Acorn Computers to be reborn as laptop maker

If you're a Brit of a certain age, the name Acorn probably has as much resonance for you as Commodore or Amiga does for us Yanks. No, it's not because you're a squirrelwatcher (not that there's anything wrong with that). It's because of Acorn Computers, the pioneering manufacturer of the late 70s and early 80s, which quit the computer business in the 90s. Now, according to reports, Acorn is set to be reborn as notebook vendor. The revived Acorn will launch next week with four laptops, ranging from a 12-incher to one with a 17-inch display. Rather than running Acorn's old RISC OS, however, the new boxes will be fairly convention Windows XP laptops, and will come bundled with Star Office.

[Jason @ May 5th 2006 10:21AM]

Will they come bundled with a free BBC Model B emulator? I need to get my Chuckie Egg fix :)

[EdZ @ May 5th 2006 10:21AM]

Wasn't the Amiga more popular in Europe than America? I certainly prefered my A1200 over the Acorn (though having to regularly fix the computers at the primary school I was attending probably didn't do much to sway me toward them).

[hussein rawat @ May 5th 2006 10:25AM]

yes definitely need chuckie egg and castle quest. but this is something i did not see coming up. well this is going real retro!

[bob @ May 5th 2006 10:26AM]

they should have kept risc os, that would be cool. but i think they sold it off for use in pda's - set-tops etc.

[ralphg @ May 5th 2006 10:27AM]

I think Acorn got the contract from BBC to create a home computer Brits could buy to follow along with a BBC series on home computers in the 1980s. That gave them access to a lot of money without having to prove market superiority.

[Ultim8fury @ May 5th 2006 10:43AM]

Wow. Blast from eons ago. My first computer was an Acorn Electron. I still have it in my loft. Haven't used it in years and I'm not sure any of the tapes would still be serviceable.

Nice to see them get back into the computer industry.

[Paul Livingstone @ May 5th 2006 11:12AM]

Awesome, although why Windows XP? Acorn's OS was bangin!

[Korey @ May 5th 2006 11:51AM]

do they have a website?? i wanna see specs of these things will they be available stateside?

[RobW @ May 5th 2006 12:04PM]

My interest in computers started at 11 or so on a ZX-81, but took root when I got a BBC Micro. I learnt about programming, Basic, assembler, pointers, graphics, Forth, and a whole shed loads of things I've used ever since (ok, except Forth!)

I can honestly say - the decent living I've earned ever since in IT is down to these 2 machines ....

[prickly pete @ May 5th 2006 12:12PM]

One question, Why?
in a already crowded notebook market come out against the Chinese who own the market. Sounds like another Tiger Telematics venture of crash n burn.

[SEbastien Derenoncourt @ May 5th 2006 12:28PM]

(you guys do realize that ARM --of intel Xscale fame-- is the processor branch of Acorn right, and that ARM processors are pretty much based on Acorn RISC processors?)
In this ARM incarnation Acorn is actually much much much better as its IP powers everything from Cell phones to PDAs, Cars and "MILLIONS" of other devices literally.

[John @ May 5th 2006 12:43PM]

I still have a BBC micro & one the first generation Acorn Archimedes computers (where the ARM chips first appeared). The latter is upgraded to use an overclocked ARM3 running at 36MHz :-)

I too am wondering about the WinXP choice though, esp. in a market already saturated with WinXP laptops and desktops. Acorn also had a BSD based OS for the Archimedes... it would have been very interesting to see them use an updated version of that on these new laptops, perhaps with their own RiscOS based desktop environment (kind of like Apples BSD based OS with an Apple desktop on top of it)... They could still run Windoze using something like VMware, or just dual boot it, for those who need the adrenaline rush of running a low security OS every now and again ;-)

[Steve @ May 5th 2006 12:52PM]

To #10's point, ARM actually stands for Acorn RISC Machine. When the Acorn Archimedes first came out, using the first ARM processor, it was 2x faster than the next fastest computer you could buy (which was a Mac II costing waaaay more, IIRC)

[VinceH @ May 5th 2006 1:13PM]

In reply to post #8, the website for this 'new acorn' is http://www.acorncomputer.co.uk

I don't believe this company has any real connection to the Acorn of old, other than the name - though I could, of course, be wrong.

[Brant @ May 5th 2006 1:15PM]

OMG I totally remember Chuckie Egg !! Thanks for reminding me, oh those days of typing a save command and hitting record on the tape player... awesome. I still have my Acorn Electron here in the US (I moved over here in 91) and have special power outlets in my office for my British electronics... I'm going to have to get that thing out of storage!

[VV @ May 5th 2006 1:42PM]

Chuckie Egg for the PC:

http://www.bagshot-row.org/chuckie-egg/retroremakes.html#DirectXChuckieEgg

Works really well, though the birds in level 7 don't use the same route as those on the Beeb version.

