title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: Caldwell concluded that, in time,[T]he Kampuchean revolution will appear more and more clearly as one of the most significant early indications of the great and necessary change beginning to convulse the world in the later 20th century and shifting from a disaster-bound course to one holding out the promise of a better future for all.Caldwell also wrote that, "The evacuation of Phnom Penh was not, therefore, an unpremeditated act of savagery (as portrayed in the Western press), but a well-thought-out operation to feed its starving people." Shortly before departing for Cambodia, Caldwell delivered a speech to the Institute of Race Relations where he promoted the Pol Pot regime, concluding that "the Kampuchean experiment, which may appear to the Western media and to the Vietnamese and Russians as totally irrational, reactionary and backward, is a very valid and valuable experiment." He argued that "it would be a great pity" and"‘a very great tragedy" if "the Kampuchean experiment were to be extinguished.


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: Caldwell was a member of the first delegation of three Western writers—two Americans, Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman, and Caldwell—to be invited to visit Cambodia in December 1978, nearly 4 years after the Khmer Rouge had taken power. The invitation was apparently an effort by Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, to improve the image of the Khmer Rouge in the West, now questioned by some of its former academic sympathizers.


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: On 22 December, Caldwell had a private meeting with Pol Pot and returned "euphoric" to the guest house in Phnom Penh where the three members of the delegation were staying. During the night, Becker awoke to the sound of gunfire and saw a Cambodian man with a gun in the guest house outside her room. Later that night, she and Dudman were allowed by guards to venture out of their rooms and they discovered Caldwell's body. He had been shot. The body of a Cambodian man was also in his room.


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: The murder of Caldwell has never been fully explained. Four of the Cambodian guards were arrested and two "confessed" under torture, sayingWe were attacking to ruin the Khmer Rouge Party's policy, to prevent the Party from gathering friends in the world ... it would be enough to attack the English guest, because the English guest had written in support of our Party ... Therefore, we must absolutely succeed in attacking this English guest, in order that the American guests would write about it.Whatever the motive behind Caldwell's murder, it seems highly unlikely that it could have occurred in tightly controlled Cambodia without the involvement of high-level Khmer Rouge officials. According to Becker later on, "Caldwell’s death was caused by the madness of the regime he openly admired."


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: The impact of Caldwell's visit to Cambodia and his murder was muted by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia three days later on 25 December 1978, which soon ended the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Support for the Khmer Rouge in the Western academic community of Cambodian scholars quietly faded away. Peter Rodman, an American foreign policy expert and public official, stated that "When Hanoi [Vietnam] turned publicly against Phnom Penh, it suddenly became respectable for many on the Left to 'discover' the murderous qualities of the Khmer Rouge — qualities that had been obvious to unbiased observers for years."


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: With the takeover of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979 and the discovery of incontestable evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities, including mass graves, the "tales told by refugees," which had been doubted by many Western academics, proved to be entirely accurate. Some former enthusiasts for the Khmer Rouge recanted their previous views, others diverted their interest to other issues, and a few continued to defend the Khmer Rouge.


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: In an exchange with William Shawcross in an issue of "The New York Review of Books" dated 20 July 1978, Gareth Porter wrote thatIt is true, as Shawcross notes from my May 1977 Congressional testimony, that I have changed my view on a number of aspects of the Cambodian situation. I have no interest in defending everything the Khmer government does, and I believe that the policy of self-reliance has been carried so far that it has imposed unnecessary costs on the population of Cambodia. Shawcross, however, clearly does have an interest in rejecting our conclusions. It is time, I suggest, for him to examine it carefully, because it does not make for intellectual honesty.Shawcross responded,I was glad to acknowledge in my article that Mr. Porter had changed his views on the Khmer Rouge and it is a tribute to his own integrity that he now agrees that the Khmer Rouge have imposed 'unnecessary costs' on the Cambodian people. He should, however, be a little more careful before he accuses others of deliberately falsifying evidence and of intellectual dishonesty.In 2010, Porter said he had been waiting many years for someone to ask him about his earlier views of the Khmer Rouge. He described how the climate of distrust of the government generated during the Vietnam War carried over to Cambodia. "I uncovered a series of instances when government officials were propagandizing [about the Vietnam War]. They were lying," he explained. "I've been well aware for many years that I was guilty of intellectual arrogance. I was right about the bloodbath in Vietnam, so I assumed I would be right about Cambodia."


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: Australian Ben Kiernan recanted after interviewing 500 Cambodian refugees in 1979. He admitted that he had been "late in recognizing the extent of the tragedy in Cambodia ...and wrong about ...the brutal authoritarian trend within the revolutionary movement after 1973."


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: In the opinion of Donald W. Beachler, the genocide deniers and doubters among academics may have been motivated more by politics than a search for the truth, but conservatives who "embraced the reports" of Khmer Rouge atrocities had no less "cynicism or naiveté" in later downplaying reports of atrocities by anti-communists in Central America. He noted that the supportive attitude towards the Khmer Rouge had also been expressed by the U.S. government and politicians for a dozen years after the regime was toppled in January 1979, as part of the denigration against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s. In fact, the U.S. was one of the countries that had voted for the retainment of the Democratic Kampuchea's seat at the United Nations until 1991. Bruce Sharp, who points out many errors of Chomsky's analysis, also says that "While Chomsky's comments on Cambodia are misleading and inaccurate, one important point must be borne in mind: The actions of the United States were largely responsible for the growth of the Khmer Rouge."


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: In 2013, the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen passed legislation which makes illegal the denial of the Cambodian genocide and other war crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. The legislation was passed after comments by a member of the opposition, Kem Sokha, who is the deputy president of the Cambodian National Rescue Party. Sokha had stated that exhibits at Tuol Sleng were fabricated and that the artifacts had been faked by the Vietnamese following their invasion in 1979. Sokha's party have claimed that the comments have been taken out of context.


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: Certain authors have continued to downplay Khmer Rouge atrocities in recent years. Richard Dudman, who accompanied Caldwell to Cambodia, challenged the "conventional wisdom that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are irrational fanatics who practiced deliberate genocide [and] slaughtered more than one million Cambodians" in a 1990 editorial in "The New York Times", arguing that "The evidence for these fixed beliefs consists mainly of poignant though statistically inconclusive anecdotes from accounts of mass executions in a few villages. It comes mostly from those with an interest in blackening the name of the Khmer Rouge: From Cambodian refugees, largely the middle- and upper-class victims of the Pol Pot revolution, and from the Vietnamese."


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: In 2012, Holocaust denier Israel Shamir wrote an article titled "Pol Pot Revisited" for "CounterPunch" in which he argued:


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocutors. Surely the victorious peasants shot marauders and spies, but many more died of American-planted mines and during the subsequent Vietnamese takeover, they said ... Noam Chomsky assessed that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated 'by a factor of a thousand'...  To me, this recalls other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin's Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor ... [The Vietnamese] supported the black legend of genocide to justify their own bloody intervention.


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: Estimates of the number of Cambodians who died during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule have been controversial and range from less than one million to more than three million. Ben Kiernan, head of the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale University, estimated that the Khmer Rouge were responsible for 1.5 million deaths and later raised that estimate to 1.7 million, more than 20% of the population. His deputy, Craig Etcheson, undertook the most complete survey of mass graves and evidence of executions in Cambodia and concluded in 1999 that the Khmer Rouge may have executed as many as 1.5 million people and as many as another 1.5 million may have died of starvation and overwork. Kiernan criticized Etcheson for "sloppiness, exaggerating a horrific death toll," and "ethnic auctioneering." Etcheson's report was removed from the web site of the Cambodian Genocide Project.


title: Cambodian genocide denial

text: Kiernan had earlier been cited by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in 1979, saying that "[Kiernan] notes that most of the atrocity stories come from areas of little Khmer Rouge strength, where orders to stop reprisals were disobeyed by soldiers wreaking vengeance, often drawn from the poorest sections of the peasantry." Kiernan has since completely rejected his own previous explanation, saying in 1996 that: "Despite its underdeveloped economy, the regime probably exerted more power over its citizens than any state in world history. It controlled and directed their public lives more closely than government had ever done."


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Acorn Archimedes is a family of personal computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, England. The systems are based on Acorn's own ARM architecture processors and the proprietary operating systems Arthur and RISC OS. The first models were introduced in 1987, and systems in the Archimedes family were sold until the mid-1990s.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: ARM's RISC design, a 32-bit CPU (using 26-bit addressing), running at 8 MHz, was stated as achieving 4.5+ MIPS, which provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit home computers, such as Acorn's previous machines. Claims of being the fastest micro in the world and running at 18 MIPS were also made during tests.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Two of the first models—the A305 and A310—were given the BBC branding, with BBC Enterprises regarding the machines as "a continuing part of the original computer literacy project". Dissatisfaction with the branding arrangement was voiced by competitor Research Machines and an industry group led by a Microsoft representative, the British Micro Federation, who advocated the use of "business standard" operating systems such as MS-DOS. Responding to claims that the BBC branding was "unethical" and "damaging", a BBC Enterprises representative claimed that, with regard to the BBC's ongoing computer literacy initiatives, bringing in "something totally new would be irresponsible".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The name "Acorn Archimedes" is commonly used to describe any of Acorn's contemporary designs based on the same architecture. This architecture can be broadly characterised as involving the ARM CPU and the first generation chipset consisting of MEMC (MEMory Controller), VIDC (VIDeo and sound Controller) and IOC (Input Output Controller).


