Acorn Archimedes
Released
June 1987
Gaming platform
The Acorn Archimedes was a line of computers marketed by British company Acorn Computers Ltd starting in 1987. It was originally positioned to be the replacement for the hugely successful BBC Micro as the primary educational computer in British schools. Early models were even marketed under the BBC brand including the "Owl" logo for their computer literacy project. The Archimedes were the first home computers which used Acorn's ARM line of microprocessors.
The Archimedes was originally sold with the Arthur operating system, a hastily assembled GUI based operating system that lacked native multitasking. By April 1989, the Archimedes began to be shipped with RISC OS 2, the replacement for Arthur and which offered significant backwards compatibility to the earlier system. Earlier Archimedes systems could also be upgraded by replacing their BIOS ROMs. Ultimately RISC OS would continue to be developed for a variety of ARM systems through the late 2000s by Acorn, its successor Element14 and other companies.
Compared to home computers of its time, the Archimedes was initially lauded for his high performance featuring a fast 32-bit processor which allowed it to compete favorably with 16-bit Motorola 68000-based systems like the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Graphically, the Archimedes has a custom display chip which supported a variety of resolutions up to 640x512 in 256 colors and 800x600 in 16 colors. The 32-bit ARM chip also allowed for memory configurations significantly larger than other home computers (up to 4MB at launch), and the Archimedes was marketed for power users with an available hard drive option. All models of the Archimedes featured at least 8-bit stereo sound.
Over time the Archimedes names was dropped, as well as the association with the BBC; Acorn used model numbers beginning with R and A for systems based on the Archimedes architecture. Many of the later machines were workstations that dual booted into RISC/iX, a variant of Unix marketed by Acorn. Note that any games designed for RISC/iX should be linked under Linux/Unix and not this platform. The last true Archimedes systems were released in 1992, and included a laptop model.
The Archimedes was originally sold with the Arthur operating system, a hastily assembled GUI based operating system that lacked native multitasking. By April 1989, the Archimedes began to be shipped with RISC OS 2, the replacement for Arthur and which offered significant backwards compatibility to the earlier system. Earlier Archimedes systems could also be upgraded by replacing their BIOS ROMs. Ultimately RISC OS would continue to be developed for a variety of ARM systems through the late 2000s by Acorn, its successor Element14 and other companies.
Compared to home computers of its time, the Archimedes was initially lauded for his high performance featuring a fast 32-bit processor which allowed it to compete favorably with 16-bit Motorola 68000-based systems like the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Graphically, the Archimedes has a custom display chip which supported a variety of resolutions up to 640x512 in 256 colors and 800x600 in 16 colors. The 32-bit ARM chip also allowed for memory configurations significantly larger than other home computers (up to 4MB at launch), and the Archimedes was marketed for power users with an available hard drive option. All models of the Archimedes featured at least 8-bit stereo sound.
Over time the Archimedes names was dropped, as well as the association with the BBC; Acorn used model numbers beginning with R and A for systems based on the Archimedes architecture. Many of the later machines were workstations that dual booted into RISC/iX, a variant of Unix marketed by Acorn. Note that any games designed for RISC/iX should be linked under Linux/Unix and not this platform. The last true Archimedes systems were released in 1992, and included a laptop model.
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