The first time I started up an Archimedes and ran Lander it really felt like the future had arrived. The smoke particles in particular (heh) were very impressive.

The Archimedes was too expensive and not very well supported. The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.

I never felt that way. I thought both the Amiga and the ST were great, each with useful and unique features but I still loved the Acorns.

IMHO the GUI was better on RiscOS and being able to run video at 25fps in just software felt like magic. At the time, I never saw Amigas doing that without expensive hardware like the Video Toaster, even Amiga A3000s.

You could even get 12.5fps video off floppy disc which seemed crazy at the time.

> The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.

And yet... Do you own a smartphone of any kind?

It has an Acorn-compatible CPU inside it. In fact, if it isn't 20+ years old, it has several: it has a multicore main CPU with several different Arm cores, and there are more in the Wifi controller, and more in the Bluetooth controller.

There is a pretty good chance that if you own an x86 machine with wifi, it includes multiple Arm cores too. Whatever OS you run, from Windows to BSD, if you were to search your SSD, you will find BLOBs of Arm code on it.

Is there any Amiga or ST derived tech in them? Not that I know of. But a company with "A" for Acorn in its name is in very nearly every device with a microprocessor.

I first used an Archimedes back in 1988 running Arthur 1.2.

Nice one. That's the year before I bought my first.

I thought it was a superb deal up against things like the Amiga and ST, because it was much faster and more capable for a hobby programmer.

And in the first job I had, my 2nd hand A310 cost £800. It had 1MB RAM, a 20MB hard disk, and a colour monitor. So probably half its new price.

The fastest machine that the VAR I worked for offered was an IBM PS/2 Model 70-A21:

http://www.walshcomptech.com/ps2/70A21.htm

A 25MHz 80386DX with a tiny L1 cache on the daughterboard. Our demo one had a 80387DX and 2MB of RAM and a 120MB HDD, the first 3.5" HDD I ever saw.

It retailed at about £10,000 for the base model, without "optional" extras like keyboard, DOS, or a monitor.

Tricked out like the display one with an 8514 XGA display, something like £15,000 or £16,000.

I tested it. My Archimedes was 4x to 8x faster in integer benchmarks. And it had a GUI -- the PS/2 didn't, this was before Windows 3.0 -- and it multitasked, which the PS/2 also didn't.

Overpriced my left kidney. It had astonishing industry-beating price:performance. It stomped all over the fastest x86 kit in the world: it ran a usable pure-software emulation of an x86 PC on which I could run work apps.

It's great having a superfast computer without any useful software. Sure there were things like Pro Artisan but it was no good compared to DPaint on the Amiga. I didn't want to run PC software but did want to run Mac software. So when you mention emulation, the Amigas of the time were faster with emulating of the Mac than the hardware Macs themselves for a period. When RISC OS came along it was nice but had that horrible error dialogue that restricted mouse movement. The memory allocation needing to be manually set was also wacky. The Amiga also had a BBC BASIC emulator coded in 68K assembler so even that wasn't an advantage anymore. Side by side, you got more value from using an Amiga. The Arch might be great for running benchmarks though.

Why should I care?

I wasn't interested in drawing pictures or playing games. I was interested in exploring programming on something that wasn't as horribly constrained as my previous machines -- 3 different Z80 powered boxes. (Sinclair Spectrum, SAM Coupé, Amstrad PCW 9512).

I had a choice of editors. I had BBC BASIC and a compiler. I had Obey scripts to explore OS scripting. I also could get hold of C, Pascal, and a few other compilers, but most of them were too expensive.

I could declare arrays that took a meg of RAM. Or, declare a RAMdisk and then put frames of short videos in it, then experiment with compressing and decompressing them, and later save the results to HDD or floppy.

I didn't want a gaming machine with some graphics apps, even if it could emulate a different 68K box that was so expensive that its apps cost as much as the entire computer I was sitting in front of.

I am not saying your use case was not valid for you, but it wasn't even something of interest for me to explore. I didn't, and still don't, care about drawing pictures. I'm quite interested in learning how to generate pictures, though.

You're presenting these things as drawbacks for the Archie and advantages for the Miggy. They're not. Those are absolutes. The stuff you describe are selling points for particular target markets... and some of the Archie's tools in related, overlapping markets were highly competitive. Impression and Ovation for DTP, Sibelius for musical notation. An offshoot of ArtWorks was sold by Corel for a while and it's still on sale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Designer_Pro%2B

It is very much not fair to make out the Archie platform had no apps. It did, and some of the biggest names made it onto other platforms. Some are still on sale today.

https://www.xara.com/

https://www.avid.com/sibelius

But I didn't care about them on RISC OS myself then and I don't now because that's not an area of interest for me.

Still, they exist, and they are competitive.