[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?

[skissane]

Correcting myself:

IBM Network Station used PPC

And although its OS was called “NCOS”, it was completely different from Oracle’s NCOS. It was apparently a closed source derivative of NetBSD

[jacquesm]

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