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Having introduced the BBC Micro in 1981, Acorn had established itself as a major supplier to primary and secondary education in the United Kingdom. Attempts to reproduce the same dominance in other sectors, such as in home computing with the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, and in other markets, such as the United States and West Germany, had been rather less successful.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: With microprocessor and computing technology making considerable advances in the early 1980s, microcomputer manufacturers were obliged to consider the evolution of their product lines to provide increasing capabilities and performance. Acorn's strategy for business computing and for introducing more capable machines involved a range of "second processor" expansions, with a Z80 second processor running the CP/M operating system being a product to which Acorn had committed when securing the BBC Micro contract.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Meanwhile, established platforms such as CP/M running on Z80 processors were being challenged by the introduction of the IBM PC running PC DOS and computers running a variety of operating systems on Intel processors such as the 8088 and 8086. Systems using the Motorola 68000 and other processors running the Unix operating system were also becoming available. Drawing on previous work by Xerox, Apple had launched the Lisa and Macintosh computers, and Digital Research had introduced its own GEM graphical user interface software.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Acorn's strategy ostensibly evolved to follow the lead of Torch Computers - the subject of an uncompleted acquisition by Acorn - who had already combined BBC Micro hardware with second processors (and modems) to produce their Communicator product line and derivatives. In 1984, Acorn presented the Acorn Business Computer (ABC) range, building around the BBC Micro architecture and offering models with different second processors and capabilities, thus responding to and anticipating the current and future trends in computing at the time. These models were tentatively favourably received by the computing press. However, with Acorn financially overstretched from its different endeavours, the company was rescued by Olivetti in 1985, with the future of the ABC range left uncertain in the anticipated rationalisation exercise that would follow. Ultimately, only one of the variants - the Acorn Cambridge Workstation - would reach the market, and in a somewhat different form to that originally planned.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The demise of the Acorn Business Computer left Acorn purely with a range of 8-bit microcomputer products, leaving the company vulnerable to competitors introducing 16-bit and 32-bit machines. The increasing dominance of MS-DOS in the business market and advocacy for the use of such software in the education sector left Acorn at risk of potential exclusion from its core market. Meanwhile, competing machines attempted to offer a degree of compatibility with the BBC Micro, enticing schools to upgrade to newer, more powerful non-Acorn machines while retaining access to software developed and purchased for Acorn's "aging machine". Acorn's ability to respond convincingly to these competitive threats was evidently constrained: the BBC Model B+ was merely a redesigned BBC Model B (with some heritage in the ABC endeavour) providing some extra memory but costing more than its predecessor, being labelled as a "stop gap" by Acorn User's technical editor, expressing frustration at opportunities not taken for cost reduction and at a general lack of technological innovation in that "Acorn has never shown interest in anything as exciting as the 68000". Disillusionment was sufficient for some software producers to signal a withdrawal from the Acorn market.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Other commentators in response to the B+ suggested that Acorn pursue the second processor strategy more aggressively, leveraging the existing user base of the BBC Micro while those users were still using the machine. In 1986, Acorn introduced the BBC Master series, starting with the Master 128 which re-emphasised second processors in the form of internally fitted "co-processors". Although a modest evolution of the existing 6502-based platform, enthusiasm for the series was somewhat greater than that for the B+ models, with dealers and software developers citing the expansion capabilities and improved compatibility over the B+. However, the competitiveness of these co-processors proved to be constrained by hardware limitations, compatibility and pricing, with a Master 512 system featuring a Master 128 and 80186 co-processor comparing unfavourably to complete IBM PC-compatible systems. The planned Master Scientific product was never launched, leaving potential customers with the existing Cambridge Co-Processor expansion as their only available option.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Attitudes towards Acorn and its technological position changed somewhat in late 1985 as news of its RISC microprocessor development effort emerged, potentially encouraging Olivetti to continue its support for the company at "a critical stage" in its refinancing of Acorn. Subsequent commentary suggested the availability of this microprocessor - the Acorn RISC Machine - in future computers as well as in an evaluation board for the BBC Micro, although such a board - the ARM Evaluation System - would only be announced in mid-1986 at a cost of £4500. Having also developed the additional support chips required to make up a complete microcomputer, Acorn was regarded as having leapt ahead of its nearest competitors.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: On the eve of the announcement of Acorn's 32-bit ARM-based microcomputer products, prototypes designated A1 and A500 were demonstrated on the BBC television programme "Micro Live" exhibiting BASIC language performance ten times faster than a newly introduced 80386-based computer from perennial education sector rival Research Machines, with suggestions made that the machines would carry the BBC branding. Revealingly, Acorn's managing director noted, "Over the past two years we've paid the price of having no 16-bit micro."


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The Acorn Archimedes was variously described as "the first RISC machine inexpensive enough for home use", powered by an ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) chip and "the first commercially-available RISC-based microcomputer". The first models were released in June 1987, as the 300 and 400 series. The 400 series included four expansion slots and an ST-506 controller for an internal hard drive, whereas the 300 series required the addition of a backplane to gain expansion slot capabilities. A two slot backplane could be added to the 300 series as an official upgrade, with the possibility of 4-slot backplane being available from third parties, but a hard drive expansion card was also required for these machines, occupying one slot.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Both series included the Arthur operating system (later replaced by RISC OS as a paid-for upgrade), BBC BASIC programming language, and an emulator for Acorn's earlier BBC Micro, and were mounted in two-part cases with a small central unit, monitor on top, and a separate keyboard and three-button mouse (the middle one used for pop-up context menus of the operating system). All models featured eight-channel 8-bit stereo sound and were capable of displaying 256 colours on screen.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Three models were initially released with different amounts of memory, the A305, A310 and A440. The 400 series models were replaced in 1989 by the A410/1, the A420/1 and A440/1, these featuring an upgraded MEMC1a and RISC OS. Earlier models which shipped with Arthur could be upgraded to by replacing the ROM chip containing the operating system. Because the ROM chips contained the operating system, the computer booted instantly into its GUI system, familiar from the Atari ST.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Despite the A310 being limited to 1 MB of RAM officially, several companies made upgrades to 2 MB and 4 MB, with the smaller upgrades augmenting the built-in RAM and the larger upgrades replacing it entirely. The 400 series were officially limited to 4 MB of RAM, but several companies released 8 MB upgrades that provided an extra MEMC chip plus 4 MB of RAM to complement an existing 4 MB of fitted RAM.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Speculation gathered pace about new machines in the Archimedes range in early 1989, with commentators envisaging a low-cost, cut-down model with 512 KB of RAM to replace the A305 in a fashion reminiscent of the Master Compact. Such speculation also raised questions about the 300 series if a low-cost model were to become available with support for up to 2 MB of RAM, given the limitations of the 300 series to a maximum of 1 MB (at least in terms of upgrade availability at the time), this potentially making the older models look "pretty stupid" according to one commentator. This speculation evolved to more accurately predict a machine with 1 MB of RAM aimed at junior or primary schools, albeit incorrectly predicting a separate disc drive unit.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Other commentators more correctly identified the use of an internal drive and even a single "special" podule slot, but suggested the inclusion of a TV modulator and a possible price of £399 for a 512 KB "Archimedes 205" machine aimed at the home market. Rumours about the integration of various elements of Acorn's chipset - specifically, MEMC and VIDC - to "do an Electron" were regarded as logistically demanding and thus unlikely to reduce cost. Such increased integration and targeting of the home market was later pursued with the introduction of the A3010 in 1992.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Concurrently with these rumoured product development efforts, work had commenced on a successor to the Arthur operating system, initially named Arthur 2 but renamed to RISC OS 2 for launch. A number of new machines were introduced along with RISC OS 2, and in May 1989, the 300 series was phased out in favour of the new BBC A3000, with the 400 series being replaced by the improved 400/1 series models. Having been developed in a "remarkably short timescale of nine months", the machine was the "major learning vehicle" for an integrated CAD system introduced at Acorn, and it was reported that the A3000 was the first home microcomputer to use surface mount technology in its construction, with the machine being built at Acorn's longstanding manufacturing partner, AB Electronics.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The A3000 used an 8 MHz ARM2 and was supplied with of RAM and RISC OS on of ROM. Unlike the previous models, the A3000 came in a single-part case similar to the BBC Micro, Amiga 500 and Atari ST computers, with the keyboard and disc drive integrated into a base unit "slightly smaller than the Master 128". Despite the machine's desktop footprint, being larger than a simple keyboard, the case was not designed to support a monitor. Acorn offered a monitor stand that attached to the machine, this being bundled with Acorn's Learning Curve package, and PRES announced a monitor plinth and external disc drive case.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The new model sported only a single internal expansion slot, which was physically different from that of the earlier models, although electrically similar. An external connector could interface to existing expansion cards, with an external case for such cards being recommended and anticipated at the machine's launch, and one such solution subsequently being provided by PRES's expansion system. Acorn announced a combined user port and MIDI expansion for the internal slot at the machine's launch, priced at £49. To enable the machine's serial port, an upgrade costing £19 was required, and Econet support was also an optional extra.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Although only intended to be upgradeable to of RAM, third-party vendors offered upgrades to along with expansions offering additional disc drive connections and combinations of user and analogue ports, both of these helping those upgrading from Acorn's 8-bit products, particularly in education, to make use of existing peripherals such as 5.25-inch drives, input devices and data logging equipment. Simtec Electronics even offered a RAM upgrade to 8 MB for the A3000 alongside other models. In 1996, IFEL announced a memory upgrade for the A3000 utilising a generic 72-pin SIMM module to provide 4 MB of RAM. Hard drive expansions based on ST506, SCSI and IDE technologies were also offered by a range of vendors.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: With the "British Broadcasting Corporation Computer System" branding, the "main market" for the A3000 was schools and education authorities, and the educational price of £529 – not considerably more expensive than the BBC Master – was considered to be competitive and persuasive in getting this particular audience to upgrade to Acorn's 32-bit systems. The retail price of £649 plus VAT was considered an "expensive alternative" to the intended competition – the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST – but many times faster than similarly priced models of those ranges. The Amiga 500, it was noted, cost a "not-so-bargain" £550 once upgraded to of RAM.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The relative affordability of the A3000 compared to the first Archimedes machines and the release of RISC OS helped to convince educational software producers of the viability of the platform. Shortly after the A3000's launch, one local education authority had already ordered 500 machines, aiming to introduce the A3000 to its primary schools in addition to other levels of education. Such was the success of the model that it alone had 37 percent of the UK schools market in a nine-month period in 1991 and, by the end of that year, was estimated to represent 15 percent of the 500,000 or more computers installed in the country's schools.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The appeal of the A3000 to education may also have motivated the return of Microvitec to the Acorn market with the Cub3000 monitor: a re-engineered version of the Cub monitor that was popular amongst institutional users of the original BBC Micro. (Having been "nowhere to be seen" when the Archimedes was released, Microvitec had sought to introduce its own Cubpack range of IBM PC-compatible personal computers for the education market offering some BBC BASIC compatibility, building on an estimated 80 percent market share for 14-inch colour monitors in the sector, and aspiring to launch an "interactive video workstation".)


