scratch.
Now I’ve discovered why. There were no install disks.
Legal versions of RISC iX either came pre-installed on a R140 or R260, or were installed by Granada Microcare. Acorn did not supply distribution media to customers (although in 2006 a set of 14 floppy discs with an installable copy of RISC iX 1.14 were sold on ebay). If you ordered RISC iX, Grenada Microcare would make an appointment, come along and install it from a tape drive, taking the tape away afterwards.
From Chris Acorn’s RiscIX
Thank goodness for Linux and FreeBSD.
