I bought my Acorn System 1 back in the summer holidays of 1979 and over the next few years added boards and software from Acorn as well as many homebuilt boards until I had a pretty comprehensive System 2 computer.
As a student I had the time to disassemble the Acorn COS (Cassette Operating System), BASIC and ADE (Assembler, Disassembler, Editor) and fortunately kept paper copies of the listings. I also purchased all the Acorn manuals I could afford at the time which I still have. I even produced my own 'Oracle Microsystems COS Extension' which I used to sell via ETI/Computing Today to supplement my student hobby. Even so I couldn't afford proper front panels so cut them out of sheet aluminium and used curtain rail for the handles ! The boards on the far right were made later once I was working and could afford proper Vero panels.
Around 1984 I moved onto a BBC B Computer and the System computer took a back seat eventually just collecting dust (lots of it). By the late 80's I moved on to a PC and the Beeb also got forgotten about. I recently dug out both machines, the Beeb still worked out of the box, the System computer needed a little more work (and cleaning) to get it back up and running.
Extending the System 2 to become a System 3 was well out of my reach in the early 80's, the Acorn Floppy Disk kit alone cost £369, far more than a months wages so I have set myself the challenge of upgrading it to a System 3.
Follow these links to see how the refurbishment progressed:
At this point I had a working System 3. Looking through my collection of Vero parts I realised that I probably had enough card frame parts to build a System 2, 3, 4 and 5 using a combination of trev_ham replica boards and some of my own. I have also built a mini System which has been useful for development work because it takes up less bench space.
Finally I have put my E01E FileStore in its own rack together with an Econet Bridge and two Econet Clock/Terminator/Hubs.