Acorns land at Bletchley Park
Summary: Acorn was a star of British tech in the 1980s, but faded as IBM took hold. Take a tour of the computer maker's lineup in this dig through the archives at the National Museum of Computing
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Acorn ABC
The Acorn Business Computer was the first sign that even when Acorn could build computers, it had the greatest trouble marketing them.
The Acorn Business Computer (ABC) was a BBC Micro with more memory and a selection of second processors, such as the Z80 or 80286, packaged in a large monitor. Launched after the IBM PC, it's hard at this distance to understand the logic of a computer based on an educational machine, with many incompatible variants, but priced as a business computer.
In fact, the ABC was never really launched at all, and the entire range was cancelled before any were delivered to customers — although one was rebranded as the Cambridge Workstation to appeal to engineers. It didn't.
Photo credit: Rupert Goodwins
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Talkback
As a member of the South Yorkshire Personal Computer Group I was also in the lecture hall when somebody from Acorn came to demonstrate the BBC. I can clearly remember him smoking away whilst showing what it could do in a very casual off-hand fashion. There was a stampede at the end of people wanting to place orders for the machine.
Very fond memories.
I'm surprised you didn't show the Archimedes though.
No mention of the Archimedes or the RiscPC, GUI using ARM Chips back then
I moved from the Electron to the BBC B and then to the Acorn Archimedes and then to a duel CPU (StrongARM 200 Risc) and Intel Pentium 100 two slice RiscPC back in the early 90's and became an Acorn Dealer back then. I have come full circle and now have a Raspberry Pi running RiscOS once more sitting next to my Xeon Intel Powered PC.
Tom (Electro Technical Officer BP Shipping)