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The introduction of the A3000 also saw Acorn regaining a presence in mainstream retail channels, with a deal with high street retailer Dixons to sell the computer at "business centre" outlets, followed by agreements with the John Lewis and Alders chains. Acorn also sought to secure the interest of games publishers, hosting a conference in August 1989 for representatives of "the top 30 software houses, including Ocean, Domark, US Gold, Grand Slam and Electronic Arts".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Marketing efforts towards home users continued in 1990 with the introduction of The Learning Curve: a bundle of A3000 and application software priced at £699 plus VAT, requiring a SCART capable television, or bundled with a colour monitor and Acorn's monitor stand for £949 plus VAT. The software, having a retail value of around £200, consisted of the second, RISC OS compliant version of Acorn's First Word Plus, the hypermedia application Genesis, and the PC Emulator software, with an introductory video presented by Fred Harris. Aiming at the "pre-Christmas market" in 1990, another bundle called Jet Set offered a more entertainment-focused collection of software valued at £200 including Clares' Interdictor flight simulator, Domark's Trivial Pursuit, Superior Golf, and the Euclid 3D modelling package from Ace Computing. The price of this bundle was £747.50 which also included a television modulator developed by the bundle's distributor, ZCL, designed for use with "any TV set" and offering a "monitor quality" picture.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The A540, introduced in late 1990, was an anticipated consequence of Acorn's Unix workstation development, offering the same general specification as Acorn's R260 Unix workstation (running RISC iX) but without built-in Ethernet support and running RISC OS 2 instead of Unix. It was Acorn's first machine to be fitted with the ARM3 processor as standard, supporting up to 16 MB of RAM, and included higher speed SCSI and provision for connecting genlock devices. The memory access frequency was raised to 12 MHz in the A540, compared to 8 MHz in earlier models, thus providing enhanced system performance over earlier models upgraded with ARM3 processors. The hardware design featured memory modules, each providing their own memory controller and 4 MB of RAM, and a processor module providing the ARM3 and a slot for a floating point accelerator (FPA) chip, the latter offering the possibility (subsequently unrealised) of processor upgrades. The FPA, replacing Acorn's previous floating point podule, was scheduled to be available in 1991. Much delayed, the FPA finally became available in 1993.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In late 1991, the A5000 was launched to replace the A440/1 machine in the existing product range. With the existing A400/1 series regarded as "a little tired", being largely unchanged from the A400 models introduced four years previously, the A5000 was regarded (by one reviewer, at least) as "the biggest leap forward for Acorn since the introduction of the Archimedes in 1987", introducing a combination of the ARM3 processor and RISC OS 3 for the first time in a new Acorn product, being "the machine the A540 should have been - smaller, neater, with higher capacity drives and all the same speed for about half the cost". The A5000 initially ran RISC OS 3.0, although several bugs were identified, and most were shipped with RISC OS 3.10 or 3.11.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The A5000 featured the new 25 MHz ARM3 processor, 2 or 4 MB of RAM, either a 40 MB or an 80 MB hard drive and a more conventional pizza box-style two-part case (HxWxD: 100 mm × 430 mm × 340 mm). With IBM-compatible PCs offering increasingly better graphical capabilities, they had not merely matched the capabilities of Acorn's machines, but in offering resolutions of 1024 x 768 in 16 or 256 colours and with 24-bit palettes, they had surpassed them. The A5000 (along with the earlier A540) supported the SVGA resolution of 800 x 600 in 16 colours, although the observation that "Archimedes machines have simply not kept pace" arguably remained. Earlier models could also benefit from the video performance of the A5000 via third party upgrades such as the Computer Concepts ColourCard Gold. The A5000 was the first Acorn machine to adopt the 15-pin VGA connector.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: It was the first Archimedes to feature a high density capable floppy disc drive as standard. This natively supported various formats including DOS and Atari discs with formatted capacities of 720 KB and 1.44 MB. The native ADFS floppy format had a slightly larger capacity of 800 KB for double density or 1.6 MB for high density. A later version of the A5000 featured a 33 MHz ARM3, 2 or 4 MB of RAM, and an 80 or 160 MB hard drive. Particularly useful in this revised A5000 was the use of a socket for the MEMC1a chip, meaning that memory expansions beyond 4 MB could more easily replace the single MEMC1a, plugging in a card providing the two MEMC1a devices required to support 8 MB. Earlier revisions of the A5000 required desoldering of the fitted MEMC1a to provide such a socket.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In 1992, Acorn introduced the A4 laptop computer featuring a slower 24 MHz version of the ARM3 processor (compared to the 25 MHz ARM3 in the A5000), supporting a 6 MHz power-saving mode, and providing between 2.5 and 4 hours of usage on battery power. The machine featured a 9-inch passive matrix LCD screen capable of displaying a maximum resolution of in 15 levels of grey, also featuring a monitor port which offered the same display capabilities as an A5000. No colour version of the product was planned. A notable omission from the machine was a built-in pointing device, requiring users to navigate with the cursor keys or attach a conventional Acorn three-button mouse, such as the Logitech mouse bundled with the machine.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The other expansion ports available on the A4 were serial and parallel ports, a PS/2 connector for an external keyboard, a headphone connector, and support for an Econet expansion (as opposed to an Econet port itself). No other provision for expansion was made beyond the fitting of the Econet card and a hard drive. The A4 effectively fit an A5000 into a portable case, having a motherboard "roughly half the size of a sheet of A4 paper", adding extra hardware for power management and driving the LCD, the latter employing an Acorn-designed controller chip using "time-domain dithering" to produce the different grey levels. Just as the processor could be slowed down to save power, so the 12 MHz RAM could be slowed to 3 MHz, with various subsystems also being switched off as appropriate, and with power saving being activated after "more than a second or so" of user inactivity. The A4's case itself was used by Olivetti and Triumph-Adler models, particularly the Triumph-Adler Walkstation which did integrate a built-in pointing device, this being described as an "all-but-unusable touchpad mouse-controller" by one reviewer.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The launch pricing of the A4 set the entry-level model with 2 MB of RAM at £1399 plus VAT, with the higher-level mode with 4 MB of RAM and 60 MB hard drive at £1699 plus VAT. Education pricing was £1099 and £1399 respectively. Acorn foresaw educational establishments taking to the machine where existing models were needing to be moved around between classrooms or taken on field trips, although review commentary noted that "the A4 is too expensive for schools to afford in large numbers" and that contemporary Apple and IBM PC-compatible models offered strong competition for business users.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Peripherals for the A4 were eventually produced, with Acorn providing the previously announced Econet card, and with Atomwide providing Ethernet and SCSI adapters utilising the bidirectional parallel port present on the A4 (and also the A5000 and later machines). Atomwide also offered the "Hi-Point" trackball peripheral modified to work as an Acorn-compatible mouse which attached to the side of the unit.