Whatever Happened to the Acorn range of computers?

[meerschaum]

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

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[CU_AMiGA]

Damn! Pity! Shame they weren't any cheaper. What about the second hand models? Is there an Acorn version of Amibench (Acornbench!)? I quite liked the later models of Acorns. Damn that school! Neednessly throwing away Acorns for nothing! Silly them! One thing i didn't like too much was the 3 buttoned mouse.

[Amiga1200PPC]

In Great Britain their community is, I guess.
The Acorn was superior to the Amiga hardware wise back in 1990, but the Acorn OS was utmost crap compared to AOS in that time.

[Gwion]

They have a A3020 still in my primary skwl!

[Boudicca]

I'm suprised that no one has mentioned that although Acorn Computers is no longer with us, the company directors became ARM, i.e the processor core behind it is practically in everything including the kitchen sink.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture

If you aint got a ARM core embedded in your phone your sure to have it in the DVD, the DSL router, the washing machine and the TV.....

"ARM's 2006 annual report and accounts state that royalties totalling £88.7 million ($164.1 million) were the result of licensees shipping 2.45 billion units" ..... Easy Money....Don't make anything, just milk it.

[HopperJF]

From looking online, the Acorn users certainly have it better than us.

- More up to date hardware, in fact, they have new hardware!!
- OS enjoying steady development with more modern features
- Better software, leaps and bounds ahead in terms of web browsing and just about everything else

Only downside is, they are pricey.

[coldfish]

I remember playing David Braben's Zarch (known as Virus in Amigaland) on an Acorn Arch'3000 back in highschool.  It was as good if not better (prettier, faster and more fluid) than the A500 version.  The machine spent most of its time running educational mathematics apps, plotting charts and graphs, something, I felt at the time was a bit of a waste of good hardware.

linkage:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=697
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Braben
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch

I think they were extremely expensive to buy, which is probably what hindered their mainstream popularity.  Otherwise a very capable machine.

[Fixer]

Basically, the Acorn series of hardware was the UK's answer and equivalent to the American Apple Mac educational market!

I should know something about this - unfortunately my area was well behind in computing and I only started using Acorns for the last three years of Primary school.

However, I was still using them in HIGH SCHOOL up until I was about 14. Only then did they replace everything with PCs (at the time I was really thankful, because I was in the mindset that PCs are/were the way to go and that every other platform was obsolete).

Until my primary school had Acorns they were solely using those BBC machines. Now that's nostalgia!!!

[Hodgkinson]

I remember dismantling an old computer at the local amateur radio club some time ago - I’m sure that it was badged as an "Apricot".

Could anyone confirm if such a machine actually existed?

Hodgkinson.

[spirantho]

The wikipedia is a wonderful thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_Computers

They were basically PC compatibles later on or PC "could-just-about-run-MSDOS", i.e. compatible in the same way as they used to call an Osborne 1 "portable".

[Hodgkinson]

I'd looked on the internet some (A long) time ago but I couldn't seem to find anything at the time.

Thought it might of been intresting to mention... ;-)

Thanks,
Hodgkinson.

[reddwarfer]

Only downside is, they are pricey.

Yup, was looking for some RISCOS4 ROMS on eBay and then decided that for £40 I'll stay with 3.7!

[1500]

Well, this takes me back ...

We had all BBC Master Compacts and Master 128s when I did my GSCE Computer Studies all of idontwantothinkhowmany years ago.  For their time, they were good pieces of kit, very well built and they had to be given their environment.  Spent most of my time trying to get places I shouldn't be over their ECONET network, which has a great big enormous 5MB winchester hanging off the back of some other Beeb which remained carefully locked away.

Archie's were a couple of years after my time - even in college I was on Beebs and XT or AT PC clones.  I went from the Acorn to the Amiga - I think the Amiga 500 was about £100 cheaper than a Master 128 which is pretty woeful given the technology gap - the Acorn stuff was always expensive.  Very well engineered though.

I still have my old Electron, complete with Rombox and a dual 5.25" floppy drive tucked away in the loft, not to mention my old Texas TI-99/4A up there as well, but that's another story.  Ah, Parsec.  Really must get that down and play that old game again.  I bet it still works!

[1500]

Hodgkinson wrote:
I remember dismantling an old computer at the local amateur radio club some time ago - I’m sure that it was badged as an "Apricot".

Could anyone confirm if such a machine actually existed?

Hodgkinson.

They were junkheaps.  A lot worse whan Amstrads, and they were shockingly bad.  I remember having to go and fix one of these - OEM DOS 3.something running a bespoke dBase II app.  MFM hard disk was on the blink, so I had to dig one of the our junky old MFM drives off the shelf, laplink all the data off praying that the whole thing wouldn't come crashing down around my ears, replace the drive, try to remember what the DOS debug thing was to prep it (g=c800:5 if anyone's interested), re-install Apricot DOS which was a manual process without a manual, then laplink the data back.  The whole thing was a mess and took a lot longer than that summary.  The box was virtually impossible to take apart without breaking something.  Everything was non-standard.  It was like dealing with Sony.  Talk about engineering by stealth.

[InTheSand]

1500 wrote:
g=c800:5

Heh! Haven't seen that written anywhere for a while!!!

I also used to use a friend's Apricot - it had a green screen high-persistence monitor, which really was incredibly high-persistence to the point where characters on the screen would take 5+ seconds to fully disappear/refresh when the output data changed... Those were the days!

Anyway... back to the Archimedes... Used them quite a bit "in the day", but unfortunately at our 6th form college, most of them spent their time either running the BBC emulator or a very slow PC emulator rather than doing anything useful natively.

I remember being very impressed with Zarch and ProArtisan, making decent use of the 256-colour modes, and also with the 8-voice audio hardware (which certainly beat the likes of Oktalyzer in terms of output quality!!!), and then being slightly envious when comparing the same with my A500.

However, its hugely high cost and the lack of software vs the A500, plus the fact that programming graphical GUI-based applications in BBC BASIC was an exercise in torture meant that I stayed away other than for school/college use.

I did have some fun with an early greyscale video digitiser though (single frames only!) which was hooked up to a video camera, and transferred some of those pictures to my A500 (via MS-DOS disks and a quick hack in AMOS to decipher the Archie's "sprite" format), and conversely converted some Amiga pictures to the Archie using the great old "!Translator" shareware application.

I now have two (or three, can't remember!) Archies and an Acorn multisync monitor (which works well with the A1200), picked up for nothing as a friend of mine worked at a school when they were being chucked out.

I must admit my Archies don't get used much these days - Red Squirrel on the PC does the job for RiscOS 3.x stuff, but it's still nice to fire up the old hardware now and again! I also bought (for NZ$50!) a RiscOS-based thin client, but haven't yet got it to do anything - it appears to want to request some OS files via an NFS mount, and apparently it's "easy" to turn into a basic Archimedes, but I've not yet had any luck with it.

 - Ali