Whatever Happened to the Acorn range of computers?

[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.

[amigamad]

I liked these well made british computers i still have an acorn electron somewhere And i have 2 bbc,s a bbc model a upgraded to b specification and the bbc master 128 these things were the amiga of there day. :-)  :-)


modem users beware large pics
Risc os5 picture large http://www.mikejs.com/graphics/desktop/screen.jpg

another here

http://www.a4com.de/riscos/images/iyoR5.jpg

[Skyraker]

The archie was a great machine, just never achieved widespread recognition outside high school....

@amigamad

My mate had an electron (while I had a 64), spent hours playing elite, gisbournes castle, chuckie egg and twin kingdom valley.... halcyon days eh?

[that_punk_guy]

I considered buying an Acorn recently, did an eBay search for 'A3000' and didn't find quite what I was expecting unfortunately :-D They're cheap enough generally to buy out of curiosity (and usually come stamped with 'PROPERTY OF xxx HIGH SCHOOL' :-))

We had them at our school too, in fact I believe one is still in use in the Design & Technology lab, cutting letters out of sticky-back plastic for making signs, etc. There was another in the Geography room, gathering dust unfortunately, and a stash of Acorn BBC model B machines in the computer block. They told us they couldn't give them away for legal reasons, which seems a shame and a wasted educational opportunity.

Edit: sp

[peroxidechicken]

Great topic.  I've been aware of these Acorns for a little while but never looked beyond the easy to find places for more information.  What I know about ARM, I like but I don't like the idea of putting my money into Intels hand.  

Amigamad - that's what I call a decent photo of an OS screen (I know you probably didn't take it but anyway...)

[meerschaum]

what happend to them? their still around! search google! RiscOS is ahead of our OS's even in many ways...its got a pretty good web browser I heard too, I saw one once at a computer show and boy they look like fun hobby systems.

[Amiga1200PPC]

You have got to remain on the carpet.
It shurely is not ahead of AmigaOS, they don't even have shared libraries.

[tintin]

Funnily enough I get exactly the same questions about Amiga.  
"Whatever happened to those Amiga computers you used to be so fond of ?".  
"Not much you could do with them, was there ? And one ugly OS".
I would bet most people have never seen OS 3.5 or OS 3.9, in fact anyone that does remember the Amiga remembers an A500 with OS 1.2 or 1.3.  
I had a friend who owned a BBC micro back then, he saw no advantage in exchanging it for an A500, probably still believes he had the best computer.

Exchange Acorn for Amiga in all these posts and you have a pretty good view of where our beloved computer is today in the eyes of an outsider.

[chris]

Wishmaster wrote:
It shurely is not ahead of AmigaOS, they don't even have shared libraries.

They have RM Modules (which probably stands for "Relocatable Module" Modules), and they are indeed shared, load one into memory and you get extra commands (probably internal functions as well, I'm not quite sure how they work).

Chris

[CU_AMiGA]

So Acorns are still about! lol
I hated the early acorns, i forgot there name but were in a similar case to the A500 with green or red F keys. Then we got some newer Acorns at school simialr to the ones pictured here. They were pretty kick ass. Much nicer OS.

Then tragedy struck, the school (rather wastefully) skipped the Acorns and got rid off them, for nothing. I remember i asked if i could have one, but this was not possible. Apparently schools/colleges are not allowed to give away computers for health reasons. For example you could get electrocuted when turning on the system, meaning the school/college would be responsible. Having said that, if a contract was written and signed about purchasing a free system off them then they would no longer be able to use this excuse! :-D

What was lemmings like on the Acorn, any screenshots? Are Acorns being emulated?

(edit)

Are people trying to tell me that Acorn is better than Amigas at more serious stuff (aka Word Processing and DTP) but not for games? What games are on the Acorn?

Anyone remember PenDown and WinLogo? :-)

[Mad-Matt]

I remember getting kicked out of the computer room one lunch time after using Pendown3 text to speech function  Just couldnt resist haveing it say sware words at the time , but unlike me, do remember to turn the volume down on the monitors first

I do still have quite a few of my games, discopiers and stuff. Ive used my amiga to image some of the disks to use on my emu.

[chris]

CU_AMiGA wrote:
So Acorns are still about! lol
I hated the early acorns, i forgot there name but were in a similar case to the A500 with green or red F keys.

The A3000 was in an A500 style case.  The A3010/3020 had green F keys and were in a smaller, more A1200-style case.  I was offered an A3010 for nowt a while back, along with one of those nice Acorn-branded multiscan monitors, but couldn't pick it up :-(

What was lemmings like on the Acorn, any screenshots? Are Acorns being emulated?

Lemmings was virtually indistinguisable from the Amiga version, except the level codes rhymed with the level number.  So "TIMEFORTEA" would be the code for level 3, or whatever.

Are people trying to tell me that Acorn is better than Amigas at more serious stuff (aka Word Processing and DTP) but not for games? What games are on the Acorn?

I don't know whether it is technically better or worse for apps or games, but certainly being aimed at the educational market meant more serious software was released for it (something else I've just remembered - the save requester allowed you to drag and drop the file into another application without saving or playing with copy and paste options, which is very neat and saves a lot of time for editing files embedded in other documents).  Games-wise, I'm only aware of Lemmings and Lander (a Zeewolf-type game, a demo of which was shipped with RISC OS), but there are probably loads more even discounting compatible BBC games such as the Tea Shop game and Granny's Garden.

Chris

[CU_AMiGA]

So then. How much does the average Acorn computer cost then? The latest models?

[CU_AMiGA]

Mad-Matt wrote:
I remember getting kicked out of the computer room one lunch time after using Pendown3 text to speech function  Just couldnt resist haveing it say sware words at the time , but unlike me, do remember to turn the volume down on the monitors first

I do still have quite a few of my games, discopiers and stuff. Ive used my amiga to image some of the disks to use on my emu.

:lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol:

Point taken!  :-D

[chris]

So then. How much does the average Acorn computer cost then? The latest models?

After a quick search, I found an Iyonix for a mere £1250 (excluding monitor).  It makes the AmigaOne look cheap.

I forgot to mention emulators earlier - there are a couple for Windows, the one I use is RedSquirrel, but you need ROM images and (ideally) RISC OS disks (RISC OS up to 3.11(?) is mainly on ROM, later RISC PC ones are mainly disk based, don't know about 4.x or higher).

Chris

[meerschaum]

What I find interesting is how do they keep up so well?, where is their community?

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