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Comment by grahar64 | Hacker News Reader

A BBC micro was my first computer. Americans had Amegas or something, but I had a BBC and a big book with example BASIC programs.

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The American equivalent of the BBC Micro was very much the Apple II. Both based on the 6502, both dominated the market of ‘first computers purchased en masse by schools’ in the 1980s in their respective countries.

I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.

For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball.

At the time the Archimedes blew the nascent PC and every other machine out of the water, and yet couldn't get a toe-hold in the US market for reasons I've never quite understood. At the same point MS Windows looked shoddy at best in comparison to RiscOS.

Acorn didn't so much drop the ball as that the industry took off in a way that they simply could not have dealt with for the exact same reason that your EU start-up that is successful usually ends up being acquired: lack of access to easy capital. SV was well established by the time that the personal computer took off and even though they found their own nice niche (education) they never started out to conquer the world, they achieved their goals - and then some, see linked article - and managed to pivot fast enough and well enough to eventually give intel a run for their money, which is no mean achievement.

RiscOS wasn't even on the table for the likes of IBM and that is what it would have taken to succeed in the business market. But for many years the preferred machine to create Videotext or ATEX (automatic typesetting system) bitstreams was to have a BBC micro and there were quite a few other such interesting niches. I still know of a few BBCs running art installations that have been going non-stop for close to 45 years now. Power supplies are the biggest problem but there are people that specialize in repairing them, and there are various DIY resources as well (videos, articles).

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

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?

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

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

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.

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?

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

Did capital make the big difference? Apple didn't take huge VC rounds back then and lasted much longer.

I think it was just relative lack of apps in the end. Microsoft commodified the hardware so it became competitive and prices fell dramatically. Every other company stayed attached to their integrated designs and couldn't keep up on cost. Apple held on for a while because of the bigger US ecosystem and economy but nearly got wiped out also.

Also the RiscOS wasn't really backwards compatible with BBC apps and games, iirc. More like a clean-sheet design.

Lack of capital almost killed Apple.

I had a BBC B as my first computer and would likely have enjoyed having an Archimedes greatly, but in retrospect "IBM compatible" was winning the day even then.

The 80s were crazy. In 1981 Sinclair had a market with a 1KB machine and in 1985 the Amiga came out.

That's 4 years! The 386 came out in 1985 too.

I think Acorn did quite well and its legacy still lives on through ARM. Where's IBM in the desktop or CPU market?

I don't think Acorn "dropped the ball". They were doing amazing things, but they simply weren't IBM, and their PC wasn't an IBM PC. The corporate world was rapidly standardizing on PCs and MS DOS, and that it was crap didn't really matter; it was more powerful than what the corporate world before, and it had all the support it needed for business applications. Superior architecture didn't matter; killers apps did. I wish it was different and really hoped the Archimedes would be the new standard. Well, decades later the ARM would finally become the new standard.

> For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball.

Acorn's CPU division is the most successful CPU design house in the world and sells around 10x more than all forms of Intel and Intel-compatible chips put together.

It was named after its first product, the Acorn RISC Machine: ARM. It is still called Arm Ltd. today.

Arm alone is one half of the entire CPU market.

https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/arm-2025-q4-and-fy-fina...

An Acorn-compatible CPU is inside half of the processor-powered devices in the world.

How is that "dropping the ball"? It is the most successful processor design of all time, bar none.

It wasn't their goal to become a CPU vendor, come on. He was clearly meaning the Acorn computers.

It was such a pity. As a British schoolboy in the early 90s we had a mix of Acorns and PCs, and I had a BBC Model B at home and then a bit later also a PC. Very lucky in hindsight.

The Acorn machines were ridiculously better except for fewer games. At first I don't remember there being much of a gaming gap and there were plenty of games targeting the BBC Micros, but as games scaled up the bigger US economy started to matter much more and the app/game selection just wasn't as good.

But in terms of engineering the GUI was better than Windows, but more importantly the reliability was way higher. My primary school teachers (!) were constantly getting me to fix the computers or install new apps because they always broke. When an Acorn "broke" it was something like the printer being out of paper. When the PC "broke" it was always something much, much harder.

I agree about the virtues of the kit. I owned several Archies and loved them.

But the goal of a company is to survive, sell stuff, and make money. One division of Acorn survives, makes money, and dominates the industry, and the A in its name stands for Acorn.

