Whatever Happened to the Acorn range of computers?

[dandelion]

Acorn computers! Wonderful thread. OK, the two main machines I use are the Amiga and Acorns. And I have to say, I think I prefer the latter (huh!)

Ok..so this is where Acorn is today. When the company died, various people got the rights to manufacture new machines, and the OS continues to be developed by RISC OS ltd (www.riscos.com). RISC OS Ltd was originally owned by Pace but has recently been bought by Castle. Castle make the Iyonix, an Acorn compatible 600mhz RISC Intel XScale (which is an ARM chip, made under Intel licence). There's also the Microdigital (www.microdigital.co.uk) which have just released their own Acorn compatible machine called the Omega. The latest version of RISC OS is the supremely reliable and lovely RISC OS v4 Select. The Acorn world (or more correctly, the RISC OS world) is looking very rosey in terms of operating system, in terms of quality and fast hardware - yet it faces the problem of market share. Although Caste and Microdigital are shifting quite a few boxes they are mainly to the loyal fan base. I expect a similar thing might happen to Amiga.

Anyway, to regularly updated news sites are

www.drobe.co.uk
www.iconbar.co.uk

I myself have a StrongARM RiscPC running at 233mhz which I use for all my internet stuff, word processing, DTP and gaming. I love the machine actually, wonderful to program and most importantly of all a very highly educated young user base. I advise you to buy one. 8-)  :-D

[dandelion]

For a picture of the more recent OS (v 4) which I hope might dispel some of your views that RISC OS is an ugly os (yes, Arthur was, v2 was - in much the same way os Workbench 1.2 was) visit this..

http://www.houseofmabel.co.uk/puters/RISCOS4/full/standard.png

Now, go and buy one. They're lovely, responsive machines with a very solid and stable OS and some truly excellent software. And the community is fantastic. A lot of people remember these as school machines or learning toys - the success of them in British and commonwealth schools has actually been a little unfortunate in hindsite.