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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes like to escape into a fantasy daydream world when I'm at work, where the British government of the 80s realized the importance of controlling your own destiny, and just bought a million Acorn Archimedes for the entire civil service, military, universities etc, enough that it became a no-brainer for everyone else in the UK. We could be 10-20 years ahead of where we are now. Same if the Germans and Dutch had just bought Commmodore and Atari outright and moved their production over.

Of course if they had they would probably have been tricked into buying Amstrad shit.

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I live in a similar fantasy land, however I think Acorn had ample help from the UK government. After all, pretty much every secondary school in the UK purchased them. That and free national TV advertising from the BBC.

The problem was that platforms that were limited to a single nation were not viable, Acorn never really broke into the US market. I don't believe there was even much adoption in Europe. You can see the same story in Japan with MSX.

That said, I agree that RiscOS was far superior to many competitors. But as we still see, it is adoption and the ecosystem around the platform which is often the deciding factor in success than the superiority of the basic technology.

Still more than a little nostalgic though... and wish it was able to address international markets better. Anyone have some cash to buy the rights to RiscOS and open source it? I think it only take 30K GBP or so. :)

If just the cash were the problem I'd be happy to do it but I think RiscOS's time has past.

QnX now, that would be another matter but I suspect RIM will want more then 30 K for it. I already approached Quantum when they still owned it but there was absolutely no way to get them to even respond. Which is a pity because I think something like QnX in open source form would absolutely rock.

That and free national TV advertising from the BBC.

Ah that is not true. In fact Acorn paid the BBC a royalty on every Beeb sold.

RiscOS is open source https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

Hmmm.. if you count non-commercial restriction, parts have that.

And hadn't the British government also already had a pretty serious go at building a national champion in computing with ICL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limite... ? IIRC part of the problem was that when it came to building a global computer business on the foundation of a home-market advantage, US companies had by far the biggest and wealthiest home market.

That would require the UK civil service to treat STEM graduates as equals to the Classics grads - instead of some below stairs oily menial.

Yes the British civil service has a long history of ignoring British engineers and just doing whatever the Americans tell them. A key example is Black Arrow. Or the TSR-2. Exactly the same with the PC. Imagine how it could have been...

I remember being take out to CIT on a school trip and seeing the TSR2 sadly sitting at the back of one of the hangers.

A plane so hot that one of the protype's on a single engine could walk away from the fastest fighter of the era!

If I ever run a laundry files game 666 squadron will be using the advanced version of the TSR 2 rather than the Bombcords

The UK managed to mess up the TSR-2 all by itself [1].

[1] http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/documents/Research/RAF-Historica...

Thank you for posting that doc. My Dad worked on TSR-2 avionics (at Ferranti) and I grew up entertained by tales of TFR and moving map displays. Interesting reading.

Yeah, sometimes I like to daydream too: what would happen if Poland released to the public their 16bit computer built in early 70s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202

Hey! I loved my Amstrad.

what's that about Amstrad?

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