(Some other bits survive inside Broadcom and things.)

It focussed on the successful bits and executed superbly. As the desktop PC industry consolidated on x86 and MS OSes it moved away. Good move. That's keeping your eye on the ball, in my book.

I can't think of any other company that did so well.

Sun, SGI, Cray, DEC, all either dead, or acquired, or sold on and split up, or sold off the divisions they were known for, and little or nothing of their tech lives on. IBM still makes POWER servers and workstations. That's about it. But not PCs.

Apple makes machines that use the Acorn ARM instruction set and can't run any binaries from their own PowerPC era kit, let alone 68k. It's doing great but by savagely chopping away legacy tech.

I think Acorn did great by comparison!

Yep, Acorn competitor to the Amiga and ST would was the Archimedes (followed by the A series and Risc PC).

The Archimedes was powered by a 32-bit ARM 2 and it was awesome. :D

The first time I started up an Archimedes and ran Lander it really felt like the future had arrived. The smoke particles in particular (heh) were very impressive.

The Archimedes was too expensive and not very well supported. The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.

I never felt that way. I thought both the Amiga and the ST were great, each with useful and unique features but I still loved the Acorns.

IMHO the GUI was better on RiscOS and being able to run video at 25fps in just software felt like magic. At the time, I never saw Amigas doing that without expensive hardware like the Video Toaster, even Amiga A3000s.

You could even get 12.5fps video off floppy disc which seemed crazy at the time.

> The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.

And yet... Do you own a smartphone of any kind?

It has an Acorn-compatible CPU inside it. In fact, if it isn't 20+ years old, it has several: it has a multicore main CPU with several different Arm cores, and there are more in the Wifi controller, and more in the Bluetooth controller.

There is a pretty good chance that if you own an x86 machine with wifi, it includes multiple Arm cores too. Whatever OS you run, from Windows to BSD, if you were to search your SSD, you will find BLOBs of Arm code on it.

Is there any Amiga or ST derived tech in them? Not that I know of. But a company with "A" for Acorn in its name is in very nearly every device with a microprocessor.

I first used an Archimedes back in 1988 running Arthur 1.2.

Nice one. That's the year before I bought my first.

I thought it was a superb deal up against things like the Amiga and ST, because it was much faster and more capable for a hobby programmer.

And in the first job I had, my 2nd hand A310 cost £800. It had 1MB RAM, a 20MB hard disk, and a colour monitor. So probably half its new price.

The fastest machine that the VAR I worked for offered was an IBM PS/2 Model 70-A21:

http://www.walshcomptech.com/ps2/70A21.htm

A 25MHz 80386DX with a tiny L1 cache on the daughterboard. Our demo one had a 80387DX and 2MB of RAM and a 120MB HDD, the first 3.5" HDD I ever saw.

It retailed at about £10,000 for the base model, without "optional" extras like keyboard, DOS, or a monitor.

Tricked out like the display one with an 8514 XGA display, something like £15,000 or £16,000.

I tested it. My Archimedes was 4x to 8x faster in integer benchmarks. And it had a GUI -- the PS/2 didn't, this was before Windows 3.0 -- and it multitasked, which the PS/2 also didn't.

Overpriced my left kidney. It had astonishing industry-beating price:performance. It stomped all over the fastest x86 kit in the world: it ran a usable pure-software emulation of an x86 PC on which I could run work apps.

It's great having a superfast computer without any useful software. Sure there were things like Pro Artisan but it was no good compared to DPaint on the Amiga. I didn't want to run PC software but did want to run Mac software. So when you mention emulation, the Amigas of the time were faster with emulating of the Mac than the hardware Macs themselves for a period. When RISC OS came along it was nice but had that horrible error dialogue that restricted mouse movement. The memory allocation needing to be manually set was also wacky. The Amiga also had a BBC BASIC emulator coded in 68K assembler so even that wasn't an advantage anymore. Side by side, you got more value from using an Amiga. The Arch might be great for running benchmarks though.

Why should I care?

I wasn't interested in drawing pictures or playing games. I was interested in exploring programming on something that wasn't as horribly constrained as my previous machines -- 3 different Z80 powered boxes. (Sinclair Spectrum, SAM Coupé, Amstrad PCW 9512).

I had a choice of editors. I had BBC BASIC and a compiler. I had Obey scripts to explore OS scripting. I also could get hold of C, Pascal, and a few other compilers, but most of them were too expensive.

