RISCy Business - The Acorn RiscPC - ARM in a desktop

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● Description
The Acorn Risc PC is the culmination of much experience and development at Acorn. It's also the last of their desktop computers. Find out why with me in the cave today.

● Music
Clean Break - Destiny & Time
Orange Octopus - Unicorn Heads
Cosmic Love - Bruno E.
Sunrise Drive - South London Hifi
Jude Illa - Joe Bagale
Rounds - William Rosati
Burnin Up - Stunt Racer 2000 game music Acorn Archimedes

[goodieshoes]

"Nobody wants to clean another mans mouseball. That's a special kind of torture." This channel has infinite wisdoms

[djwilduk]

Great machines. Networks of these RISC PC’s kept many of the BBC’s TV news operations on air. From the launch of News24 to at least the closure of TV Centre in 2013. They ran software by Omnibus Systems and controlled video servers, tape carts and vision mixers for automated transmission. Rack mount machines were available in 3u. And they came back in seconds rather than minutes if they needed a reboot.

The Education department used 3 or 4 slice RISC pc’s in the late 90’s to do basic offline video editing. They had a capture card and Jazz drive. They were horrible.

There’s a thriving community of RISC OS enthusiasts and a big meet in Wakefield in April called the RISC OS Show which is worth a visit.

[lrochfort]

I'm 35 so was the perfect target age for Acorn products at school. From BBC Micro through all the Archimedes to StrongARM RiscPC at school leaving age.

It really can't be understated how important ARM is. It's the most prevelant architecture on the planet. You wouldn't have iPhones or Android phones or tablets or Raspberry Pi or smart TVs or smart cars without it.

I work for a major software and hardware company and we're evaluating ARM servers with 128 cores and 256 GB of RAM.

Long live ARM!

[j.williamkay]

Was an avid RiscOS user until Acorn’s demise. The one thing I still really miss today was the ability to keep menus open after clicking an item, by using the right mouse button. So many applications demand multiple menu clicks to carry out an operation - and reopening the menu is a real pain. This applies to both Mac and Windows - in this respect, both still being beaten by a quirky, ROM-based OS from the 1990s.

[HerringandChips]

“Never clean another man’s mouseball”

That is a RMC T-Shirt I would buy.

[spokehedz]

I'm not going to lie, as someone from the USA I had zero idea this existed and man this was pretty intense for the day! The concept of the Podules was really forward thinking for the time, and the whole system looks like it was a breeze to take apart and reassemble.

[RamonSmits]

That modular design for both the internals and case is just amazing! Never knew anything about this system, thanks for yet again a very nice video.

[firsteerr]

we used risc PC's in the early days of building management system, our boffin bob (bob the boff ) was very good with the BBC so his transition to risc was easier and he wrote a beautiful operating system for our buildings, you could get custom "poddules" made which could be linked to the outstations for control which was pretty neat, unfortunately the rise of "standardization" meant most outstations off the shelf and cheap would only run on windows so gradually we swapped over, only recently was i able to relive my youth with riscV OS on a pi which is growing to beyond the walls of the PI i have and i understand a laptop is either coming to or already on the market, encouraging me to wonder if a PC is coming which i would switch to in a heart beat

[WiggysanWiggysan]

I've just finished work.
I'm broken, my body aches, my feet are throbbing.
All I want to do is sleep

however, when I get the notification pop up, I *force* myself to watch your video's as I know I'll enjoy not only the content but the tremendous effort you put in to production & fact finding.

The pleasure is all mine Mr RMC.

[hughallan]

What an absolute thing of beauty. Like an art house computer.

[connorruss]

In high school they had a bunch of these babies in the technical drawing/graphics classroom. That was my first introduction to CAD, they weren't new machines by any stretch of imagination, but we're still far ahead of anything else in terms of both ease of use and features when compared to other platforms at the time and even years later. Cheers from down Under.

[timthompson]

I love how the acronym ARM has an acronym in it.

[brucegoatly]

Thanks for bringing back happy memories of long ago!

A small point of information: Acorn specified that their operating system should be pronounced 'risk oh-ess' - I winced every time I heard 'risk oss'. But then Acorn were pretty OCD about stuff like that, even specifying a *half space* between 'Risc' and 'PC'.

[Aaronage]

To anyone obsessed with owning a proper desktop-class ARM machine again (like me), there's an option coming this year.

Gigabyte is launching a workstation based on Cavium's new ThunderX2 SoC. Maxed out, the ThunderXStation will have 64-cores, 256-threads (SMT4) and 16-channels of DDR4. It's a freakin' beast.

Edit May 2022: Fun to look back on this comment in a post Apple Silicon world 😁

[ModernVintageGamer]

great video chap. I own an A3010 and am familar with the older machines but things get fuzzy with the RiscPC in terms of timeline, OS and Compatibility. you explained it perfectly like always. well done

[AndrewLittleboy]

Acorns were amazing machines, the os was more advanced for the time than any other machine. Regular A4000 user here!

[psammiad]

That expandable slice design is brilliant - so you can have a thin box for a basic PC, and expand it for more power! Why has no other manufacturer embraced this, it's such a good idea!

[lukassbeataddicts]

New Mac Studio is a new most powerful ARM desktop computer a man can buy. Funny how it all went

[stevenjlovelace]

I love that GUI, with the subtle marble patterns.

[wimwiddershins]

Very interesting. There's something very cool about having two CPU architectures running simultaneously in the same box on the same screen.