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In 1992, several new models were introduced to complement the A3000 and to replace the low-end A400 series models - the A3010, A3020 and A4000 - thus starting a transition from a range of machines of different vintages that still included the A3000 (at the low end) and the A540 (at the high end) to a range that purely featured more recently designed models including the A5000 as the high-end offering and the A4 portable. Launched alongside the Acorn Pocket Book, a distinct product based on the Psion Series 3, the machines supposedly heralded "a changed company, with new direction" and the availability of Acorn products in mainstream high street stores including Dixons, John Lewis and Argos as well as mail order catalogues.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: These new models utilised the first ARM system-on-chip - the ARM250 microprocessor - a single-chip design including the functionality of an ARM2 (or ARM3 without cache), the IOC1, VIDC1a and MEMC1a chips all "integrated into a single giant chip" and fabricated using a 1 micron process. The ARM250, running at a higher 12 MHz clock frequency and used in conjunction with faster 80ns memory chips, compared to the 8 MHz of the ARM2 and the 125ns memory of the A3000, gave a potential 50% performance increase over such older systems, achieving a reported 7 MIPS.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Some early units of the A3010 did not actually utilise the ARM250, instead having a "mezzanine" board carrying the four separate devices comprising the complete chipset, with this board plugged into the motherboard in place of the ARM250. An Acorn representative indicated that this solution was pursued to meet retailing deadlines, whereas an ARM representative denied that any "serious delays" had occurred in the development of the ARM250, indicating that the mezzanine board had nevertheless been useful during the design process. Owners did not need to upgrade this board to a genuine ARM250 as it was "functionally identical" to the ARM250. One inadvertent advantage that the mezzanine board conferred was the ability to upgrade the ARM2 on the board to an ARM3, this being a popular upgrade for previous ARM2-based models that was incompatible with the ARM250. However, performing such an upgrade involves modifications to both the "Adelaide" mezzanine board and the ARM3 upgrade board employed in the upgrade. For machines fitted with an actual ARM250 processor, the closest alternative to an ARM3 upgrade in terms of performance enhancement was the Simtec "Turbo RAM" upgrade which provided 4 MB of faster RAM and gave a 40 percent improvement in overall system performance.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The machines were supplied with RISC OS 3.10 or 3.11. The A30x0 series had a one-piece design, similar to the A3000 but slightly more shallow, while the A4000 looked like a slightly slimmer A5000. The A3010 model was intended to be a home computing machine, featuring a TV modulator (for use with traditional PAL-standard televisions, SCART televisions already being supported by all of these models) and standard 9-pin joystick ports, while the A3020 targeted the primary and middle school educational markets, featuring an optional built-in 2.5-inch hard drive and a dedicated network interface socket. Meanwhile, the A4000 was aimed at the secondary education and office markets, offering a separate adjustable keyboard to comply with ergonomics regulations deemed applicable in these markets. Technically, the A4000 was almost functionally identical to the A3020, only differing in the supported hard disk size (3.5-inch in the A4000), this due to the machine's different casing. Despite the resemblance to the A5000, the A4000 along with the other models only provided a single "mini-podule" expansion slot, just as the A3000 did. All three ARM250-based machines could be upgraded to 4 MB with plug-in chips: though the A3010 was designed for 2 MB, third party upgrades overcame this. In 1996, IFEL announced a memory upgrade for the range utilising a generic 72-pin SIMM module to provide 4 MB of RAM.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Pricing started at just under £500 including VAT for the Family Solution bundle: an unexpanded A3010 with no monitor (to be used with a television), combined with the EasiWord word processor and one game (initially Quest for Gold). The existing Learning Curve bundle, updated to incorporate the A3010 upgraded to 2 MB of RAM in place of the A3000, included an Acorn colour monitor, the PC Emulator and a suite of Genesis hypermedia applications for a price of £799. The A4000 Home Office bundle combined the A4000 with Acorn colour monitor, Icon Technology's EasiWriter 2 "professional word processor" and Iota's Desktop Database application for a price of around £1175. The retail pricing of the A3010 was notable as making it the cheapest of any Archimedes machine sold. With games consoles gaining popularity, Acorn apparently attempted to target the "games machine plus" market with the A3010 by appealing to "the more knowledgeable, sophisticated and educationally concerned parents", this against a backdrop of established competing products having been heavily discounted: the Amiga A500 having been reduced to £299, for instance. In 1993, Commodore would subsequently offer the entry-level Amiga A600 at a price of only £199, although with Commodore "losing money on a big scale" while Acorn remained profitable, such discounting was not regarded as a threat to the A3010.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The pricing and bundles involving these machines was updated in late 1993, introducing a new Action Pack in place of the Family Solution, featuring the game Zool plus Icon Technology's StartWrite word processor. This bundle effectively reduced the price of the A3010 to £399 including VAT, reportedly making it "the cheapest Risc machine yet". The Learning Curve was revised to feature Acorn's own Advance integrated suite, together with the PC Emulator and DR DOS 6, and the bundle was also made available in conjunction with the A4000. The Home Office bundle was updated with Iota's DataPower replacing Desktop Database, and with Colton Software's PipeDream 4 and Acorn's PC Emulator being added to augment EasiWriter.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: A variety of demonstration programs and an audio training tape were also provided with the bundles. At the time of these product revisions, the A3020 had become absent from related promotional material, even material aimed at the educational purchaser, although it remained in Acorn's price list presumably for the interest of institutional purchasers.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Acorn's marketing relationships with high street retailers were somewhat problematic. While outlets such as the John Lewis Partnership proved to be successful marketing partners, electrical retailer Dixons seemingly made relatively little effort to sell Acorn machines despite promising "greater opportunities" in 1993 after earlier criticism. In late 1994, Acorn appointed a sole distributor for the A3010 Action Pack and Learning Curve bundles, with the pricing of the former reduced to only £299. Persisting with the strategy that some purchasers might choose a product positioned between games consoles and traditional PC-compatibles, the distributor, ZCL, aimed to take advantage of the absence of Commodore during the Christmas 1994 season. As the Christmas 1995 season approached, Beebug purchased Acorn's "entire remaining inventory", offering the machine for £135 including VAT together with various "value-added packs".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Production of the A3020 and A4000 ceased in 1995, with remaining stocks to be sold during 1996, due to their lack of conformance with newly introduced European Union electrical and electronics regulations. This left the A7000 as Acorn's entry-level desktop system, and appropriate pricing adjustments were expected, particularly as faster versions of the A7000 were anticipated (and eventually delivered in the form of the A7000+).