#12 - ARM originally stood for "Acorn RISC Machine". When ARM was spun out of Acorn, they renamed it to "Advanced RISC Machines".

#4 - you can still buy a computer with RISC OS:
www.iyonix.com

RISC OS was originally sold to PACE in 1998 or so and used in STBs. PACE licensed it to a company called RISC OS Ltd, who developed it further for existing Acorn machines (RISC PC). A long-time Acorn dealer known as Castle Technology bought the rights to RISC (don't remember the exact details) a few years later for the Iyonix, where it lives on as RISC OS 5.

I still have two Electrons, two BBC Bs, two Master 128s, a Master Compact, an A3010 and a RISC PC (the StrongARM version). I was a huge Acorn fan back in the day and the name "Stan Bolland" will forever be tainted for me (he was the guy in charge when Acorn was dismembered).

[moggy @ May 5th 2006 2:57PM]

FWIW, Commodore and Amiga mean as much (in fact probably a lot more) to Brits of a certain age than they do to Yanks. When I was in primary school, you either had a Sinclair Spectrum, a C64 or a BBC Micro Model B (which was made by Acorn, and was named as it was the machine chosen by the BBC to be the base for all their "home computer" education programmes). Or a TRS80. If you were way behind the curve, maybe you had a ZX81 or a VIC-20.

Most people had a Speccy cos they were cheap and had loads of games, the 64 was next in popularity and then the big, rather nerdy, worthy old Beeb - a lot less games but better for 'real computing' cos of its full keyboard and copious learning resources.

Still - in-house software division Acornsoft did great arcade ripoffs (their Defender clone 'Planetoid' was awesome), it had the best version of Chuckie Egg, it had Geoff Crammond with Aviator (perhaps the first real flight sim) and Revs (the first real driving sim), and it's where Elite - the grandfather of all space trading/fighting sims was born.

After that though it was all Amiga or Atari ST, with the Acorn offerings way behind. Most of my peers had an Amiga cos it was obviously much better :D (except maybe for MIDI stuff) - I still have my old A500, a A1200, a CDTV(!) and I picked an original A1000 for $10 from Goodwill a couple of years ago. But only geeks in the US know about Amigas.

It didn't matter in the end of course, cos Windows came and killed them all.

I actually went to university with one of the top Archimedes game programmers, Tom Cooper, and spent many a happy hour "beta-testing" Cycloids and Hamsters (instead of doing coursework and going to classes). Great games.

[Dale @ May 5th 2006 5:20PM]

Yes, being British and a certain age, I have far more fondness for the Commodore Amiga... more than any American I know.

The Acorns and their BBC counterparts were foisted on us at school till this strange "Windows" malarkey caught on, but anyone cool from about 1988 on wanted the Amiga.

[wjb @ May 5th 2006 5:47PM]

#15 - "RISC OS was originally sold to PACE in 1998 or so and used in STBs. PACE licensed it to a company called RISC OS Ltd"

Wrong!

Acorn changed their name to Element14.

RISCOS Ltd licensed RISC OS from Element14, which Pace later bought in order to get the STB staff.

[Mule @ May 5th 2006 6:18PM]

I had an Amiga A600hd im sure Amiga and Commodore (64 etc) were just as big in the Uk as in the Us. Not that it matters just a small point (like a tiny arrow.....or something)

[Andrew Griffiths @ May 5th 2006 7:50PM]

My family distributed Acorns in Australia for a few years, so we always had many at home, and RISCOS kicked arse when windows 3.1 was all the rage on windows machines, RISCOS was quick to bootup, rarely crashed, was a WHOLE lot nicer to use, and was a billion times quicker, plus I could run windows with the 486DX card inside the machine on a CPU riser. And back then they had tiny low power CPU's and a 3 button mouse with the middle as the menu key. Certainly beat installing windows from 30 bloody floppy discs.

[cf18 @ May 5th 2006 9:27PM]

I still have fond memory of using BBC BASIC with those Model B+ from high school in Hong Kong. Excellent first language with some Pascal like features, and much faster than Microsoft BASIC from the same era.

[funetik @ May 6th 2006 5:39AM]

Ah yes.. fond primary school memories here, too. Most Acorn's I encountered had non-standard keyboard layouts though. Everyone always swapped the keys around.

[Copperhead @ May 6th 2006 3:24PM]

Ah yes, my Amiga 500 (I had a ram pack though!) sat side by side with my old Electron for yearsm sharing a TV.

Those were the days..... floppy disks and audio cassette games :)

[Matt B @ May 6th 2006 4:37PM]

You're comment about the Atari ST & Amiga in connection to the Acorn machines is a little skewed. The hey day for Acorn machines were the 8 bit machines including the Atom, BBC Model A & B, Electron and later the BBC Master. The ST & Amiga were part of the next generation of 16 bit machines that came out after the Apple Mac. The ST was often referred to as the 'Jackintosh' after Jack Tramiel of Atari.

