Acorn Business Computer
Demonstrated at the Personal Computer World Show in September 1984, having been under development for "about a year" and having been undergoing field trials from May 1984, the range "understandably attracted a great deal of attention" and was favourably received by some commentators.
[3] Acorn had stated in a February 1985 press release that the ABC machines would soon be available in 50 stores, but having been rescued by Olivetti, no dealers were stocking the range and only the Personal Assistant and 300 series models were expected to be on display by the end of March.
[7] This upgrade was eventually delivered in 1984 as the Z80 Second Processor, requiring a BBC Micro, dual floppy drives and a display to complete a basic business system for a total cost of around £1500.
[13] The successful development of second processor solutions was regarded as an essential progression that would enable Acorn to offer variants of the BBC Micro as business machines and to be able to compete with Torch, whose products were in some ways pursuing such goals.
Meanwhile, negotiations between National Semiconductor, Acorn, Logica and Microsoft were ongoing with regard to making Unix - Xenix, specifically - available on "the BBC machine".
The reason given for providing Panos as the operating system at the launch of the Acorn Cambridge Workstation instead of Xenix, despite Acorn having contracted Logica to port Xenix to the machine, was the apparent lack of a working memory management unit (MMU) in the National Semiconductor 32016 chipset, for which a socket was provided on the machine's processor board.
[21] Such problems with the 32082 MMU had been noted with regard to hardware workarounds adopted in the design of the Whitechapel MG-1 workstation (a somewhat higher-specification product than Acorn's offerings that initially provided National Semiconductor's own Unix variant, Genix, instead of Xenix).
[26] One academic project struggled with "the initial unreliability and unsuitability of the Acorn workstation as a development machine", reporting slow program build times and the lack of debugging tools that led to other systems being used to develop software for the machine, also experiencing "apparently random faults" with the hardware and systems software that impacted the project for 15 months.
[31] Although most of the ABC models failed to reach the market in their original form, particularly after Olivetti's rescue of Acorn,[32] several of the concepts were revisited in the BBC Master series of microcomputers.
Like the ABC Personal Assistant, the Master 128 offers more memory than the original BBC Micro and includes the View and ViewSheet productivity software on board.
[34] Whereas the different models in the ABC range were combinations of a "host" computer based on the BBC Micro and a second processor fitted inside the display unit, the equivalent Master-series variants were generally accommodated by plug-in coprocessor cards fitted inside a Master 128 or Master Econet Terminal (ET), these models being the foundation of the range.
The Torch Unicorn was perhaps the clearest realisation of the broader "Universal Gluon" concept, effectively coupling a BBC Micro with a more powerful computing system.
[43] Initially mentioned as a "CAD graphics workstation based on the 16032 chip" in October 1983,[44] and presumably following on from work done by Acorn related to the design of the ULA components in its products,[45] the Acorn Cambridge Workstation formed the hardware basis of a chip design product by Qudos called Quickchip,[46] "a comprehensive CAD package for semi-custom gate arrays... supported by a high speed direct write electron beam fabrication facility",[47] used by custom semiconductor product designers such as Flare Technology and promoted by the UK's Department of Trade and Industry.
