[Crosseye_Jack]

Thats odd cause the OS was on rom. I remember them taking just a couple of seconds to boot. Now at my school most the machines were "just" networked and didn't contain their own hard drives (Though the A5000's did have their own drives as well as being networked).

Applications that were not on the rom were loaded from the network which meant if all the kids loaded differnt things all at the same time the network/fileserver could get congested witch slowed loading times but I don't recall loading times being too bad but that might just be recalling the experiance though rose tinted glasses.

This allowed finer control of the applications what could be installed as the network was kept in read only mode for most of the time and only swapped into write enabled mode when updates and new applications were needed to be installed. the Read Only/Write Enable switch was a keyswitch on the fileserver case which was stored in a locked room. For the age it was "enough" security.

I have fond memories of the Archimedes as the first time I got paid for my code it was written on one.