Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Archimedes experiments
The A300 and A400 machines would be Acorn's mainstay for the next two years. May 1989 saw the debut of the last BBC-branded machine, the BBC A3000 – in a new, wedge-shaped casing with an integrated keyboard – and, a month later, Acorn revamped the A400 series with an updated memory controller, upping the A440's hard drive to 40MB and introducing the 20MB A420 in the process.
All around the Archimedes A3000
Source: Chris' Acorns
Earlier that year, Acorn rolled out the R140, its first machine with the new Risc iX operating system – Unix on ARM, essentially. This would be followed by The R225 and R260 in June 1990, but they failed to win the support that Arthur – by now called Risc OS – had won, not least because of the price differential: at launch the R260 cost £5000, though that bought you 8MB of Ram and a 100MB SCSI hard drive. The A540 had one of those too, and while it only had 4MB of Ram, it nonetheless cost half as much as the R260.
Acorn killed off Risc iX in 1992. By then it had released the A5000, in September 1991. It had a 25MHz ARM 3 chip, later upgraded to 33MHz. Like the original Archimedes, it had separarate keyboard and system units, though the latter now looked more like a bog-standard PC. It was the professional-oriented successor to the A400 series
The A3000's wedge casing was retained for home and school users, and formed the basis for September 1992's A3010 and A3020. The A5000 was revised with an ARM 250 chip to become the A4000 at that time. The A3000 series had ARM 250s too, though the first A3010s went out with ARM 2s.
Acorn in decline
But by now the Archimedes family was more than five years old, and while it had built up a huge following in schools, even they, like many of its early users, were turning to other platforms, most notably the now ubiquitous Windows PC.
Archimedes morphed into the Risc PC line, a series of ARM-based boxes designed to run Microsoft Windows, or any other OS, on a x86 co-processor, and present it in a Risc OS desktop window.
Windows play: Acorn's Risc PC
Acorn spun ARM off as a separate business in November 1990 and then opened up shares in the subsidiary in 1998. The IPO brought Acorn £18m but it lost £9m during the first nine months of 1998, and the strategic review this prompted centred on killing off the Workstation division.
Acorn, one of the two key pioneers of UK home computing, would no longer make desktop computers. It would focus instead on Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chips and set-top boxes. By 1999, it wasn't even called Acorn any longer. It became Element 14, though the name lasted only a year, dropped when the company was acquired by Broadcom to become the comms chip giant's DSL division. ®
The author would like to thank the many retro-tech fans for archiving home computing adverts, photos and documentation from the 1980s and 1990s, without whom this feature would not be possible. Special thanks go to Chris Whytehead for his Chris' Acorns site, which provided invaluable source material. ®
COMMENTS
Some comments from the Project Manager.....
HI. I thought I would provide a bit of feedback having been in the middle of it all at the time at Acorn. First a great article and factually pretty near the mark. Yes, Arthur 0.2 was in EPROM and we thought we would have them back as they were expensive and possibly re-useable. We set a very firm date for the launch, June 1987 if I remember and hence the OS was whatever state it had reached; not an ideal approach but it would have been sad to have left the superb hardware waiting for too long. Were Acorn products over-priced? No, the profit margin was reasonable bearing in mind the high level of R&D and the high technology. PC clones at the time were sold at very tight margins and made in the Far East or under railway arches in the UK with virtually no R&D spend as a result of the vast volumes. When I look back at Acorn Marketing it was some of the best I have ever come across in my career both before and after. Acorn made the best of being a niche player and inevitably struggled just as Apple did for a long time. Someone comments that Archimedes had 'Windows emulation'. No it didn't, it had genuine MS-DOS licences provided by Microsoft. It was the hardware that needed some emulation as many PC applications at the time wrote directly to the PC hardware bypassing MS-DOS much of the time (it was just a Disk Operating System after all not a Machine Operating System as in Acorn products). Finally as someone else has commented acronyms should always be in upper-case so it should be ROM not Rom etc. Why UK journalism insists on treating acronyms in this way when the USA gets it right is beyond me; it makes speed scanning of technical articles more difficult as I always scan for the techno words. So when RISC-OS was developed and launched it was all upper-case and never anything else; rant over :-)
Some factual errors
There are even more rabid fanboys than I in the RISC OS world, so I'll preempt them (or maybe just warm them up) with a few points:
"Risc", as you point out, is an acronym. Thus it should be RISC. Ditto "RiscOS", which should also be two words: RISC OS. "Rom" should be ROM. Confusingly, the last Acorn machine was the RiscPC (in lower case), but the official logotype has a sort of half-space, so most people write is all joined up as I do. Finally, the mouse buttons on an Acorn machine were referred to as Select, Menu and... Adjust, not "Alter".
There seems to be some confusion about the difference between Lander and Zarch: the former was a demo of the latter. The demo (Lander) shipped with most machines in this era, while the game (Zarch) was a commercial full product. It was exactly the same game on the PC, but known as Virus. The player's ship in that was not triangular (it was non-symmetrically pentagonal), and is the same shape as the Copperhead ship from Bell and Braben's game Elite.
Two final points. First: "Archimedes morphed into the Risc PC line, a series of ARM-based boxes designed to run Windows – on a co-processor, and presented in a Risc OS window." No. Just no. The RISC PC was never *designed* to run Windows - it was designed to run RISC OS natively, and use hardware-based emulation to run Windows within RISC OS. The "co-processor" wasn't a true one in the sense you seem to be inferring; the primary CPU was an ARM610, 710 or some variant of the StrongARM processor, while the secondary CPU was a specially designed 4x86 or 5x86 card which could *only* be used by the emulated copy of Windows. It was also not a default item included with the RiscPC, but usually a seperate purchase.
Finally, there's the fact that you say the line stopped with the death of Acorn/Element 14, without mentioning anything about the two spin-off companies RISC OS Ltd or Castle Ltd. Acorn's demise left RISC OS at 4.02, and ROL/CTL developed this further in two confusingly-numbered parallel brances, known as RISC OS 5 and RISC OS 6 (also known under the names RISC OS Select and RISC OS Adjust). There were also the the Iyonix, the Omega, and some other hardware designed and sold in the post-Acorn era. And last but not least, there are ongoing efforts to port RISC OS to small boards like the BeagleBoard and the Raspberry Pi, these mostly happening through RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL), a spin-off created when Castle decided to open parts of the RISC OS source.
As an Acorn fan girl...
I loved my BBC micro. The first affordable ARM machine was the Acorn A3000. So I got that when it came out. By then I'd already been programming ARM code on a Uni Archimedes 305. I've known ARM assembler for almost 25 years. I feel old!
I still have my A3000 (plus a spare for parts) and my RiscPC which I replaced it (with a couple of spares including one which was an ex Acorn development machine). My RiscPC had the 486 card, 4MB RAM, 2MB VRAM and a 130MB SCSI HD. Alas the HD has died.
Basically those machines founded my career. On the A3000 I developed my first piece of commercial software. I produced an ARM Linux distribution for them in the 90s. I am now a software consultant and my work still requires me to do ARM dev. Finally to go full circle my Raspberry Pi turned up this morning. I will be putting RISC OS on it to play with.
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