What is an acorn?
The Acorn platform is probably one of the smallest computer platforms, consisting of some estimated 500,000 machines (excluding older 8-bit computers). A majority of them were sold in Great Britain, as Acorn Group were situated at Cambridge, and many were bought by British schools. However, there are also a lot of private users of Acorn computers, mostly - in order of importance - in Great Britain & (Northern) Ireland, Germany, France, Australia & New Zealand, the Netherlands and Italy. There are practically no Acorns to be found in the USA.
History
Being a small company in a market of industry giants who have much greater resources (for development, cheap production and for marketing), Acorn were always exposed to strong competition. The company was founded in 1978 by Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry. In the 1980s, practically all British schools were equipped with their computers (and Acorn machines were also quite popular as home computers), but when Wintel PCs began to gain importance, more and more schools switched over to that platform. Still, the educational sector remained an important market for a long time.
The company went through many a restructuring. Most importantly, separate companies were founded for supporting the UK education market (Xemplar was owned in part by Acorn, in part by Apple), developing RISC OS (Acorn RISC Technologies; ART, although this didn't exist as a separate company for very long), working on the 32-bit processor architecture (Advanced RISC Machines; ARM) and on Acorn's NetComputer models (Acorn Network Computing; ANC, again, not for a long time).
As time went by, Acorn were able to sign contracts with various major companies, with a positive overall effect on their share price, e.g. Apple (UK education market), Digital Semiconductors (StrongARM processor) and Oracle (NetComputer).
Since about 1997, the company's focus slowly changed. The desktop market of RISC OS machines was large enough to sustain it, and a new desktop computer was being designed, but other markets looked more promising in the long run. Building on the experiences made when designing the Acorn NetComputer, Acorn concentrated on making their technology available for licensing to third parties, for things like interactive/digital TV and Multimedia Point of Sale Terminals.
Finally, on "Black Thursday" 17th September 1998, in a shock move Acorn announced that all work on desktop computers had ceased, which included the Phoebe workstation which had been scheduled for November, and that development would focus completely on the digital TV market from now on. In an attempt to get rid of the "educational" image, even the company name was changed to Element 14 early in 1999. (Element 14 is silicon.)
Later, the company was bought by Pace Computers Ltd.. Pace are only interested in Acorn's digital TV expertise - no further development for desktop systems is to be expected from their side.
For a very long time, Acorn had remained the only European company designing and manufacturing complete desktop computer systems, which are considered a true alternative to the more popular systems.
piesoftwareinc@piesoftwareinc.co.uk
PIE Software Inc. 16/04/2003
Copyright (C) PIE Software Inc 1997-2003 All Rights Reserved
piesoftwareinc@piesoftwareinc.co.uk
PIE Software Inc. 16/04/2003
Copyright (C) PIE Software Inc 1997-2003 All Rights Reserved