[jameshart]

The American equivalent of the BBC Micro was very much the Apple II. Both based on the 6502, both dominated the market of ‘first computers purchased en masse by schools’ in the 1980s in their respective countries.

I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.

[DrBazza]

For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball.

At the time the Archimedes blew the nascent PC and every other machine out of the water, and yet couldn't get a toe-hold in the US market for reasons I've never quite understood. At the same point MS Windows looked shoddy at best in comparison to RiscOS.

[jacquesm]

Acorn didn't so much drop the ball as that the industry took off in a way that they simply could not have dealt with for the exact same reason that your EU start-up that is successful usually ends up being acquired: lack of access to easy capital. SV was well established by the time that the personal computer took off and even though they found their own nice niche (education) they never started out to conquer the world, they achieved their goals - and then some, see linked article - and managed to pivot fast enough and well enough to eventually give intel a run for their money, which is no mean achievement.

RiscOS wasn't even on the table for the likes of IBM and that is what it would have taken to succeed in the business market. But for many years the preferred machine to create Videotext or ATEX (automatic typesetting system) bitstreams was to have a BBC micro and there were quite a few other such interesting niches. I still know of a few BBCs running art installations that have been going non-stop for close to 45 years now. Power supplies are the biggest problem but there are people that specialize in repairing them, and there are various DIY resources as well (videos, articles).

[skissane]

In the 1990s, Acorn had a big deal with Oracle... Oracle NCOS was rebadged Acorn RiscOS

But I just don't think Oracle were able to sell it – and Oracle's sales people are really good, if they can't sell your product, the problem is likely the product or market fit not their sales ability

[jacquesm]

I didn't know that, thank you.

RiscOS simply had to start the whole OS cycle from scratch, it wasn't as good as what was already available on the Amiga and it wasn't Unix. It was fun to work with if you came from the BBC Micro it all made good sense and was a step up. But when looking at it from a corporate angle it wasn't quite what you'd expect from a workstation and it didn't run anything that you needed right there.

Did Oracle port any applications to it?

[skissane]

It was part of the Oracle-led Network Computer project, the main thing ported to it was the JVM, to run Java business apps. IBM also sold them (IBM Network Station), and Sun - although I believe Sun Network Computers ran JavaOS not NCOS, but still used ARM CPUs

[xyzzy3000]

The various Sun 'JavaStation' NC models retain the SPARC CPUs of their workstation line - they definitely do not use ARM.

JavaOS was in ROM, on a module that can be removed (SIMM-style form factor). At one point people started to use BOOTP to run Linux compiled for SPARC as a replacement, as JavaOS was unpleasantly slow on JavaStation hardware.

[jacquesm]

That is such a bit of neat lore. Thank you.

[mike_hearn]

Did capital make the big difference? Apple didn't take huge VC rounds back then and lasted much longer.

I think it was just relative lack of apps in the end. Microsoft commodified the hardware so it became competitive and prices fell dramatically. Every other company stayed attached to their integrated designs and couldn't keep up on cost. Apple held on for a while because of the bigger US ecosystem and economy but nearly got wiped out also.

Also the RiscOS wasn't really backwards compatible with BBC apps and games, iirc. More like a clean-sheet design.

[jacquesm]

Lack of capital almost killed Apple.

[mcv]

I don't think Acorn "dropped the ball". They were doing amazing things, but they simply weren't IBM, and their PC wasn't an IBM PC. The corporate world was rapidly standardizing on PCs and MS DOS, and that it was crap didn't really matter; it was more powerful than what the corporate world before, and it had all the support it needed for business applications. Superior architecture didn't matter; killers apps did. I wish it was different and really hoped the Archimedes would be the new standard. Well, decades later the ARM would finally become the new standard.

[forinti]

The 80s were crazy. In 1981 Sinclair had a market with a 1KB machine and in 1985 the Amiga came out.

That's 4 years! The 386 came out in 1985 too.

I think Acorn did quite well and its legacy still lives on through ARM. Where's IBM in the desktop or CPU market?

[lproven]

> For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball.

Acorn's CPU division is the most successful CPU design house in the world and sells around 10x more than all forms of Intel and Intel-compatible chips put together.

It was named after its first product, the Acorn RISC Machine: ARM. It is still called Arm Ltd. today.

Arm alone is one half of the entire CPU market.

https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/arm-2025-q4-and-fy-fina...

An Acorn-compatible CPU is inside half of the processor-powered devices in the world.

How is that "dropping the ball"? It is the most successful processor design of all time, bar none.

[mike_hearn]

It wasn't their goal to become a CPU vendor, come on. He was clearly meaning the Acorn computers.

It was such a pity. As a British schoolboy in the early 90s we had a mix of Acorns and PCs, and I had a BBC Model B at home and then a bit later also a PC. Very lucky in hindsight.

The Acorn machines were ridiculously better except for fewer games. At first I don't remember there being much of a gaming gap and there were plenty of games targeting the BBC Micros, but as games scaled up the bigger US economy started to matter much more and the app/game selection just wasn't as good.

But in terms of engineering the GUI was better than Windows, but more importantly the reliability was way higher. My primary school teachers (!) were constantly getting me to fix the computers or install new apps because they always broke. When an Acorn "broke" it was something like the printer being out of paper. When the PC "broke" it was always something much, much harder.

[lproven]

I agree about the virtues of the kit. I owned several Archies and loved them.

But the goal of a company is to survive, sell stuff, and make money. One division of Acorn survives, makes money, and dominates the industry, and the A in its name stands for Acorn.

(Some other bits survive inside Broadcom and things.)

It focussed on the successful bits and executed superbly. As the desktop PC industry consolidated on x86 and MS OSes it moved away. Good move. That's keeping your eye on the ball, in my book.

I can't think of any other company that did so well.

Sun, SGI, Cray, DEC, all either dead, or acquired, or sold on and split up, or sold off the divisions they were known for, and little or nothing of their tech lives on. IBM still makes POWER servers and workstations. That's about it. But not PCs.

Apple makes machines that use the Acorn ARM instruction set and can't run any binaries from their own PowerPC era kit, let alone 68k. It's doing great but by savagely chopping away legacy tech.

I think Acorn did great by comparison!

[zem]

I had a BBC B as my first computer and would likely have enjoyed having an Archimedes greatly, but in retrospect "IBM compatible" was winning the day even then.

[forinti]

There's a very important distinction to be made between the Beeb and the Apple II (or most other 8 bit micros).

The Beeb was a very well engineered machine, including the BASIC (which allowed in-line assembly and also allowed its functions to be called from assembly, ie other programs).

[pansa2]

> in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles

That’s my understanding as well. In the US the NES was huge in the late 80s, but in the UK home computers were dominant. The NES never sold well in the UK.

The 16-bit consoles did later on, though. So did the 8-bit Sega Master System, but not until the early 90s - it wasn’t a predecessor to the 16-bit machines, but a budget-friendly contemporary.

[Lio]

Yep, Acorn competitor to the Amiga and ST would was the Archimedes (followed by the A series and Risc PC).

The Archimedes was powered by a 32-bit ARM 2 and it was awesome. :D

[jacquesm]

The first time I started up an Archimedes and ran Lander it really felt like the future had arrived. The smoke particles in particular (heh) were very impressive.

[sys_64738]

The Archimedes was too expensive and not very well supported. The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.

[Lio]

I never felt that way. I thought both the Amiga and the ST were great, each with useful and unique features but I still loved the Acorns.

IMHO the GUI was better on RiscOS and being able to run video at 25fps in just software felt like magic. At the time, I never saw Amigas doing that without expensive hardware like the Video Toaster, even Amiga A3000s.

You could even get 12.5fps video off floppy disc which seemed crazy at the time.

[lproven]

> The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.

And yet... Do you own a smartphone of any kind?

It has an Acorn-compatible CPU inside it. In fact, if it isn't 20+ years old, it has several: it has a multicore main CPU with several different Arm cores, and there are more in the Wifi controller, and more in the Bluetooth controller.

There is a pretty good chance that if you own an x86 machine with wifi, it includes multiple Arm cores too. Whatever OS you run, from Windows to BSD, if you were to search your SSD, you will find BLOBs of Arm code on it.

Is there any Amiga or ST derived tech in them? Not that I know of. But a company with "A" for Acorn in its name is in very nearly every device with a microprocessor.

[sys_64738]

I first used an Archimedes back in 1988 running Arthur 1.2.

[lproven]

Nice one. That's the year before I bought my first.

I thought it was a superb deal up against things like the Amiga and ST, because it was much faster and more capable for a hobby programmer.

And in the first job I had, my 2nd hand A310 cost £800. It had 1MB RAM, a 20MB hard disk, and a colour monitor. So probably half its new price.

The fastest machine that the VAR I worked for offered was an IBM PS/2 Model 70-A21:

http://www.walshcomptech.com/ps2/70A21.htm

A 25MHz 80386DX with a tiny L1 cache on the daughterboard. Our demo one had a 80387DX and 2MB of RAM and a 120MB HDD, the first 3.5" HDD I ever saw.

It retailed at about £10,000 for the base model, without "optional" extras like keyboard, DOS, or a monitor.

Tricked out like the display one with an 8514 XGA display, something like £15,000 or £16,000.

I tested it. My Archimedes was 4x to 8x faster in integer benchmarks. And it had a GUI -- the PS/2 didn't, this was before Windows 3.0 -- and it multitasked, which the PS/2 also didn't.

Overpriced my left kidney. It had astonishing industry-beating price:performance. It stomped all over the fastest x86 kit in the world: it ran a usable pure-software emulation of an x86 PC on which I could run work apps.

[sys_64738]

It's great having a superfast computer without any useful software. Sure there were things like Pro Artisan but it was no good compared to DPaint on the Amiga. I didn't want to run PC software but did want to run Mac software. So when you mention emulation, the Amigas of the time were faster with emulating of the Mac than the hardware Macs themselves for a period. When RISC OS came along it was nice but had that horrible error dialogue that restricted mouse movement. The memory allocation needing to be manually set was also wacky. The Amiga also had a BBC BASIC emulator coded in 68K assembler so even that wasn't an advantage anymore. Side by side, you got more value from using an Amiga. The Arch might be great for running benchmarks though.