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The "A7000", despite its name being reminiscent of the Archimedes naming conventions, was actually more similar to the Risc PC, the line of RISC OS computers that succeeded the Archimedes in 1994. It lacked, however, the DEBI expansion slots and multi-slice case that characterized the Risc PC (though by removing the CDROM, a backplane with one slot could be fitted).


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Reminiscent of the BBC Micro upon its release, the earliest Archimedes models were delivered with provisional versions of the Arthur operating system, for which upgrades were apparently issued free of charge, thus avoiding the controversy around early ROM upgrades for the BBC Micro. In early 1988, Arthur 1.2 was delivered in an attempt to fix the deficiencies and problems in the earlier versions of the software. However, even after Arthur 1.2 had been released, a reported 100 documented bugs regarded as "mostly quite obscure" persisted, with Acorn indicating that a "new, enhanced version" of the operating system was under development.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Following on from the release of Arthur 1.2, Acorn itself offered a "basic word processor", ArcWriter, intended for "personal correspondence, notices and short articles" and to demonstrate the window, menu and pointer features of the system, employing built-in printer fonts for rapid printed output. The software was issued free of charge for registered users, although Acorn indicated that it would not produce a "definitive" word processor for the platform, in contrast to the BBC Micro where the View word processor had been central to Acorn's office software range. However, Acorn did also announce a port of the 1st Word package, First Word Plus, for the platform. ArcWriter was poorly received, with window repainting issues demonstrated as a particular problem, and with users complaining of "serious bugs". Although taking advantage of the Arthur desktop environment and using anti-aliased fonts, complaints were made about "blurred and smudged" characters and slow display updates when changing fonts or styles on low-memory machines like the A305. An early competitor, Graphic Writer, was received more favourably but provided its own full-screen user interface. Neither were regarded as competitive with established products on other platforms.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Several software companies immediately promised software for the Archimedes, most notably Computer Concepts, Clares and Minerva, with Advanced Memory Systems, BBC Soft and Logotron being other familiar software publishers. Autodesk, Grafox and GST were newcomers to the Acorn market. However, in early 1988, many software developers were reportedly holding off on releasing software for the Archimedes until the release of a stable operating system, with Acorn offering to lend Arthur 1.2 to developers. Claims had been made of confusion amongst potential purchasers of the machine caused by the lack of available software, with Acorn having pursued a strategy of launching the machine first so that independent software developers might have hardware to work with. In order to make the Archimedes more attractive to certain sectors, Acorn announced a £250,000 investment in educational software and indicated a commitment to business software development. Alongside First Word Plus, the Logistix spreadsheet-based business planning package was also commissioned by Acorn from Grafox Limited as a port to the platform. Autodesk released AutoSketch for the Archimedes in 1988, having launched the product in March the same year. Priced at £79 plus VAT, it offered the precision drawing functionality familiar from AutoCad but with "none of the frills" that made the latter product professionally suitable for various markets at pricing that could exceed £2500. On the Archimedes, AutoSketch was reported to run at about five times the speed of a "standard PC-compatible machine".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Although Acorn had restricted itself to supporting the use of its View word processor under BBC emulation on the Archimedes, View Professional - the final iteration of the View suite on Acorn's 8-bit computers - had been advertised as a future product in June 1987 for November availability. View Professional, like the View series, had been developed for Acorn by Mark Colton, and a company - Colton Software - delivered the successor to this product as PipeDream for the Cambridge Computer Z88. In mid-1988, Colton Software announced PipeDream for the Archimedes, priced at £114, following on from the announcement of a version for MS-DOS, establishing a long history of product development for the platform, leading to PipeDream 4 in 1992, followed by PipeDream's eventual successor, Fireworkz, in 1994.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Much early software had consisted of titles converted from the BBC Micro, taking advantage of a degree of compatibility between the different series of machines, with Computer Concepts even going as far as to produce a ROM/RAM hardware expansion for use with the company's existing BBC Micro series products, and Acorn also offering such an expansion alongside a BBC-compatible interfacing expansion. Another element of Acorn's early marketing strategy for the Archimedes was to emphasise the PC Emulator product which was a software-based emulator for IBM PC-compatible systems based on the 8088 processor running "legal MS-DOS programs". Alongside this, plans were also made for the launch of a podule (peripheral module) hardware expansion providing its own 80186 processor, a disk controller and connector for a disk drive.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The PC Emulator in its initial form shipped with MS-DOS 3.21 and required a system with 4 MB of RAM to be able to provide the "full" 640 KB of RAM for DOS programs, with early versions of Arthur only providing 384 KB to DOS on 1 MB systems, but with Arthur 1.2 aiming to provide the more usable 512 KB to DOS on such systems. The emulator was described as having "very few compatibility problems" and was reported by diagnostic utilities as providing an 80188-based system, but the performance of the emulated system was regarded as slow. Acorn reportedly acknowledged this by indicating the imminent availability of "an 80186 co-processor". The podule expansion (or "co-processor") was subsequently postponed in early 1988 (and ultimately cancelled), with Acorn indicating that its price of £300 would have been uncompetitive against complete PC systems costing as little as £500, and that the hardware capabilities to be offered, such as the provision of CGA graphics, would be likely to become outdated as the industry moved to support EGA and VGA graphical standards.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Commentators were disappointed with the incoherent user interface provided by the software platform, with "Logistix looking like a PC, First Word slavishly copying GEM" and "101 other 'user interfaces'" amongst the early offerings. The result was the lack of a "personality" for the machine which risked becoming a system that would "never look as easy or as slick as the Mac". Alongside the introduction of visual and behavioural consistency between applications, personal computer user environments had also evolved from running a single application at a time, moved beyond "desk accessories" (or pop-up programs), normalised the practice of switching between applications, and had begun to provide the ability to run different applications at the same time, with the Macintosh having already done so with its MultiFinder enhancement. Computer Concepts, having begun development of various new applications for the Archimedes, was sufficiently frustrated with Arthur and its lack of "true multi-tasking" that it announced a rival operating system, Impulse, intended to host those applications on the machine.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Remedying various criticisms of the early operating environment, Acorn previewed RISC OS (or, more formally, RISC OS 2) in late 1988 and announced availability for April 1989. Internally at Acorn, the realisation had dawned that multitasking had become essential in any mainstream computing environment where "the user is likely to use lots of small applications at once, rather than one large application alone", with other graphical environments such as Hewlett Packard's NewWave and IBM's Presentation Manager being considered as the contemporary competition.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Reactions to the upgraded operating system were positive and even enthusiastic, describing RISC OS as giving software developers "the stable platform they have been waiting for" and "a viable alternative to the PC or Mac", also crediting Acorn for having improved on the original nine-month effort in developing Arthur in the following twelve months leading up to the unveiling of RISC OS. For a modest upgrade cost of £29, users received four ROM chips, three discs including several applications, and documentation.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: New facilities in RISC OS included co-operative multitasking, a task manager to monitor tasks and memory, versatile file management, "solid" window manipulation ("the whole window moves - not just the outline"), and adaptive rendering of bitmaps and colours, using dithering where necessary, depending on the nature of the selected screen mode. A common printing framework was introduced, with dot-matrix and PostScript printer drivers supplied, with such drivers available for use by all desktop applications. Amongst the selection of applications and tools included with RISC OS were the Draw graphics editor, featuring vector graphics editing and rudimentary manipulation of text (using the anti-aliased fonts familiar from Arthur) and bitmaps, the Edit text editor, the Paint bitmap editor, and the Maestro music editor.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: With RISC OS available, Acorn launched new and updated applications to take advantage of the improved desktop environment. One of these, deferred until after the launch of RISC OS, was Acorn Desktop Publisher, a port of Timeworks Publisher, which introduced a significant improvement to the anti-aliased font capabilities through a new outline font manager, offering scalable fonts that were anti-aliased on screen but rendered at the appropriate resolution when printed, even on dot-matrix printers. First Word Plus was also updated to support the new RISC OS desktop environment, albeit retaining its own printer drivers, being positioned as complementing Acorn Desktop Publisher whose emphasis was on page layout as opposed to textual document creation.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: As part of an effort to grow the company's share of the home market, Acorn introduced a bundle called The Learning Curve, initially featuring the A3000, optional monitor and a set of applications (First Word Plus, the PC Emulator, and Genesis). This bundle was enhanced later in 1990 to attract buyers to the A420/1, adding Acorn Desktop Publisher and some additional Genesis applications. Acorn's document processing applications also began to see broader competition around this time, with Impression from Computer Concepts and Ovation from Beebug also providing competitive solutions for desktop publishing. Also in 1990, PipeDream 3 became the first version of the PipeDream integrated suite, descended from Acorn's View Professional but developed and marketed by Colton Software, to be made available for the RISC OS desktop.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The launch of the A5000 in late 1991 brought a new version of RISC OS to the market: RISC OS 3. This delivered a range of enhancements to the operating system including multitasking filer operations (meaning that file copying, moving and deletion no longer took over the computer), support for reading and writing DOS format discs, the provision of various bundled applications (Alarm, Calc, Chars, Configure, Draw, Edit, Help and Paint), commonly used outline fonts, and software modules in ROM (instead of needing to be loaded from accompanying floppy discs into RAM), the removal or raising of limits on windows and tasks, the ability to "iconise" windows and pin them to the desktop background (or pinboard), desktop session saving and restoring, screen blanking support, and other printing and networking improvements. Providing the bundled applications and other resources in ROM saved an estimated 150 KB of workspace, thus being beneficial to users of 1 MB machines.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The bundled RISC OS 3 applications were enhanced from their RISC OS 2 versions in various general ways, such as the introduction of keyboard shortcuts, but also with new, specific features. The printing system was also updated to support multiple printers at once, but in this first version of RISC OS 3 background printing was still not supported. The "most obviously improved" application was Draw, acquiring new features including multiple levels of "undo" and "redo" operations, rotated text (benefiting from an updated outline font manager), graduated fills, shape interpolation (or in-betweening) support, and built-in support for converting text into paths. Edit gained improved formatting and searching support plus transparent BASIC program editing facilities. One somewhat visually obvious improvement delivered in RISC OS 3 was the use of "3D window borders" or, more accurately, dedicated bitmaps for window furniture, allowing different desktop styling effects. The appearance of the desktop would eventually shift towards Acorn's "NewLook" desktop theme, previewed in late 1993.