I could declare arrays that took a meg of RAM. Or, declare a RAMdisk and then put frames of short videos in it, then experiment with compressing and decompressing them, and later save the results to HDD or floppy.

I didn't want a gaming machine with some graphics apps, even if it could emulate a different 68K box that was so expensive that its apps cost as much as the entire computer I was sitting in front of.

I am not saying your use case was not valid for you, but it wasn't even something of interest for me to explore. I didn't, and still don't, care about drawing pictures. I'm quite interested in learning how to generate pictures, though.

You're presenting these things as drawbacks for the Archie and advantages for the Miggy. They're not. Those are absolutes. The stuff you describe are selling points for particular target markets... and some of the Archie's tools in related, overlapping markets were highly competitive. Impression and Ovation for DTP, Sibelius for musical notation. An offshoot of ArtWorks was sold by Corel for a while and it's still on sale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Designer_Pro%2B

It is very much not fair to make out the Archie platform had no apps. It did, and some of the biggest names made it onto other platforms. Some are still on sale today.

https://www.xara.com/

https://www.avid.com/sibelius

But I didn't care about them on RISC OS myself then and I don't now because that's not an area of interest for me.

Still, they exist, and they are competitive.

> in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles

That’s my understanding as well. In the US the NES was huge in the late 80s, but in the UK home computers were dominant. The NES never sold well in the UK.

The 16-bit consoles did later on, though. So did the 8-bit Sega Master System, but not until the early 90s - it wasn’t a predecessor to the 16-bit machines, but a budget-friendly contemporary.

There's a very important distinction to be made between the Beeb and the Apple II (or most other 8 bit micros).

The Beeb was a very well engineered machine, including the BASIC (which allowed in-line assembly and also allowed its functions to be called from assembly, ie other programs).

The Amiga was much bigger in Europe/UK than the US, though.

The Apple II would be an example of the opposite.

Currency exchange rates in the early 80s meant that most US machines were much more expensive than their European equivalents.

Commodore, the owner of Amiga, was an American company but they had factories in Europe.

The Amiga was more 2nd gen. I think the Micro equivalent was more like an Apple I/II. TRS-80/Tandy Color, or Vic-20/C64. The Amiga was Motorola 68000 based and at a clockspeed that really outran those zlog and 6502 based early devices.

The Amiga was a pretty impressive device with an OS that was fairly advanced. You could probably use it still today for word processing and sound design and not feel like you're missing much. The OS looks a lot like one of those super low-resource linux DE's.

Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were 16-bit 68000 chips.

The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following:

BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master

Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64

Atari 400/800 XL

Tandy TRS80

Oric Atmos

Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL

Amstrad CPC 464

Dragon 32/64

MSX machines

The Sinclair QL was a 68k machine, not an 8-bit (and famously what Linus Torvalds had before he got a 386 based PC).

Edit: 8-bit data bus though, which I didn't know until reading up on the Motorola 68008 just now! Trust Uncle Clive to cheap-out as usual...

I cut my teeth on a ZX81 and even had a Spectrum +3 later on - that was the last gasp of the 8-bit Z80 Sinclair line, although the IP was owned by Amstrad by then.

The QL indeed had a 68008, and at the time there was a lot of debate about what bitness it really was. Bit the real cheapskatery was the microdrives.

I am not sure what your point is here.

You miscategorize most of the lines in this list.

> Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were 16-bit 68000 chips.

And the Mac which outsold both in the long run.

You missed:

Sinclair QL -- also a MC 680x0.

> The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following:

> BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master

> Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64

> Atari 400/800 XL

All 6502, yes. But you missed:

> Oric Atmos

Then you do not have a category for Zilog kit.

> Tandy TRS80

> Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL

Not the QL, no.

> Amstrad CPC 464

> MSX machines

Then another error. This line:

> Dragon 32/64

Is neither 6502 nor Z80. It is a Motorola 6809, along with 1 model of TRS-80.

Given this confusion I am not sure what you were trying to say.

The BBCs were niche products in Britain where they were mostly used in education. They were too expensive so parents bought Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s. Even the cheap BBC Model B, the Electron, was a poor seller.

We had an Electron. It was a fun little machine, that you could expand to a fun big machine. Originally 32kB RAM and 32kB ROM, ours eventually ended up with 224kB ROM due to all the expansions you could hook on the back of that thing. Didn't really help its stability, though.

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