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Soft Rock
Software

Updated:
23rd August 1998

Profiles: Soft Rock Software

The History

Well, it all started billions of years ago, when there was an almighty explosion. (This came to be known, eventually, as the big bang.) This explosion marked the start of the universe. But, to cut a long story short, we need to jump forward a few billion years, to 1989...

Soft Rock Software commenced trading on 1st July 1989. I had wanted to write software since I first discovered computers, at school some years before - around 1982/3, I think. (So I jumped forward in time a little way to far, but what the hell!)

Between then and 1989, I had written quite a few programs, that never ever left the tapes or disks of the machines they were written on. Mostly, these were in Basic, but some were also partly in 6502 machine code, and a few were entirely code.

During this time, everybody told me I'd never get a job doing this kind of thing, and as for having my own business... WELL!

So I said "Stuff 'em!" and here we are :-)

The Name

I keep getting asked about this, so I may as well (yawn!) explain it here...

The name came about after lots of thought about nothing. I had various rubbish names as options, such as VMH Software (and that one example is about the level of them all - very very corny) and eventually thought along the lines of Rock Software, using something that obviously isn't soft. This evolved into Soft Rock Software, which IMO has a nice ring to it.

The Hardware

A lot of people stick descriptions of their systems on their web pages as a means of boasting ("My computer system's bigger than yours!") but this can't be considered a boast, because most people's system's are better than mine. Ho hum...

An Acorn Risc PC 600, running Risc OS 3.5 on a 30Mhz ARM 610 processor. It has 64Mb main RAM, and 1Mb video RAM, a 1.2Gb IDE hard disk formatted to 400Mb (because of a limitation in the Risc OS 3.5 filecore) and a Goldstar 8 Speed IDE CD ROM drive. A recet addition is a Midimax2 midi card. Connected to it are an Epson GT5000 scanner, a Hewlett Packard HP4L Printer, and a 33,600 modem. Oh! And it's also connected to my hi fi! :-)

An Acorn A3000, running Risc OS 3.1 on a 8Mhz (???) ARM 2 processor. It has 2Mb RAM, and an 80Mb IDE hard disk. It also has an internal Midi port/sound sampler (which uses the econet socket). I usually connect either a Star LC10 9pin colour printer to it, or an Integrex Colourjet 600 inkjet printer. At the moment, this system is stored away due to a lack of space - and I suspect the Integrex is broken. Ah well.

Lastly, I have a 32Mb P166 running Windows 95, with a 1.6Gb hard drive, a 16 speed CD ROM drive, a 16bit sound card, and a 1Mb video card. There's also a fairly low spec 486, but that's broken in the display department, and I only mentioned it to fillout this paragraph. :-)

As you might expect, the Risc PC is the most used machine. The A3000 is primarily used to test software on (when I actually have time to write any :-/ ) and for sound sampling. The P166 might replace it in the sampling role, however.

The Software

Third party software used includes Pulse (which came with the sampler, and is the only item used on the A3000), Armadeus, Fireworkz, DataPower, Voyager, ArcFax, Studio 24 and Ovation Pro. In addition to these, Acorn's own Paint, Draw and Edit are often to be found running. On the PC I don't use anything regularly as yet, though Lotus Smartsuite is installed, and I have (somewhere!) an old version of Borland Turbo C++ - that should serve my fairly basic needs in the first instance, which is to learn some basics of programming on that platform; eventually I'll get something more up to date.

The End

And if reading that didn't bore you, I don't know what will!

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