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

The Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, not 1987. By 1987, Commodore had released the Amiga 500, which had more memory and cost $699.

I am not familiar enough with the Acorn Archimedes and RISC OS to comment on how they compared.

As for why Apple survived and why Commodore failed, I’ve written several blog posts about that, some of them very long. The short version is Apple chose a niche, desktop publishing, sold into it, and had no qualms asking for up to $10,000 for a computer and $5,000 for a printer that replaced $50,000 worth of other equipment. The Amiga was excellent for video production but Commodore was stuck on trying to repeat the Commodore 64 again, when their management had any direction at all. I have a blog post on Irving Gould that explains a lot about Commodore. I’ll be revisiting him in late September.

They would have had to add an MMU chip like the 68000-based Unix machines had, which would have increased the hardware cost. The OS was already a very tight squeeze in 256K of RAM, so they might have had to increase the minimum to 512K. So now we’re no longer talking about a starting price of $1295 for the computer.

how much Adding memory protection would have increased costs?

in 1987 QNX have Adding memory protection

how did the Amiga OS compare with RISC OS

could Acorn Archimedes in 1987 with RISC OS be successful than the Amiga 1000 in 1987

why was Apple Computer more successful than the Amiga 1000 in 1987