The ST & Amiga were both huge in the UK & the rest of Europe, with the ST loosing steam first and the Amiga carrying on for a bit longer into the era of multi-media capable PC's.

Also during 8-bit era the Sinclair ZX81, Spectrum (known as 'Timex' in the US), Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX were huge in europe with less many popular machines such as the Jupiter Ace, Enterprise, Genie, Oric 1 & Atmos, Dragon 32 & 64. There were dozens of machines and manufacturers vying for dominance. As I understand it the Apple II & Atari 400/800/etc. were more dominant in the USA during the 8-bit era.

The BBC Micro (codenamed 'Proton') did well because it was adopted by British schools due to a deal with the BBC, Acorn & the Government. It was very expensive and lacked 'game' hardware for dealing with sprites, lots of colours, etc. Although it's "faster" 4Mhz 6502 processor was a god send when it came to Elite, as most other home computers were about 1Mhz when it came out.

I owned a BBC with disc (as they spelt it) drives and lots of expensive extras, as well as a 'Speccy', Atari 800XL & disk drive, Atari ST with HDD, Amiga 500, Commodore CD-TV, Acorn Atom and many other machines during my childhood and learnt to program them all. At no point did we see the PC as competition as it was slow, boring and unimpressive. Shame how things turned out. I'm plenty happy with my Apple machines running lots of emulators now :-)

Acorn went on to produce the Archimedes with their own RISC CPU which was very very advanced for the time. Much of the ARM technology lives on in many PDA's today.

As for Acorn producing PC laptops today it can't be more than a marketing effort to capitalise on the history behind the name. I wonder if someone has just bought the rights to the name in order to exploit it in a similar way others have wanted to exploit the Commodore, Atari & Amiga brand names in the past.

I just don't see this effort as having 'legs'.

[Lemster @ May 7th 2006 10:47AM]

Crikey... never thought I'd see the day. Very great memories of the RiscPC (you expanded it by stacking "slices" on top of each other and adding whatever drives/cards you wanted into the slice)just a shame they ballsed up with the RiscPC 2 yellow-monstrosity:

http://www.a4com.de/riscos/ph_img1.htm

Looking at that http://www.acorncomputer.co.uk site, it definitely looks like them, it's the same old logo!

I just hope it's more than re-selling re-branded hardware.

[phipscube @ May 8th 2006 8:22AM]

Acorn was only ever known in UK as makers of "Education" computers for schools. Sinclair with the Spectrum and later Commodore with the Amiga dominated the markets for home computing until the PC took off in the mid 90's. The Amiga was probably most popular in UK than anywhere else in the world. The A500 sold around 2.5 Million which sounds like nothing nowadays, but back then it was amazing to sell that much.

[David Holden @ May 10th 2006 9:01AM]

In case anyone is taking this at face value this company is absolutely nothing to do with the original Acorn Computers who produced the famous world beating BBC and Archimedes computers and RISC OS. It's just another PC-centric company that seems to have bought up the old (now defunct) Acorn name (note the logo is subtly different) and is trying to masquerade as the original company ressurected.

[Peter @ May 10th 2006 10:42AM]

As far as I know this company has no connection with the Acorn of old.
There are though two companys making and selling old Acorn and/or newer "RISC OS" computers.

http://www.thea9.info/
http://www.castle-technology.co.uk/

The Operating system is being developed as well by

http://www.riscos.com

[john @ May 15th 2006 8:36AM]

This defo has no connection to Acorn of old.

They bought the right to use the name Acorn form a french company but, as far as can be assertained, have no right to use the Acorn nut logo or claim old acorn is back etc.. etc..

This company is a completly new company that just happens to have the name acorn.... Personally (and this may be just me) I wouldn't deal with a company who appear to be trying to decive us into thinking Acorn are back.

Just my humble opinion anyway

[Stuart Todd @ May 15th 2006 12:44PM]

Hi there Ladies and Gentleman,

As a admittedly long-term Acorn fan, I was saddened to hear that the "brand" name was been resurrected to market PCs. I feel that the following link may be of interest to people who have followed the interesting discussions here:

http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact1594.html

Take care all

Toddy

[Smeg @ May 16th 2006 5:41PM]

It's either going to work - the name, according to thier leaflets from CTS2006, is the most commonly recognised name in the education sector. They've obviosuly bought the rights to it, and now they need to deliver. If they deliver high quality PC's then it won't be long until the name gets around the industry and schools etc will be buying them.

It's certainly getting the publicity at the moment. So long as the product is good, not cheap stuff from china, then there's no reason why they shouldn't do well.

If only I had thought of the idea first...