In the late 80s I worked at a little BBC department writing multimedia Mac & Windows software (it had moved on from the BBC Micro software it used to write). This was a team descended from the team that did the Domesday Project years before.
One day we had a visitation from Acorn trying to get us to write Archimedes software.
They asked us what they could do to make their platform more appealing to us as developers and to users.
We said we liked their CPU performance, but didn't like the Archimedes graphics hardware which was too low res and low depth, and could not be upgraded.
For example, the Risc OS system did anti-aliased fonts (which they were very proud of), but at such a horribly low resolution that the result managed to be blurry and blocky at the same time.
They didn't really get our complaints, didn't think the bad graphics were important. They had no intention of ever making a machine with enough video memory to do a better job.
We said their system UI was odd, for example unlike Mac and Windows there was no copy and paste. We gave other examples of the UI being weird just for the sake of it, but I can't remember the details after all these years.
They said all their UI was fine, and copy and paste was stupid.
That department never did publish anything for the Archimedes.
> We said we liked their CPU performance, but didn't like the Archimedes graphics hardware which was too low res and low depth, and could not be upgraded.
I'm surprised about that! Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes it says the machine could do 640 × 512 with 2, 4, 16 or 256 possible colours, or 800 × 600 with 2, 4 or 16 possible colours. That's pretty spectacular for the late eighties; far superior to the Amiga (previously considered the king of graphics) and even superior to VGA, let alone the Mac.
One day we had a visitation from Acorn trying to get us to write Archimedes software. They asked us what they could do to make their platform more appealing to us as developers and to users.
We said we liked their CPU performance, but didn't like the Archimedes graphics hardware which was too low res and low depth, and could not be upgraded. For example, the Risc OS system did anti-aliased fonts (which they were very proud of), but at such a horribly low resolution that the result managed to be blurry and blocky at the same time.
They didn't really get our complaints, didn't think the bad graphics were important. They had no intention of ever making a machine with enough video memory to do a better job.
We said their system UI was odd, for example unlike Mac and Windows there was no copy and paste. We gave other examples of the UI being weird just for the sake of it, but I can't remember the details after all these years.
They said all their UI was fine, and copy and paste was stupid.
That department never did publish anything for the Archimedes.