Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:05 AM UTC

batou wrote: post #10

jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too owned a whole bunch of Acorn stuff. Most of the software was excellent. The best basic interpreter around and a very good shot at a DOS. The Acorn 'Unicorn' was excellent but too expensive and this is roughly where the parent comment comes in. So Acorn did a lot of good stuff before they lost the plot, roughly around the time they released the Archimedes, which was an amazing machine for the time but the Amiga…

Yes the BASIC interpreter was the best thing there was on the platform. Mainly for me at least because it was heavily structured, didn't require line numbering like earlier versions and had a stupidly powerful inline assembler. I had a 1040ST and an Amiga 500 at the time as well (spot the geek) and the software wasn't that great on those platforms either IMHO. Even PDS on DOS was nicer to program in with the 2kg pile…

Post by dasmoth » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:07 AM UTC

batou wrote: post #6

I think there's a lot of fondness for Acorn, at least here in the UK but I'd like to offer a slightly more accurate history. I was the owner of many Acorn machines including BBC B, Master, A410, RiscPC 600. The hardware, clearly designed or at least originated by Sophie Wilson was remarkable. It was robust, well designed and incredibly expandable. To this day there is not a single computer that actually made sense mo…

Post by mattbee » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:13 AM UTC

batou wrote: post #6

I think there's a lot of fondness for Acorn, at least here in the UK but I'd like to offer a slightly more accurate history. I was the owner of many Acorn machines including BBC B, Master, A410, RiscPC 600. The hardware, clearly designed or at least originated by Sophie Wilson was remarkable. It was robust, well designed and incredibly expandable. To this day there is not a single computer that actually made sense mo…

Post by rjsw » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:19 AM UTC

keithpeter wrote: post #12

batou wrote: post #6

I think there's a lot of fondness for Acorn, at least here in the UK but I'd like to offer a slightly more accurate history. I was the owner of many Acorn machines including BBC B, Master, A410, RiscPC 600. The hardware, clearly designed or at least originated by Sophie Wilson was remarkable. It was robust, well designed and incredibly expandable. To this day there is not a single computer that actually made sense mo…

"Now I certainly enjoyed the platform but in retrospect, I'd have invested my money in something else back then if I knew what was going to happen." I take your point about Acorn as a business but I used a 'lab' full of RISC-OS 2 bases A310s at College with 20Mb Rodime hard drives. We did scanning, dtp, Genesis multimedia packages &c and various home grown projects. What else could we have bought at that time for sim…

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Jul 07, 2015, 10:26 AM UTC

batou wrote: post #6

I think there's a lot of fondness for Acorn, at least here in the UK but I'd like to offer a slightly more accurate history. I was the owner of many Acorn machines including BBC B, Master, A410, RiscPC 600. The hardware, clearly designed or at least originated by Sophie Wilson was remarkable. It was robust, well designed and incredibly expandable. To this day there is not a single computer that actually made sense mo…