3 ms·

Realistically I don t think Acorn ever really and a hope of becoming a mass market success because their failure wasn’t technical. BeOS was a far better operati

Realistically I don t think Acorn ever really and a hope of becoming a mass market success because their failure wasn’t technical. BeOS was a far better operating system than RiscOS but at the end of the day agglomeration effects are far more important than technical prowess. Maybe they could have captured some of Sun or SGI’s market share but who remembers them either? (I say this as someone who grew up with first and Electron then an A3000.)

lproven 4y ago
This is a good point, yes. I reckon Acorn had 2 possible escape routes, but they didn't seem to notice either. [1] Make the thinnest lightest longest-battery-life laptops around, able to do all the stuff the DOS/Win9x phat boyz did but with no fan, no extra cooling, and do it for a day at a time. RISC OS would have been fine for that... but it was just a different dead end road. [2] The Phoebe (RISC PC 2) was SMP-capable, had richer media support and PCI and so on, but RISC OS wasn't SMP ready and wasn't going to be. SMP was already manifestly The Future. So, commit to it. Current SOTA OSes in ~1998 that could do SMP were either: • Expensive proprietary UNIX workstations -- so undercut them • Windows NT 4 -- not really finished yet, serious weaknesses (e.g. no USB), even if it was the first version with a credible UI. • Linux was not there yet. There was an opening, but the plan to build their own OS -- again -- was insane. They didn't know it but they needed a partner with a lightweight SMP media OS. Be had a lightweight SMP media OS but needed more competitive hardware. But these are just daydreams. If the bottom line is just maximising revenue -- to hell with changing the world, just sell more sugar water (to paraphrase Jobs to Sculley) -- then they did the right thing. Sell lotsa chips, dump the workstations and the OS.

lproven 4y ago

This is a good point, yes. I reckon Acorn had 2 possible escape routes, but they didn't seem to notice either. [1] Make the thinnest lightest longest-battery-life laptops around, able to do all the stuff the DOS/Win9x phat boyz did but with no fan, no extra cooling, and do it for a day at a time. RISC OS would have been fine for that... but it was just a different dead end road. [2] The Phoebe (RISC PC 2) was SMP-capable, had richer media support and PCI and so on, but RISC OS wasn't SMP ready and wasn't going to be. SMP was already manifestly The Future. So, commit to it. Current SOTA OSes in ~1998 that could do SMP were either: • Expensive proprietary UNIX workstations -- so undercut them • Windows NT 4 -- not really finished yet, serious weaknesses (e.g. no USB), even if it was the first version with a credible UI. • Linux was not there yet. There was an opening, but the plan to build their own OS -- again -- was insane. They didn't know it but they needed a partner with a lightweight SMP media OS. Be had a lightweight SMP media OS but needed more competitive hardware. But these are just daydreams. If the bottom line is just maximising revenue -- to hell with changing the world, just sell more sugar water (to paraphrase Jobs to Sculley) -- then they did the right thing. Sell lotsa chips, dump the workstations and the OS.