"Now I certainly enjoyed the platform but in retrospect, I'd have invested my money in something else back then if I knew what was going to happen."
I take your point about Acorn as a business but I used a 'lab' full of RISC-OS 2 bases A310s at College with 20Mb Rodime hard drives. We did scanning, dtp, Genesis multimedia packages &c and various home grown projects.
What else could we have bought at that time for similar use cases? Not trolling, my memory of the time is hazy and I recollect being extremely underwhelmed by DOS based PCs in another 'lab'.
EDIT: flashbacks to Aldus Framemaker on Apricot PCs, Amstrad PCW spreadsheet applications being used in a theatre box office, and an early 9" screen Mac being used with some form of DTP software.
My college had an (experimental?) machine they got from Acorn that dual-booted into a 'nix OS. It got stuck in a corner and forgotten about, but if it had been a few years later I think it could have been an amazing project for them.
When I was in secondary school, we had a plain grey, all-in-one keyboard and system desktop case that had a microdrive and was connected to a hacked colour TV via a massive umbilical cord. It turned out to be a BBC Micro prototype.
I take your point about Acorn as a business but I used a 'lab' full of RISC-OS 2 bases A310s at College with 20Mb Rodime hard drives. We did scanning, dtp, Genesis multimedia packages &c and various home grown projects.
What else could we have bought at that time for similar use cases? Not trolling, my memory of the time is hazy and I recollect being extremely underwhelmed by DOS based PCs in another 'lab'.
EDIT: flashbacks to Aldus Framemaker on Apricot PCs, Amstrad PCW spreadsheet applications being used in a theatre box office, and an early 9" screen Mac being used with some form of DTP software.