The Acorn brand will be used to launch a range of PC laptops at a computer show next week. The lack of connection shown between the new company behind the apparent revival and the Acorn of old is unclear, provoking a furious reaction from a number of RISC OS users. Acorn Computers Ltd, which was incorporated on January 28 this year, will be attending the CTS 2006 event at the NEC in Birmingham while promoting a ‘new range of Acorn Notebooks’.
are really Windows laptops. And they looks very similar to Compaq laptops a few years back…
Sounds like another AmigaAnywhere label trip. I thought they were gonna build Laptops with ARM chips running RISC OS.
Disappointing.
Indeed, I too am disappointed. I was expecting some Acorn/RISC (ARM) goodness. Too bad they are winblows boxen.
Sounds like the Commodore mp3 players. A bunch of suits buy up an old respected brand and try to appeal to the nostalgia of older nerds in order to sell their generic, inferior products.
No thanks.
I stayed in the water as long as I could! But the water was cold! Soon, a crowd formed.. They gave me a nickname on the spot…. one that still haunts me… ACORN!
(I’ll vote you back up – your comment was a tad frivolous but not off topic)
I love that ep. I was quite dissapointed that a rightious geek like Dilbert was unaware that ‘Acorn’ was the name of a computer manufacturer; dissapointed that the yanks hadn’t heard of Acorn Computers.
I’d have thought that the Acorn brand would be a liability rather than an asset. After all, they didn’t manage to sell that many computers to home/business users back when they offered a superior OS and faster CPU. I think it’s fair to say that a main reason for that was their association with education. They were seen as computers for school kids rather than a credible option for the home or business.
Maybe the Acorn logo will help them get a few education sales due to brand recognition from IT staff who’ve been around long enough to remember the BBC and Archie, but I think most would see through this gimmick. It certainly isn’t going to fool the hard core Acorn/RISC OS fans, not that they’re exactly a big target market… Overall it just seems pointless to put the Acorn brand on generic Wintel laptops.
It’ll be interesting to see if Element14/Broadcom do still own the Acorn name and logo, and if they bother to do anything about this. Personally I hope they do, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when people try to cash in on once brilliant companies like Acorn and Commodore.
In my opinion Acorn were one of the most important and innovative computer companies to come out of Britain, it was a sad day for the computer industry when they closed their doors. If they’re not going to resurrect their technology, why not let them rest in piece?
I think you are completely wrong. Acorn was oneof the more succesful 80s computer companies to penetrate the business segment with their products, specifically with the BBC B. This is true for the UK at least.
You have to put this into perspective, and compare with the othercompanies of that time. Sure, companies like NorthStar, Apple and IBM made much better strides into the business segment, but Acorn wasn’t too far behind. Compare them with Commodore, Sinclair, TRS, Dragon, the MSX (here the “branding” analogy is a bit shaky, I admit..), Atari; those remained almost 100% toy/home computers. Compared to these, Acorn had certain pedigree.
“I think you are completely wrong. Acorn was oneof the more succesful 80s computer companies to penetrate the business segment with their products, specifically with the BBC B. This is true for the UK at least.”
That’s true of the BBC, I remember them being used by a number of companies and government agencies in the early 80s, as well as NHS hospitals. Acorn may have had a pedigree in the business segment then, but that was over 20 years ago and people have short memories. By the late 80s when the Acorn Archimedes was released, IBM PC compatibles were already dominant in business, with Apple grabbing the new graphics/DTP market.
In my experience the Archie was pretty much completely ignored outside of schools, despite it being an excellent computer it wasn’t taken very seriously. I don’t think I ever saw an Archimedies or RISC PC in a workplace, and while I knew several Amiga owners, I didn’t know anyone with an Archie as their home computer.
I’m sure there are still plenty of people in Britain who have fond memories of playing Elite on the BBC B, or using an Archie at school, but is that really going to affect their Wintel laptop purchasing decision decades later?
Like I said before, if people didn’t buy Acorn computers back when they had a significant hardware/software advantage (and when they were a much better known brand), I can’t see people buying a laptop today just because there’s an Acorn logo on it.
“…and while I knew several Amiga owners, I didn’t know anyone with an Archie as their home computer. ”
Ironically, when I had an Arc, I knew some other owners (we had a club) and I used bump into fellow Arc owners all the time. Well… maybe not all the time but occasionally. Howevever, back in the early 90’s I never [knowingly] met a Mac owner.
I think you are completely wrong. Acorn was oneof the more succesful 80s computer companies to penetrate the business segment with their products, specifically with the BBC B. This is true for the UK at least.
You point out the problem with Acorn yourself: their succes was confined to Britain, NZ and Australia for the most part. And after the BBC computers, they gradually lost their marketshare by failing to put out a new computer that could convince buisnessowners, AFAIK.
Atari, their desktop line, was quite popular in New Zealand schools (along with the Amiga), especially in music classes; they had a good midi kit set, along with an easy to use operating system, and a fine selection of software, it was a pretty neat tool to use – I wrote my first composition on one 🙂 can’t remember the name, except it was in E flat minor.
As for the grabbing onto, and whore off products using old names, personally, its not going to work; they’re trying to use the ‘Apple halo effect’, the difference is, Apple kept their hardware and operating system, but created a new appliance in the same spirit; NEC is merely horing off PC clones and crap as “Acorns” – hardly something I would call very enterprising.
Want to really wow me; how about grab FreeBSD, work hard on KGI, build a nice new, original desktop ontop of it using Qt, and have a laptop that has a long battery life, rugged, and reliable – then I might consider it.
It really saddens me when all I see is vendor after vendor, whoring themselves out to the public with their Windows offering, with little or no innovation of imagination when it comes to creating something is unique and different.
NEC aren’t doing PC clones marketed as Acorn; however Mitsubishi are or were whoring off relatively poor quality PC clones as Apricot…. maybe you got the wrong Japanese behemoth and the wrong strange little English firm…
If not, the NEC in that Drobe post means the National Exhibition Centre; a very big arena in Birmingham and not the computer firm.
This is what money does on innovation and alternatives. SHAME !!!! Just say no to Wintel.
I will buy one of those laptops, but only if they ship with Windows 1.0. If they want to sell nostalgia, then please give me the full package.
The pictures of the laptops on El Reg, look like the current MSI 12 and 17 inch cases. Is this just a coincidence or are these new Acorn computers just rebadged MSI’s?
If someone is prepared to offer MSI laptops in the UK, and some decent support to go with them, then that’s a good thing, because they are awesome machines.