Acorn Computers

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Intelligently designed systems from Cambridge, England

I was lucky enough to be one of the generation of Brits that were taught BBC Basic at school (well, I taught myself, years before we even got to it in the classrooms ;-) . Back then in the 1980's, computers were seen as things that everyone could easily learn to use and actually write programs on for their own projects and enjoyment, as it should be. The BBC Micro was a great step along that road, and was brought into education in association with the BBC. This fine machine made Acorn famous and is fondly remembered by many of my generation. Sadly their future products such as the Archimedes series, while employing cutting edge 32-bit RISC technology, didn't sell so well in a market infested with cheap IBM-compatible Personal Computers as the world slid blindly into the Dark Ages that was the Microsoft decade of the 1990's before GNU/Linux became popular. Nowadays Acorn lives on in the form of ARM (Advanced RISC Machines), which power billions of embedded devices in use today such as the ubiquitous mobile phones, which have thankfully ended Microsoft's reign of terror.

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