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In late 1992, RISC OS 3 was itself updated, becoming RISC OS 3.1 (as opposed to the initial RISC OS 3.0 provided with the A5000) and being made available for all existing Archimedes machines, although A300 series and the original A400 series machines needed a hardware modification to be able to accept the larger 2 MB ROMs, employing a special daughterboard. Various bugs in RISC OS 3.0 were fixed and various other improvements made, making it a worthwhile upgrade for A5000 users. Notably, support for background printing was introduced. VAT-inclusive introductory pricing for the upgrade was £19 for RISC OS 3.0 users and £49 for RISC OS 2.0 users, with the upgrade package including ROMs, support discs and manuals. The non-introductory price of the upgrade was stated as being £89.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The limitations of RISC OS became steadily more apparent, particularly with the appearance of the Risc PC and the demands made on applications taking advantage of its improved hardware capabilities (although merely highlighting issues that were always present), and when contrasted with the gradually evolving Windows and Macintosh System software, these competitors offering or promising new features and usability improvements over their predecessors. Two fundamental deficiencies perceived with RISC OS were a lack of virtual memory support, this permitting larger volumes of data to be handled by using hard disc storage as "slow, auxiliary RAM" (attempted by application-level solutions in certain cases), and the use of cooperative multitasking as opposed to preemptive multitasking to allow multiple applications to run at the same time, with the former relying on applications functioning correctly and considerately, and with the latter putting the system in control of allocating time to applications and thus preventing faulty or inconsiderate applications from hanging or dominating the system. Problems with the storage management and filing systems were also identified. In 1994, the FileCore functionality in RISC OS was still limited to accessing 512 MB of any hard drive, with this being barely larger than the largest supplied Risc PC hard drive at the time. Filing system limitations were also increasingly archaic: 77 files per directory and 10-character filenames, in contrast to more generous constraints imposed by the then-"imminent" Windows 95 and then-current Macintosh System 7 release.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Although an update to the FileCore functionality was delivered in 1995, initially to members of Acorn's enthusiast community, providing support for larger storage partitions (raising the limit to 128 GB), other improvements, such as those providing support for the use of longer filenames, were still only provided by third parties. With adverse financial results and a restructuring of the company in late 1995, Acorn appeared to be considering a more responsive strategy towards customer demands, potentially offering rebadged PC and Mac products alongside Acorn's existing computers, while cultivating a relationship with IBM whose PowerPC-based server hardware had already been featured in Acorn's SchoolServer product running Windows NT. In the context of such a relationship, the possibility was raised of "bolting a RISC OS 'personality' on top of a low level IBM-developed operating system" to address RISC OS's deficiencies and to support virtual memory and long filenames. At this time, IBM was pursuing its Workplace OS strategy which emphasised a common operating system foundation supporting different system personalities.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In mid-1991, the PC Emulator was eventually updated to work as a multitasking application on the RISC OS desktop, requiring 2 MB of RAM to do so, and supporting access to DOS files from the RISC OS desktop filer interface. The emulator itself permitted access to CD-ROM devices and ran MS-DOS 3.3 with a special mouse driver to permit the host machine's mouse to behave like a Microsoft bus mouse. CGA, EGA, MDA and partial VGA graphics support was implemented, and the emulated system could run Windows 3. The product cost £99, with an upgrade costing £29 for users of previous versions. Although technically compatible with 1 MB systems, and with 2 MB of RAM considered necessary for multitasking operation, offering facilities to capture the emulated display as a bitmap or as text, 4 MB was recommended to take advantage of such features, along with a high resolution multiscan monitor and VIDC enhancer to be able to display most of the emulated screen without needing to scroll its contents. An ARM3 processor was considered essential for "a workable turn of speed", this giving performance comparable with a 4.77 MHz 8086 PC-XT system.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Regarded as a "programming wonder", the PC Emulator was nevertheless regarded as being "too slow for intensive PC use". Shortly after the introduction of the updated PC Emulator, a hardware PC compatibility solution was announced by Aleph One, offering a 20 MHz 80386SX processor and VGA display capability, effectively delivering Acorn's envisaged PC podule in updated form. A low-cost alternative to Acorn's PC Emulator called FasterPC became available in 1993, priced at around £20 but with DOS not included (to be provided by the user at an estimated additional cost of £50). The software provided PC emulation outside the desktop environment, with considerable performance benefits claimed relative to Acorn's product. Regarded as being "considerably faster than the Acorn emulator when displaying graphics", with a two-times speed improvement observed for various tested programs, the product was considered appropriate for gaming, albeit at lower than VGA resolution. It was also unable to run Windows 3.1: the Aleph One PC expansion cards being the only solutions able to do so at that time.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Having considerably improved graphical capabilities compared to those provided with Acorn's 8-bit machines, a number of art packages were released for the Archimedes to exploit this particular area of opportunity, albeit rather cautiously at first. One of the first available packages, Clares' Artisan, supported image editing at the high resolution of but only in the 16-colour mode 12, despite the availability of the 256-colour mode 15 as standard. Favourably received as being "streets ahead" of art software on the BBC Micro, it was considered as barely the start of any real exploitation of the machine's potential. Typical of software of the era, only months after the launch of the machine, Artisan provided its own graphical interface and, continuing the tradition of BBC Micro software, took over the machine entirely even to the point of editing the machine configuration and restoring it upon exiting. Clares released a successor, Artisan 2, two years later to provide compatibility with RISC OS, replacing special-purpose printer support with use of the system's printer drivers, but not making the software a desktop application. The program's user interface deficiencies were regarded as less forgivable with the availability of a common desktop interface that would have addressed such problems and made the program "easier to use and a more powerful program as a result".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Clares also produced a 256-colour package called ProArtisan, also with its own special user interface (despite the impending arrival of RISC OS), costing considerably more than its predecessor (£170, compared to £40 for Artisan), offering a wider range of tools than Artisan including sprays, washes and path editing (using Bézier curves) to define areas of the canvas. Although regarded as powerful, the pricing was considered rather high from the perspective of those more familiar with the 8-bit software market, and the user interface was regarded as "only just bearable". Competitors to ProArtisan during 1989 included Art Nouveau from Computer Assisted Learning and Atelier from Minerva. Both of these programs, like ProArtisan, ran in full-screen mode outside the desktop, used the 256-colour mode 15, and offered their own interfaces. Atelier, however, was able to multi-task, providing the ability to switch back to the desktop and find applications still running and accessible. Unlike other contemporary art programs, it also took advantage of the system's own anti-aliased fonts. One unusual feature was the ability to wrap areas of the canvas around solid objects. Both programs also offered similar path editing facilities to ProArtisan, with it being noted that Art Nouveau's limitations in this regard might be remedied by using the support already present in RISC OS and provided by the Draw application functionality, as ProArtisan 2 eventually demonstrated.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In 1989, RISC OS was provided with the Paint application on one of the accompanying application discs. It featured a multi-document, desktop-based interface with a range of elementary painting and drawing tools, also allowing images to be created in arbitrary sizes for any of the display modes, even permitting editing of images in display modes with different numbers of colours, albeit with limitations in the representation of image colours when the desktop mode had fewer colours available. Along with its companion applications, Paint supported the system's anti-aliased fonts and printer driver framework, and by embracing the system's user interface conventions, images could be exported directly to applications such as Draw by dragging an image's file icon from the save dialogue directly to the target application.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Despite a trend of gradual adoption of desktop functionality, in 1990, Arcol from ExpLAN offered a single-tasking, full-screen, 256-colour editing experience using the lower resolution mode 13, supporting only bitmap fonts. Aimed at educational users, its strengths apparently included real-time transformation of canvas areas, rapid zooming, and the absence of limitations on tools when zooming: arguably demonstrating more a limitation of contemporary packages with their own peculiar interfaces. ExpLAN subsequently released Arcol Desktop, although the "desktop" label only indicated that the program would multi-task with desktop applications and offer some desktop functionality, particularly for the loading and saving of images: the program still employed a special full-screen user interface, albeit allowing other 256-colour modes to be used, with the mode of the original being the default. With expectations having evolved with regard to user interfaces and desktop compatibility, this updated product was judged less favourably, with the partitioning of functionality between the desktop and painting interface being "awkward" and the behavioural differences "confusing", leaving the product looking "rather dated" when compared to its modern contemporaries.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In early 1991, in the context of remarks that, at that point in time, the Paint application bundled with RISC OS was "the only true Risc OS art program" operating in the desktop and not restricting users to specific display modes, Longman Logotron released Revelation, an application running in the desktop environment, providing interoperability with other applications through support for the platform's standard Sprite and Drawfile formats, with vector graphics import being provided by a companion tool, and utilising the system's printing framework. Apart from observations of limited functionality in some areas, one significant limitation reminiscent of earlier products was the inability to change display mode without affecting the picture being edited. This limitation was not convincingly removed in the second version, sold as Revelation 2 around a year later, with colours being redefined when selecting a 16-colour display mode while editing a 256-colour image, preserving the inability to edit 256-colour images in 16-colour modes. A further version update was delivered as the Revelation ImagePro product, being considered "the best art package that I have used on the Archimedes" by Acorn User's graphics columnist in late 1992.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In response to the evolving competitive situation and market expectations, Clares released ProArtisan 2, a successor to its earlier product, in late 1993 as "a completely new program" with some familiar features from the company's earlier products but offering display mode independence, 24-bit colour support (including support for ColourCard and G8/G16 graphics cards), multi-document editing, and desktop compliance. The path editing tools familiar from its predecessor were supported using functionality from Acorn's Draw application, and the image enhancement capabilities had also "undergone a major revamp". At a reduced price of £135, and with use of the RISC OS desktop contributing to overall ease of use, the package was considered by one reviewer as "the best art package around at the moment for the Archimedes".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Late in the Archimedes era, this being prior to the release of the Risc PC, a consensus amongst some reviewers formed in recommending Revelation ImagePro and ProArtisan 2 as the most capable bitmap-based art packages on the platform, with Arcol Desktop and First Paint also being reviewer favourites. With the release of the Risc PC and A7000, offering improved hardware capabilities and built-in support for 24-bit colour, the art package market changed significantly. New packages supplanted older ones as recommendations, some from new entrants within the broader Acorn market (Spacetech's Photodesk, Pineapple Software's Studio24), others coming from established vendors (Clares' ProArt24 and Longman Logotron's The Big Picture), and still others from beyond the Acorn market (Digital Arts' Picture). However, the platform and hardware requirements of such packages were generally beyond Archimedes era machines, demanding 8 MB of RAM or 24-bit colour display modes (using 2 MB of dedicated video RAM) in some cases. A notable exception was Studio24 which, having been significantly updated in its second version, was reportedly "completely compatible" with the earlier machines.