[BuildTheRobots]

The boot was from ROM and I remember them starting up pretty quickly, however there were also network options which might have slowed something down.

I'm almost certainly remembering this wrong, but I believe these machines supported EcoNET with 10 base-T ethernet being available later with an addon podule. At my high school we did network authentication to log on and then also had access to our private folder which was also a network share, as well as some of the applications / boot scripts being on a network drive. The 3020's were surprisingly slow if you used the TCP/IP stack. I have fond memories of waiting for someone to start a game (Aarknoid iirc) and then sending flood pings to their IP causing the system to slow down to about 2fps. Fun times. I don't remember this being a problem on the A4000 or any of the RISC-PC range.

If you're based in the UK and need an Acorn nostalgia hit, then the Wakefield Acorn Users Group still has monthly meetings.

I also have very vivid memories of getting an x86 addon card (probably a 486) for one of our early RISC machines and being able to run Windows 95 within a window from the Acorn desktop; mind blowing in the late 90's.

TLDR: I remember the 3020 booting quickly, but the network services were slooooow.