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Comment by viler | Hacker News Reader

Always wondered why a machine like the Archimedes didn't catch on quite like the Amiga did in the enthusiast/demoscene/etc. space. Both were certainly revolutionary for similar reasons. Was it the more limited reach outside of the UK? The focus on educational markets?

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Having gone from The Acorn Electron to the Spectrum to the Amiga and always keeping up with the nerdy magazines of the time, I remember it being about price point and 'cool factor'.

The older I got, the more I appreciated how cool the Archimedes could be (especially after seeing Zarch which I think was more technically impressive than anything on the Amiga 500 at the time - I might be exaggerating), but it was a rare and strange beast mostly seen in school IT departments, and the teachers even then tended to be quite protective of the expensive machines.

Being as it was a relative of the BBC Microcomputer, it would always have been an uphill struggle to win the hearts of school kids wearing their parents' wallets down at Christmas time, and was anyway a lot more expensive.

Everyone had Amigas because there was a very healthy Euro/Global trade in pirated games from crackers on BBS' - Amiga had an ecosystem useful to schoolkids, Archimedes did not.

That said - I too would love to have a peek at an alternate timeline! I distinctly remember sitting as an UnMin in Gatwick airport reading some Acorn computer magazine heralding the new age of the Archimedes and getting quite excited. Oh well.

- ed

additionally - I think the demo scene tended to be very tightly wrapped into the cracker/pirate scene, ie. they were pretty much one and the same.

Wasn't the Amiga perhaps also popular because the C64 was such a hit? ( in the EU at least )

I'm sure that helped, but as a Spectrum owner, I'd be breaking code - decades old as it might be - to suggest that anything positive could arise from the existence of that machine.

Looking back now, the C64 was clearly a better machine than the Speccie, haha.

As a c-64 owner I envied the more featureful basic of of every other machine of the time!

C64 BASIC was terrible but better BASIC interpreters were available for it.

For instance, this one was excellent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC

Zarch blew me away at the time (in my high school computer room) as well as Conqueror, built on the same engine. Most home computer games at the time were inferior to arcade games : it was only years later that arcade games were surpassed at home, at least where I grew up in the UK.

Written in BASIC Too.

Source? Surely not.

I had the demo version of Zarch many months before it was released and a pre-production Archimedes to play around with. The power of that box compared to anything that I'd been using up to then was unbelievable to me. It wasn't just a quantitative difference, it was an entirely different realm of possibilities.

Price point, perhaps? The Amiga only became a big success for bedroom coders once the Amiga 500 was released, after all.

And being a natural upgrade from the super hit c64.

I feel like that was actually one of the reasons the Amiga didn't catch fire as much as it could have-- it wasn't a no-brainer upgrade.

If you were a serious user of a 64, there was no forward upgrade that didn't consist of chucking all your software and data. Yeah, you could get a 128, but that was frankly close to obsolete the day it launched. If you have to abandon your existing investment, the bargain-priced Atari ST and the collapsing price of PC clones made them reasonable shortlist competitors against the A500.

It would have been interesting to say "here's a $100 module that lets you connect your 1541 and read the discs, and run your 64 software in a window."

The real question is how RM elbowed their way into the UK education market, displacing Acorn, with their shonky Nimbus machine. To this day I believe it must have been backhanders.

RM was the main education supplier before Acorn had any products at all. Schools could get 380Z [1] machines at reduced cost and some were given away in a competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z

> shonky Nimbus machine

Ah, Nimbus.

In my teens I was briefly root on our school's Nimbus network after tampering with a boot floppy on a server that wasn't physically secured...

Was a great feeling for a few hours ... then I felt very guilty and 'fessed up to a teacher :)

IFIR the Archimedes was marketed in Germany only after the Amiga was already established, and by then it was too little too late. All the games and productivity software was on the Amiga.

There wasn't even a place as the "underdog alternative" for the Archimedes, since that position was already taken by the Atari ST.

Too expensive and Amiga owners were generally coming from Sinclair/Commodore/Atari 8-bits. Usually Archimedes owners were invested in BBCs already.

> Usually Archimedes owners were invested in BBCs already.

This matches my experience, I knew the founders of LVL Rocom, Radio Rotor and several other companies close to the Acorn eco-system and typically the Archimedes was an upgrade path from the Beeb.

The amiga had already been out for a couple of years already as well; I remember seeing ads for the Amiga while I was still on BBC stuff and thinking I'd like one.

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