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by keithpeter 3995 days ago
"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 similar use cases? Not trolling, my memory of the time is hazy and I recollect being extremely underwhelmed by DOS based PCs in another 'lab'.

EDIT: flashbacks to Aldus Framemaker on Apricot PCs, Amstrad PCW spreadsheet applications being used in a theatre box office, and an early 9" screen Mac being used with some form of DTP software.

4 comments

I found it fairly easy to port stuff to the Atari ST. My local university used them in labs too.
My college had an (experimental?) machine they got from Acorn that dual-booted into a 'nix OS. It got stuck in a corner and forgotten about, but if it had been a few years later I think it could have been an amazing project for them.
When I was in secondary school, we had a plain grey, all-in-one keyboard and system desktop case that had a microdrive and was connected to a hacked colour TV via a massive umbilical cord. It turned out to be a BBC Micro prototype.
They sold a BSD port called RISCiX.
Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.
Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.
Thanks, yes I remember the package now.