Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

For those not in the know, the Archimedes was the computer that the ARM processor was originally made for - in 1987. The A3020 was the 1992 version.

Fastest home computer in the world in 1987 in terms of mips. Wildly underappreciated at the time but then obviously ARM came into its own later on ...

edit: no wait I'm wrong about Intel 32-bit, I took that bit out

View on HN

Amazing machines at the time. It's just a shame they launched in the UK and not the US. Acorn didn't really have enough money, or production, or understanding, to market it in the US successfully, and it was probably missing a decent office bundle at the time, plus anti-competitive WinTel behaviour through the 90s. Microsoft used decent PR, smoke and mirrors, to sell MS-DOS and Windows, Windows pillow cases in every Las Vegas hotel around Computex and so on.

Can't blame them, even systems from US based companies often sold in UK/Europe better than they sold in the US without any involvement from Microsoft (I'm talking, of course, about the Commodore Amiga).

Yes, I was the only one on my gang with a PC (a 386SX) everyone else was on Amiga, and I got to learn about Amiga thanks to our weekend meetings, having access to books and magazines and trying to replicate demoscene stuff on the PC.

In Portugal, until around 1994 PCs were pretty much something that one would find at the office, not home computers.

Magazines like Computer Shopper (UK), Solo Programadores and Spooler were multi-platform.

With Commodore it was not lack of money, though, but profound incompetence that saw them burn their US retail network to the ground by antagonizing them. Most notably an infamous incident of announcing a large retail price drop of the C64 without first lowering the price to retailers, and without warning.

Commodore only lived as log as it did because it's international subsidiaries had a lot of independence, and some of them were far better at selling than the US team.

I'm afraid with the 32 bit bit your're wrong, the 386 was released in 1985, and the Compaq Deskpro 386 was in 1986, so 32 bit Intel PCs were available before the Archimedes (of course 386+ PCs weren't common for a few years after that).

cripes you're right, I had always assumed that Pentium was a big deal because it was 32-bit, and that the previous 386 was 16-bit. In the late 80s I'd heard of IBM Pcs but didn't encounter one till the pentium era.

The 386 was a full 32-bit processor: the 386SX was a cheaper variant with a 16-bit data bus. In that sense the SX wasn't a million miles removed from the 68000 and 68010 processors, which similarly operated with 16-bit data buses.

You may be confusing the operating system with the processors. Windows 3.x and earlier were 16-bit operating systems that were run on PCs well into the 32-bit era. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was, I believe, the first full 32-bit version of Windows. 32-bit Windows only became widespread, at least amongst consumers, with the release of Windows 95.

The Pentium was a big deal due to the incorporated FPU (which was separate and comparatively slow on 368 and 486). With the Pentium high-end PCs were nearly as fast as, but much cheaper than, Unix workstation, even for typical workstation workloads, which was the beginning of the end of those.

486DX CPUs had an integrated FPU. Only the SX version didn't.

Right, of course. I had a DX in mid nineties and should have known ;-} Alas, it's been a while.

They ran DOS and most had monochrome monitors.

The Archimedes was way sexier: it booted straight into a GUI and also had BASIC in ROM.

I ran UNIX with X11 on my 386DX/25 PC in 1987.

Nice. Which flavour are we talking here?

Real UNIX - SysVR3.2 from Interactive Systems Inc. The X11 server was my own, used an NEC TMS34010 graphics card for 2d acceleration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com