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: RISC OS was supplied with the Draw application, offering a range of tools for creating diagrams and pictures using vector graphics primitives, also permitting the incorporation of bitmap images and text into documents, and managing the different elements of documents as a hierarchy of objects. A significant capability provided by the application (and exploited by art packages) was that of Bézier curve editing, allowing shapes with smooth curves to be created, rendered and printed.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The file format used by Draw was documented and extensible, and a range of tools emerged to manipulate Draw files for such purposes as distorting or transforming images or objects within images. Amongst them was the Draw+ (or DrawPlus) application which defined other object types and also added other editing features, such as support for multiple levels or layers in documents. DrawPlus became available in 1991 and was released "at nominal cost" via public domain and shareware channels. The author of DrawPlus, Jonathan Marten, subsequently developed an application called Vector, released by an educational software publisher, 4Mation, in early 1992. Described as "effectively an enhanced Draw", the program improved on Draw's text handling by allowing editing of imported text, continued DrawPlus's support for layers and object libraries, provided efficient handling of replicated or repeated objects, and introduced masks that acted as "windows" onto other objects. Priced at £100, even for site-wide usage, the software was considered "ideal... for technical drawing, to graphic design and even limited desktop publishing". A version of Draw was also developed for Microsoft Windows by Oak Solutions.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: A significant introduction to the Archimedes' software portfolio came with the release of ArtWorks by Computer Concepts in late 1992. Described in one preview as "perhaps the easiest to use, but most advanced graphic illustration package, on any personal computer today", ArtWorks provided an object-based editing paradigm reminiscent of Draw, refining the user interface, and augmenting the basic functionality with additional tools. A notable improvement over Draw was the introduction of graduated fills, permitting smooth gradients of colour within shapes, employing dithering to simulate a larger colour palette. The image rendering engine was also a distinguishing feature, offering different levels of rendering detail, with the highest level introducing anti-aliasing for individual lines. Aimed at professional use, and complementing its sibling product, the Impression desktop publishing application, 24-bit colour depths and different colour models were supported. A key selling point of the package was its rendering speed, with it being reported that redraw speeds were up to five times faster in ArtWorks on an ARM3-based machine than those experienced with CorelDRAW running on a 486-based IBM PC-compatible system. ArtWorks would have broader significance as predecessor to the Xara Studio application and subsequent Windows-based products.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Although document processing and productivity or office software applications were addressed by a few packages released in the Arthur era of the Archimedes, bringing titles such as First Word Plus, Logistix, and PipeDream, it was not until the availability of RISC OS that the Archimedes would see the more compelling software developed for the platform being delivered, with Acorn even delaying its own Desktop Publisher to take advantage of this substantial upgrade to the operating system.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Alongside Acorn Desktop Publisher, Computer Concepts' "document processor" Impression and Beebug's Ovation provided a small selection of solutions in the realm of desktop publishing. Acorn pursued the publishing industry with software and hardware system bundles, with Impression typically featuring prominently, even in the era of the Archimedes' successor, the Risc PC. Ovation was eventually succeeded by Ovation Pro in 1996, offering stronger competition to Impression Publisher - itself the professional package in the range that had developed from Impression - and to industry-favoured applications such as QuarkXPress.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Amongst a variety of word processor applications, one enduring product family for the platform was developed by Icon Technology who had already released a word processor, MacAuthor, for the Apple Macintosh. This existing product was ported to RISC OS and released as EasiWriter in 1991, fully supporting the outline fonts and printing architecture of the host system. Icon followed up to EasiWriter with an enhanced version ("EasiWriter's big brother") in 1992, TechWriter, featuring mathematical formula editing. Both products were upgraded to provide mail-merge capabilities - a noted deficiency of the first release of EasiWriter - and both provided convenient table editing, with TechWriter also offering automatic footnote handling, being promoted as "a complete package for producing academic and technical documents". Upgraded "Professional" editions of EasiWriter and TechWriter were released in 1995, with the latter adding the notable feature of being able to save documents in TeX format.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Given the platform's presence in education, various educational word processing and publishing applications were available. Longman Logotron supplied a "cost-effective introduction to DTP" in the form of FirstPage, retailing at £49 plus VAT with "unlimited" educational site licences costing up to £190. Targeting machines with only 1 MB of RAM, various traditional word processing features such as a spelling checker and integrated help were omitted, but as a frame-based document processor it was considered "excellent value for money" when compared to the pricing and capabilities of some of its competitors, even appealing to the home market. Similarly, Softease's "object-based" document processor, Textease, also had potential appeal beyond the educational market, freeing the user from having to design page layouts using frames, instead permitting them to click and type at the desired position or to drag and drop graphical objects directly into the page, providing a user interface paradigm reminiscent of the Draw application provided with RISC OS. Document layout capabilities were nevertheless available, supporting multiple column layouts, as were the traditional features such as spellchecking and integrated help absent from FirstPage. Pricing was even more competitive at around £30, or £40 with spellchecking support.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Aside from the hybrid word processor and spreadsheet application, PipeDream, being released in versions 3 and 4 for the RISC OS desktop environment, Colton Software released a standalone word processor, Wordz, in 1993, with plans for companion applications and a degree of integration between them. The first of these companion applications was Resultz, and the two applications were combined to make Fireworkz, itself incorporating the editing capabilities of both applications within a single interface, offering the ability to combine textual and spreadsheet data on the same page within documents. Colton subsequently expanded the family in 1995 with the Recordz database product, combining it with the existing Fireworkz functionality to make the Fireworkz Pro product, this bringing it into direct competition with Acorn's Advance and Minerva's Desktop Office suites, but ostensibly offering a much deeper level of integration than those competitors. PipeDream itself was later updated to version 4.5, conforming more closely to the RISC OS look and feel, being initially offered as an upgrade for users of version 4.0.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Acorn's own interest in developing applications led it to initiate work on the Schema spreadsheet application, only to disengage from application development and to transfer the product to Clares who, with assistance from the originally commissioned developers, brought the product to market. Despite its origins as one component in an application suite that was never delivered as envisaged, a cut-down version of Schema 2 was later incorporated into Acorn's Advance application suite alongside variants of Computer Concepts' Impression Junior and Iota Software's DataPower. Schema 2 itself was enhanced with a "powerful macro language" and released in 1994.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In the spreadsheet category, Longman Logotron's Eureka, released in 1992, provided robust competition to Schema and PipeDream, seeking to emulate Microsoft Excel in terms of functionality and user interface conventions. The interoperability benefits of the updated product, Eureka 2, were later given as a reason for Acorn to adopt the software internally, acquiring a 300-user site licence and thus allowing its employees to convert "substantial spreadsheet data which needed converting from Lotus 1-2-3". Updated again as Eureka 3, with new features remedying "what was badly missing in the earlier version", but with the manual regarded as inadequate and with online help still absent from the application, the application was nevertheless regarded as the most powerful of the platform's principal spreadsheet offerings, attempting to be "the "Excel" of the Acorn world".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: A number of database applications were made available for the Archimedes, with Minerva Software following up from its early applications on the system, DeltaBase and System Delta Plus, with the RISC OS desktop-compliant Multistore in early 1990: a relational database with a graphical "record card" interface and report generation functionality. A broadly similar approach, albeit without any claimed "relational" capabilities, was offered by Digital Services' Squirrel database manager software, emphasising customisation of the presentation of data and reporting, but also introducing a flowchart-based method of querying, this feature causing one reviewer to regard the product as "the most innovative database manager on the Archimedes" with its usability being comparable to FileMaker on the Apple Macintosh.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Aimed at the education market, with a focus more on "computerised data handling" than data management, Longman Logotron's PinPoint framed the structuring and retention of data around a questionnaire format, with a form editor offering "DTP-style facilities", and with data entry performed interactively via the on-screen questionnaire. Some analysis and graphing capabilities were also provided. A version of PinPoint would eventually be made available for Windows, ostensibly aimed at market research as opposed to education, as its producer attempted to broaden its audience and availability for different platforms. Also emphasising a desktop publishing style of presentation was Iota Software's DataPower, employing these facilities to customise record entry to "make data collection as much like form-filling as possible" and in the reporting functionality of the software.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: In 1993, Longman Logotron introduced S-Base, a programmable database offering the possibility of customised database application development. Described as "a more disciplined, less graphical approach to database design", the software enforced a degree of discipline around data type and table definition, but it also retained various graphical techniques to design forms for interaction with the database. Building on such foundations, programs could be written in a language called S to handle user interaction, graphical user interface events, and to interact with data in the database. Being compared to the contemporary DOS-based Paradox software, it was regarded as having more of an emphasis on "database applications" than actual databases, also being considered as similar to the contemporary RISC OS application, Archway, as a kind of "application generator" tool.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: DataPower, S-Base and Squirrel were all subsequently upgraded, S-Base 2 being enhanced with features to simplify the setting up of applications and consequently being regarded as "without doubt the most powerful database management system available for the Archimedes" due to its programmable nature, Squirrel 2 gaining relational capabilities and being recommended for its "amazing flexibility" and for its searching and sorting functionality, with DataPower being recommended more for "the majority of users" for its usability and "attractive graphs and reports".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Despite spreadsheet and database applications offering graphing capabilities, dedicated applications were also available to produce a wider range of graphs and charts. Amongst these were Chartwell from Risc Developments and the Graphbox and Graphbox Professional packages from Minerva Software. Arriving somewhat later than these packages, being released by Clares in January 1994, Plot also sought to cater for mathematical and educational users by offering support for function plotting, this having been largely ignored by the existing packages which tended "to be based on producing bar and pie charts from tables of figures".


