An Acorn computer from the late 80s.

The Archimedes had an ARM2 RISC processor, the first ARM processor deployed in a commercial machine.
* http://www.mcmordie.co.uk/acornhistory/archist.shtml

Most of the operating system was on ROM - making it ''very'' quick to boot and requiring about half the hard disc capacity of a pc of the time. Later versions had a notepad like text editor, a simple paint package and a drawing package on ROM too.

3 button mice as standard.

Had an extended version of BbcBasic as the operating system command line.

Had quite a nice operating system or am I just looking back with rose tinted glasses?

-- JamesKeogh

Not at all. We use the most recent version as a commercial EmbeddedSystem. The operating system is RiscOs, and we extensively use C, ARM assembly language, and the built-in scripting language, which is a recent form of BasicLanguage. -- ??

Fantastic, I've not been near an acorn machine for about 10 years (I think my parents may still have a RiscPc somewhere though). It's all coming back now. The WIMP system would make a great case study for UserInterface still. -- jk

Yeah they were nice boxes. OS upgrades were a bugger though. I remember going through an entire classroom with screwdriver and new ROM in hand ;-) -- AdrianHoward

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One nice feature of the UI I'm still waiting to see elsewhere is a "save dialog" which included an icon that could be dragged to a destination to save the document to that destination. (The closest I've noticed since was in OS/2's programmers' editor EPM, which had an icon in its title bar you could drag to a drag and drop target at any time.)

The Acorn Archimedes may also have been the first desktop machine to use anti-aliased scalable fonts.

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CategoryHardware