Date: Tue, 27 Feb 96 12:12:38 GMT From: pbondar (Peter Bondar) To: art-all Subject: more bullshit from yours truly ACORN and Apple have started a joint venture to supply the UK education market, but Acorn says this does not mean the death of its multi-tasking Risc OS operating system - an event described as "sad and inevitable" by one of its rivals. Instead, the new company will offer Risc OS and Apple's MacOS on the same machines, which will be designed to the CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) specification agreed last year by Apple, IBM and Motorola. Peter Bondar, who runs Acorn's Risc Technologies division, claims the deal gives Risc OS "a more secure future now than it's had for the last couple of years." Risc OS is not just being used in education, he says, but in TV set-top boxes like Viewcall's, and the forthcoming Internet-oriented "network computers" that Acorn is designing for firms like Oracle. However, forthcoming computers designed to the CHRP spec - recently renamed the Power PC Platform - will also run Microsoft's Windows NT, plus the Sun and IBM versions of Unix, called Solaris and AIX. This flexibility that should be particularly useful in the higher education market. The 50:50 venture, as yet unnamed, will be based in Cambridge. Acorn's corporate affairs manager, Kevin Coleman, says "the bulk of the people will come from Acorn," but the company will be headed by Brendan O'Sullivan, who was the managing director of Apple Computer Ireland. When it starts in April, it will take over both firms' educational businesses, selling Acorn's Risc PC, A7000 (Archimedes) and Pocket Book (Psion-based) computers as well as Apple Macintoshes and Newtons. Its turnover is expected to be about £60m a year. Combining the two operations should enable both firms to save money, and there is little geographical overlap. Nigel Turner, the director of new business development for Apple Europe, says Apple has about 16-18 per cent of the education market but "it's very regionally-dependent: it's above 50 per cent in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Acorn is strong in England and Wales so its business is very complementary, really." Turner says the joint venture is part of a broader agreement with Olivetti Telemedia, which has licensed MacOS. Olivetti Telemedia owns 50 per cent of the Acorn Group, which comprises Acorn Education, Acorn Risc Technologies, Acorn Network Computing and Acorn Online Media. Acorn Group also has a shareholding in Advanced Risc Machines Ltd (ARM), a joint venture with Apple and VLSI. The ARM chip is used in the Newton, Apple's electronic organiser. Education buyers committed to Acorn machines have been concerned about how the Archimedes and Risc PC ranges would develop. This will remain a worry since Acorn's software developers are now being encouraged to convert their Risc OS programs to MacOS and thus benefit from Apple's strength in the American education market. But Bondar says Risc OS has a future on both high-end CHRP-spec machines and cheap, Arm-based network computers. To supersede the Risc PC, Acorn's original idea was to take standard PowerPC motherboards and replace the PowerPC chip with Digital Equipment's StrongARM version of Acorn's own processor, which "goes faster than anything we anticipated." Bondar says: "We'd already reached an agreement with IBM to use the CHRP specification," so the deal with Apple came as "a happy coincidence." But to start with, Bondar thinks it may be cheaper to fit CHRP-standard Macs with ARM co-processors running Risc OS, much as current Risc PCs can take Intel-based cards to run DOS and Microsoft Windows programs. Initially they would "dual-boot" to run either MacOS or Risc OS. However, when Apple finishes the Copland version of MacOS (System 8), Bondar thinks "we might be able to get the Mac world and Risc OS world to run concurrently." Acorn is also pitching for the TV set-top box market where its history gives it some advantages. Most operating systems are large and rely on hard drives, but Acorn's machines have long had their operating system in ROM (read-only memory) chips. Risc OS was designed to run from ROM and only takes up about half a megabyte, which means there is lots of room for "applets" (small applications programs) on a standard four-megabyte chip. Bondar sees the future of the A7000 as being in this kind of "network computer" development. Acorn is also developing a $500 network computer to run Oracle's Power Browser software for surfing the Internet's World-Wide Web - and for and running applets developed in Java, Sun's C-like computer language. Bondar refuses to be drawn into speculation ("because of the nature of our Oracle contract I'm not permitted to reveal engineering information"), but clearly this is an exciting prospect. Financially, the three companies behind the new joint venture - Apple, Olivetti and Acorn - are all in a mess. Nonetheless, Acorn's prospects haven't looked better since schools started buying BBC B micros running Econet and circulating information in videotext format. That was tomorrow's "network computer" in all but name, even if it was more than a decade ago. 22 February 1996