Acorn Archimedes

» see acorn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The price list from June 1987 reads like a joke told to the wrong audience. The entry model, the A305, was 799 pounds before VAT and before you bought a monitor, and the top of the range came in at 2,299. What you got for the 799 was a 32-bit RISC machine at a moment when a comparable Mac or a 386 PC cost roughly three times as much, and Acorn's own publicity claimed four MIPS, which put a home computer in the same paragraph as a minicomputer.

Acorn built it because nobody would sell them a processor they wanted. The BBC Micro had made the company the default supplier to British schools, and the obvious upgrade path was a 16-bit chip from somebody else, and the engineers looked at what was available and did not like any of it. So Sophie Wilson wrote an instruction set and Steve Furber led the hardware, and the first Acorn RISC Machine came back from the fab working on the first attempt, drawing so little power that when the team checked the meter they found the chip had been running on leakage from the support circuitry with its own supply disconnected. The Archimedes was the product they built around it.

The first machines ran an operating system called Arthur, replaced from 1989 by RISC OS, which had a dock at the bottom of the screen and pervasive drag-and-drop years before either idea was normal. There was a Unix variant on the workstation models. There was BBC BASIC in ROM, and a BBC Micro emulator, because the customer base was schools with a cupboard full of the previous machine. The A3000 in 1989 put it in a keyboard case, the A5000 in 1991 made it a serious desktop, and the A4 in 1992 made it a laptop.

None of this reached Turkey. The Archimedes lived and died inside a British school procurement cycle, and school procurement does not export. The machines that showed up in computer rooms here were PC clones assembled from whatever was cheapest, and the argument in this country was never RISC against CISC, it was how much RAM you could get for the money. I first read the name years later, in the context of where ARM came from, which is the only way most people outside the UK ever met it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

On the eve of the announcement, Acorn demonstrated prototypes on the BBC television program Micro Live running BASIC ten times faster than a brand new 80386 machine from Research Machines, which was the company that had spent years taking Acorn's education contracts. That demo is the whole product in one gesture: enormous technical superiority, aimed at an audience of about four people who cared, in a market decided by software catalogs.

And the software catalog was the problem from the first day. The Archimedes could emulate an 8088 in software and did, badly and slowly, because that was the honest answer to what a school needed. Acorn shipped a PC emulator with MS-DOS 3.21 in the box and then cancelled the hardware co-processor that would have made it fast, on the grounds that the 300-pound board cost more than half a whole PC. That decision was correct arithmetic and a slow surrender.

~ the decline ~

RISC OS aged badly in specific, technical ways. No virtual memory, so a job larger than your RAM was a job you could not do. Cooperative multitasking, which means one badly behaved program stops the machine for everyone. In 1994 the filing system still capped hard disc access at 512 MB and allowed 77 files per directory with ten-character names, at a moment when Windows 95 and Macintosh System 7 were about to make those limits visible to ordinary users rather than only to developers.

The Risc PC in 1994 and the A7000 replaced the Archimedes line properly, and then the last of the old models went out on a technicality. Production of the A3020 and A4000 ceased in 1995 because they did not conform to newly introduced European electrical and electronics regulations, with remaining stock cleared during 1996. Compliance was possible. It was simply not worth doing for machines nobody was going to buy.

~ the long tail ~

Advanced RISC Machines was spun out of Acorn in November 1990 as a joint venture with Apple and VLSI, taking twelve engineers and the processor with it. Acorn's workstation division closed in 1998 and the company was broken up the following year. The subsidiary is now the reason the parent is remembered.

I work on embedded vision now, and there is an ARM core in essentially everything on my desk, which is a strange thing to be able to trace back to a school computer sold in a country I have never lived in. The Archimedes lost every commercial argument it entered. The part of it that was actually valuable got out through a side door in 1990 and won the whole industry instead.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »