[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.

[skissane]

Thanks, I stand corrected about the CPU

So Sun Network Computers were JavaOS on SPARC, Oracle were NCOS (Acorn RiscOS derivative) on ARM – and I think IBM's had a similar tech stack to Oracle's...

were there any others?

[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.