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: With the introduction of CD-ROM and the broader adoption of multimedia, Acorn announced a full-motion video system called Acorn Replay in early 1992, supporting simultaneous audio and video at up to 25 frames per second in the RISC OS desktop or in "a low resolution full screen mode". Unlike certain other full-motion video technologies, Replay offered the ability to read compressed video data from mass storage in real time and to maintain a constant frame rate, all on standard computing hardware without the need for dedicated video decoding hardware. The compression techniques employed by Replay reportedly offered "compression factors of between 25 and 40" on the source video data, with the software decompression requiring a computer with 2 MB of RAM or more.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Given a slower access medium such as CD-ROM or floppy disk, video could be played back at up to 12.5 frames per second, with up to 25 frames per second from a hard disk. One 800 KB floppy disk could reportedly hold 12 seconds of video. In the introductory phase of the technology, support for Replay files was quickly introduced into hypermedia applications such as Genesis and Magpie, with software developers being the primary audience for the creation of content, largely due to the expense of the equipment required to capture and store large volumes of video data. Software developers would engage the services of a suitably equipped company to convert source material to digital form, with the Replay software then used to process the video frame by frame, employing image compression techniques and "a form of Delta compression", ultimately producing a movie file.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Acorn's introduction of Replay prompted comparisons with Apple's QuickTime system which was already broadly available to users of Macintosh systems. Replay's advantages included the efficiency of the solution on existing hardware, with even an entry-level A3000 upgraded to 2 MB of RAM being able to handle 2 MB of data per second to achieve the advertised 12.5 frames per second playback. In contrast, a Macintosh system with 2 MB of RAM was reportedly unable to sustain smooth video playback, although audio playback was unaffected by the dropped video frames, whereas a 4 MB system could achieve 15 frames per second from a CD-ROM drive, although such a system was more expensive than Acorn's ARM3-based systems that could more readily achieve higher frame rates. QuickTime was also reported as only able to play video smoothly at 1/16th of the size of the screen, also favouring 32,000 colour display modes that were available on Macintosh systems with 68020 or faster processors. One disadvantage of Replay on the Acorn systems was the limitation of playback to 256 colours imposed by the built-in video system.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Educational software and resources providers saw the potential of Replay to deliver interactive video at a more affordable price than existing Laservision content, although it was noted that, at that time, Laservision still provided "the best quality, full-screen, moving image to date". Opportunities were perceived for making compilations of video clips available on CD-ROM for multimedia authoring purposes, although educational developers felt that the true value of the technology would be realised by making video like other forms of information, permitting its use in different contexts and works and thus offering children "control over the media". Educators also looked forward to more accessible authoring possibilities, with children being able to record, edit and incorporate their own video into their projects. However, the expense associated with handling video data, with the storage of one minute of video estimated at 60 MB, combined with the expense of commercial video digitisation, estimated at £100 per minute of video, meant that such possibilities would remain inaccessible for most users at that time. Indications that this situation would change were present in the QuickTime market, with it already supporting the creation of short movies in conjunction with video digitiser cards and editing tools such as Adobe Premiere.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Support for video authoring on the desktop emerged in 1993 with the Replay DIY product from Irlam Instruments: a single-width podule suitable for A540 and A5000 computers with 2 MB of RAM or more, these being the only models available at the time with the necessary performance. The podule accepted analogue video input from video cameras, recorders and laserdisc players, allowing the video to be previewed in a window on the desktop. While recording, no preview would be shown, and the hardware would digitise the audio and video input, transfer the data to the computer's memory, and this would then be sent straight to a hard disk. At its introduction, the video quality was limited to "normal Arm2 Replay, that is 256-colour, 160x128 pixels at 12.5 frames per second", although an upgrade to capture 25 frames per second was anticipated. Uncompressed video occupied around 21 MB per minute, but processing of such video using the provided Acorn Replay compression software would bring the size of the resulting video down to around 4 or 5 MB per minute. Compression was, however, relatively slow, since the compression scheme was asymmetric, meaning that decompression was fast enough to facilitate playback in real time, but compression could take "a few minutes for every few seconds of video". Nevertheless, the possibilities of video capture were predicted to "generate and maintain immense interest in the classroom, or even at home", and the digitiser's low cost (at £250 plus VAT) together with low-cost editing software such as Uniqueway's Empire (at £50 plus VAT) was regarded as surprising, possibly in light of the high cost of services previously needed to achieve similar results.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Further developments in the video authoring domain were brought to the platform by Eidos, who had developed an "offline non-linear editing system" around the Archimedes in 1989, involving the digitisation of source video and its storage on hard disks or magneto-optical media for use with editing software. Such software would be used to produce an "edit schedule list" based on editing operations performed on the digitised, "offline" video, and these editing details would subsequently be applied in an "online" editing session involving the source video, this typically residing on "linear" media such as tape. To support the more convenient offline editing environment, a highly efficient symmetric compression scheme known as ESCaPE (Eidos Software Compression and Playback Engine) had been devised, offering movie sizes of around 1.5 MB per minute. To remedy the time-consuming process of using Acorn's Replay compression software with the Replay DIY product, this being a consequence of the "Moving Lines" compression scheme emphasised by Replay at that time, Eidos introduced its own compression software for Replay DIY based on ESCaPE and given the same name. Together with the Eidoscope software, based on Eidos' professional Optima software, it was claimed that "no other computer platform has anything to match in terms of convenience and sheer usability" and that these developments would "encourage a lot more Archimedes users to have a go at making movies". In 1995, Computer Concepts offered a bundle featuring Eidoscope and the company's Eagle M2 "multimedia card" which featured audio and video capture, improved audio playback, and MIDI ports. Aimed at non-professional applications, Eidoscope was limited to editing movies up to a resolution of and did not support time codes.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: With the introduction of the Archimedes, Acorn continued the practice established for its earlier machines of offering languages in addition to BASIC, albeit priced somewhat higher than the earlier implementations, these including Pascal, C, Prolog, Fortran and Lisp. Other vendors produced implementations of Forth, such as Silicon Vision's RiscForth, and Logo, such as Logotron Logo. Other Acornsoft languages such as BCPL and Comal were not ported to the new platform and had to be run under emulation. A Smalltalk-80 implementation was also made available by Smalltalk Express costing £620, offering the familiar window-based environment, but requiring a 4 MB machine and a hard drive.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Acorn had always emphasised its implementation of BBC BASIC in its earlier machines, and the Archimedes was delivered with an enhanced version, BASIC V, that provided additional control-flow structures such as while loops, case statements, and multi-line if statements. Graphics primitives and operations were also accessible via special-case keywords such as codice_1, codice_2, codice_3 and codice_4, and the specification of colours was extended to access the broader colour palette supported by the hardware. Various commands were also added for sprite plotting and manipulation and to enable, confine, disable and read the position and state of the mouse pointer. Assembly language support was included, as it had been in the BASIC provided by Acorn's 8-bit models, with the language updated to describe instructions for the ARM processor instead of the 6502 (or other processor families) familiar from the earlier machines. Access to operating system functionality was provided from BASIC, with some of the demonstration programs provided with the Arthur operating system employing the font and window manager operating system modules, including the rudimentary desktop environment.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: The arrival of RISC OS brought the possibility of developing desktop, or WIMP, applications in BASIC and other languages. Being available as standard, BASIC was a natural choice for many developers of desktop applications, although "the complexity of the Wimp" and the need to defer to operating system functionality described in the "RISC OS Programmer's Reference Manual", this consisting of "a staggering 52 Wimp calls", required some mitigation by tutorials seeking to guide programmers through the mechanisms and techniques involved. To ease the development of such applications, various products offering toolkits or libraries were announced, one of the earliest being Archway, this providing tools to define different aspects of an application, including window layout design and menu editing, along with BASIC library routines. More ambitious attempts were later made to extend BASIC to access desktop functionality. For instance, HelixBasic added extra keywords to BASIC V whilst also making it possible for traditional BASIC programs, including graphical programs, to run in the window-based environment transparently and concurrently.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Although the performance of the supplied BASIC interpreter had been regarded as competitive, various BASIC compilers were produced for the system, such as Dabs Press' Archimedes Basic Compiler (ABC) and Silicon Vision's RiscBASIC. Both products focused on improving the performance of the input programs, but Silicon Vision subsequently introduced a separate product, WimpGEN, as an accessory for desktop application developers. This product provided window and menu editors that would generate BASIC source code implementing the functionality required to support operation in the desktop environment. Specific application functionality would then be added, and the resulting program could also be compiled using RiscBASIC before being run.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: BBC BASIC on the Archimedes was considered as a vehicle for cross-platform game development by David Braben and other developers before the Archimedes was released, Braben being the author of the three-dimensional Lander game supplied with the machine. Since the BBC Micro had been used as a development host for the Commodore 64 version of Elite and reportedly by Commodore to assist Amiga development "in the early days", a similar role was anticipated for the Archimedes in game development, this role also having the potential to expose games developers for established platforms (such as the Amiga, Atari ST, and the Sega and Nintendo consoles) to the Acorn machine. The ability to cross-assemble code in the BASIC assembler for processors other than the ARM was devised, and support from key individuals at Acorn was secured, but the company's management were reluctant to incorporate support for other systems in its product, thus curtailing the effort.


title: Acorn Archimedes

text: Despite the use of BASIC and ARM assembly language by some software houses, notably at Computer Concepts whose developers regarded the ARM processor as having been "designed to be programmed in Assembler" and where Impression and ArtWorks were implemented in ARM assembly language using the BASIC assembler, the use of higher-level languages such as C became increasingly desirable for productivity and portability reasons. That Acorn had been in a position to offer its own C compiler was reportedly the consequence of "a stroke of luck": this product having been originally developed by Arthur Norman and Alan Mycroft for a mainframe at Cambridge University and subsequently offered to Acorn.