> It always felt like if Acorn had been based in the US, the world would be using Acorn machines. I agree. But there is a more nuanced take: RISC OS was amazi

> It always felt like if Acorn had been based in the US, the world would be using Acorn machines. I agree. But there is a more nuanced take: RISC OS was amazing. It was a tour de force in the 1980s, predating Windows 3, Apple System 7, OS/2 1.1 (the first version with a GUI), and of course Windows 3.0. But it was very limited in some ways and it still is today. Acorn killed the RISC PC 2 "Phoebe" which could have supported dual CPU SMP -- but Acorn's OS couldn't. So Acorn would have needed to change OS to a new OS at some point, and if so, the computers wouldn't have been Archimedes any more. They'd have been ARM boxes with other OSes running on them. Some kind of UNIX probably. Then they'd have won. But this did happen and they did win. ARM boxes running UNIX are everywhere and they are in the pockets of something like 2/3 of the human race, all day every day. The real missed chances were not for RISC OS everywhere, which was never going to happen. I loved RISC OS but it was doomed. Hand coded ARM assembly for an always-on internet-connected SMP machine was not going to happen. The 2 real missed chances are other things. That if other OSes had got in first, before UNIX, then they could have won big. Around the time Acorn was giving up on desktops, BeOS was moving from PowerPC to x86. Imagine if Be, spurned by Apple, did a deal with Acorn instead. A $2500 BeOS desktop workstation with 4 passively-cooled ARM chips, silent and with blisteringly fast smooth multithreading, in 1998 or so, years before Windows 2000? Or if Be didn't want to play, an ARM-based Amiga with QNX? But the big missed chance was a whole decade earlier. Apple built and evaluated an ARM-based Mac called Möbius in the late 1980s. https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/where_computing_went_wrong_feature_part_3/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/where_computing_went_... It was a possible successor to the Apple IIGS and it ran Apple II and IIGS code, and 68000 MacOS apps too, faster than any of them on real silicon at the time. If it had the bravery, Apple could have gone directly to ARM from 68000, bypassing its entire PowerPC era and entire Intel era and about 20 years of technological detours.