Unfortunate, but not terribly surprising. That's not to say that the company wasn't significant, but given Acorn's near-exclusiveness to the UK market and their twenty-plus year absence from being in any market at all, the company really has become a footnote. The company was gone by the late '90s, just in time to miss the start of ARM's ascendancy in the marketplace, and ARM has become as generic a term as Xerox or Coke. Pretty much anything made by Acorn in the 8-bit or Archimedes days is going to have most of the interest in it coming from the UK - the machines just weren't terribly significant outside of Britain.ĪRM is undoubtedly one of the most significant processor architectures to date, but the Acorn name in connection to it means very little today. Is it? The ARM cpu was their doing so maybe BBC/Electron/Master are not too popular with the retro crowd (are they?) and Archimedes itself was more of a showpiece for the Acorn Risc Machine and too expensive for its time but calling footnote the company that created one of the most popular cpus on the planet is. A ton of trash and shovelware sure but a mini release could blast the C64 mini built in library far out the ocean. I wish someone would make an Acorn / BBC "mini" - don't know what form it would take exactly but if one looked hard enough there was some great games on there. It is set up to be easier out of the box for a new user. I would recommend RiscOS Direct if you decide to try it. Just buy a Pi for under $100 and off you go. However, unlike the Amiga you don't have to spend $1500+ on a machine with RiscOS. It kind of reminds me of the modern "Amiga" machines with their OS4 and the similar issues they face. I am hoping this campaign brings that closer to a reality. It just needs some modern refinements like Wi-FI, Modern Browser and something like Libre Office to really make it shine. Blindingly fast, even on an original Raspberry Pi.
But that is Apple's reality distortion for you. Hardly innovative when Acorn had an ARM desktop in 1987 and a laptop in 1992. Especially since the tech world is going nuts over Apple moving to ARM and how amazing it is.