I’m reminded of the blog post from 2011: “How the Atari ST almost had Real Unix”
https://web.archive.org/web/20110121024825/https://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1355

Same here. I switched from Amiga 500+ to Pentium 100 in about 1995. I was seriously impressed with the PC hardware, and seriously unimpressed with the software (Windows 3.1, then 95).

Even formatting a floppy disk caused the PC to hang.

npe, qnx on a floppy was something like very late 90’s…

The Archimedes was a lot more expensive than the Amiga. Acorn relied on selling to the British education sector, the BBC and other niches in its domestic market. In 1992 Acorn did launch a version of the Archimedes targeted at the home user (the A3020) but by then it was game over for the wedge-shaped home computer. And the A3020 was still much more expensive than the Amiga 1200.

In terms of technical specs, the Archimedes with its ARM RISC processor was a lot faster than the Amiga. It could display 256 colours from a palette of 4,096, had various high-res, non-interlaced modes and 8-channel stereo sound. Acorn’s machine didn’t have any custom chips for sprite handling but received plenty of ports of Amiga games which, thanks to the power of the ARM CPU, run similarly to the Amiga versions. The Archimedes is a lot faster than the Amiga or ST when displaying 3D polygons.

RISC OS was a nice operating system but single-tasking. The GUI relied on a three-button mouse and has some quirks compared other contemporaries. If you went to school in Britain between 1987 and 1996 you’re very likely to have used the Archimedes and RISC OS.

The Archimedes was a lot more expensive than the Amiga. Acorn relied on selling to the British education sector, the BBC and other niches in its domestic market. This wasn’t surprising as the company had its origins in Cambridge, England and the computing scene associated with its famous university.

In 1992 Acorn did launch a variant targeted at the home user (the A3020) but by then it was game over for the wedge-shaped home computer. And the A3020 was still much more expensive than the Amiga 1200.

In terms of technical specs, the Archimedes with its ARM RISC processor was a lot faster than the Amiga. It could display 256 colours from a palette of 4,096 and had various high-res, non-interlaced modes. If I recall correctly sound capabilities were similar to the Amiga, maybe a little better.

Acorn’s machine didn’t have any custom chips for sprite handling but received plenty of ports of Amiga games which, thanks to the power of the ARM CPU, run similarly to the Amiga versions. The Arch is a lot faster than the Amiga or ST when displaying 3D polygons.

RISC OS was a nice operating system but single-tasking. The GUI relied on a three-button mouse and has some quirks compared to the Amiga or other contemporaries. If you went to school in Britain between 1987 and 1996 you’re very likely to have used the Archimedes and RISC OS.

okay didn’t QNX first work on a floppy ?

thanks
$10,000 for a computer and $5,000 for a printer

iirc the mac se in 1987 was $3500 and lasers printer went down in prices like intel cpus