If Acorn hadn't spun-off the ARM business...

[Tension]

... would we all be using RiscOS on our Acorn A9000s instead of wintel boxes?

Or would ARM have been dragged down and buried with Acorn...

Hmmmm.......

[minator]

... would we all be using RiscOS on our Acorn A9000s instead of wintel boxes?

Or would ARM have been dragged down and buried with Acorn...

Hmmmm.......

I suspect the latter.

Apple wanted to use an ARM chip in the Newton but didn't want to buy chips from a competitor.  6 weeks later ARM appeared.

But that wasn't what made ARM, it was the business model thought up by the CEO they brought in.

They licensed the core to anyone who wanted it, and now there's hundreds of companies making ARM chips in mind bogglingly huge volumes (vastly more than x86).

[lsmart]

I watched an Acorn demo in 1993 and wasn´t terribly impressed. Amiga was far ahead on the user-interface (e.g. It seemed that proportional fonts were a problem for some of the more popular Acorn software). And the idea that some of it really was written in Basic didn´t impress me either.

So if there was something revolutionary about the boxes (except for the raw power of RISC) they did a poor job at communicating it. I don´t think the market would have noticed the benefits of Archimedes & Co.

[chris]

I watched an Acorn demo in 1993 and wasn´t terribly impressed. Amiga was far ahead on the user-interface (e.g. It seemed that proportional fonts were a problem for some of the more popular Acorn software). And the idea that some of it really was written in Basic didn´t impress me either.

BBC BASIC is very powerful, and it can do inline assembler.  You wouldn't know it was running interpreted BASIC unless you went poking about or somebody told you.

I also beg to differ on the user interface.  Both AmigaOS and RISC OS are wonderful operating systems with good and bad points.  If it was up to me I'd merge the good points of both into some crazy hybrid OS.  The drag'n'drop and context menus of RISC OS are divine, as well as the select-adjust clicks.

[KThunder]

Apple, commodore, atari, acorn and others tried going up against "IBM"
Problem was IBM was one of dozens of "pc" builders, all tied together by the "win" part of wintel.
No single company could go up against wintel because wintel is numerous companies.

Acorn would have died and taken ARM with it, unfortunately.

[coldfish]

If Acorn hadn't spun-off the ARM business...

...ARM wouldnt exist.  

Then we wouldnt have all these wonderful ARM powered portable devices.  I can count at least 10 devices using ARM architecture in this house.

Including my awesome GP2X.  

[Lando]

RiscOS is awful.  I had an Archimedes.  It doesn't even have pre-emptive multitasking.

[agami]

There's a very good chance that the whole thing would have come down in a heap. Some other company would have bought the remainder for a low price for the IP and patents, and today we'd be asking " What ever happened to Acorn?

One can only ever work in terms of odds. Sometime being in the right place at the right time can make a world of difference. If you subscribe to the multiverse theory, there is a universe out there where most of us are using one of the Acorn 'Piglet' series of consumer computers. The 'Wild Boar' professional series of workstations and portables are for pro-sumers and gamers. And Acorn's 'OakGrove' network is the most popular way to access information and stay in touch with people all over the world.

[takemehomegrandma]

If Acorn hadn't spun-off the ARM business...

...ARM wouldnt exist.  

Then we wouldnt have all these wonderful ARM powered portable devices.  I can count at least 10 devices using ARM architecture in this house.

Including my awesome GP2X.  

Indeed, and lots of things are happening in the ARM world. The Cortex A8 is being established, the Cortex A9 is growing, and...

"The launch of the Cortex-A15 MPCore processor marks the beginning of an entirely new era for the ARM Partnership."

Well, that's no understatement!

Its simplest/lowest performance version (for next-generation smartphones) offers "5x performance improvement over today’s advanced smartphone processors, within a comparable energy footprint", and it scales up to quad-core configurations and speeds of up to 2.5Ghz, clearly breaking the boundaries of traditional applications where ARM has been used, and well into x86 territory.

Some companies are already using ARM in server configurations, something that probably will increase with Cortex-A15. Virtualisation is built right into the server variants of these chips, and they can support up to one terabyte of memory.

http://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/arm-unveils-cortex-a15-mpcore-processor-to-dramatically-accelerate-capabilities.php

The road map suggests that 2012 will be when it gets released.



I'd like to see MorphOS ported to ARM!