The successor to the PC, the XT (eXtended Technology) was introduced in early 1983. Although a version of that machine was aimed at the enthusiast market much like the BBC Micro, its real area of success was business. The IBM PC was launched on 12 August 1981.

'Even from the time of the Atom, Acorn were considering how to move on from the 6502 processor: the 16-bit Acorn Communicator developed in 1985, using the 65816 being a key example. Here is another insert from the same above Wikipedia link: The RISC based Archimedes succeded the BBC Micro. Previously I had posted about Acorn's BBC Computers which succeded Acorn's Atom computer. Many British IT professionals gained their early experiences on Acorns, which were often more technically advanced than commercially successful US hardware.' In 2010, the company was listed by David Meyer in ZDNet as number nine in a feature of top ten fallen 'Dead IT giants'. Some of Acorn's former subsidiaries lived on: ARM Holdings technology is dominant in the mobile phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) microprocessor market.Īcorn is sometimes referred to as the 'British Apple' and has been compared to Fairchild Semiconductor for being a catalyst for start-ups. One of its operating systems, RISC OS, continues to be developed by RISC OS Open. Though the company was broken up into several independent operations in 1998, its legacy includes the development of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) personal computers. It is more known for its BBC Micro model B computer than for its other products. Acorn's BBC Micro computer dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the UK, including the Acorn Electron and the Acorn Archimedes. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978.

Acorn archimedes emulator games