> For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball.

Acorn's CPU division is the most successful CPU design house in the world and sells around 10x more than all forms of Intel and Intel-compatible chips put together.

It was named after its first product, the Acorn RISC Machine: ARM. It is still called Arm Ltd. today.

Arm alone is one half of the entire CPU market.

https://morethanmoore.substack.com/p/arm-2025-q4-and-fy-fina...

An Acorn-compatible CPU is inside half of the processor-powered devices in the world.

How is that "dropping the ball"? It is the most successful processor design of all time, bar none.

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mike_hearn 3 days ago | parent [-]

It wasn't their goal to become a CPU vendor, come on. He was clearly meaning the Acorn computers.

It was such a pity. As a British schoolboy in the early 90s we had a mix of Acorns and PCs, and I had a BBC Model B at home and then a bit later also a PC. Very lucky in hindsight.

The Acorn machines were ridiculously better except for fewer games. At first I don't remember there being much of a gaming gap and there were plenty of games targeting the BBC Micros, but as games scaled up the bigger US economy started to matter much more and the app/game selection just wasn't as good.

But in terms of engineering the GUI was better than Windows, but more importantly the reliability was way higher. My primary school teachers (!) were constantly getting me to fix the computers or install new apps because they always broke. When an Acorn "broke" it was something like the printer being out of paper. When the PC "broke" it was always something much, much harder.

	▲	lproven 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I agree about the virtues of the kit. I owned several Archies and loved them. But the goal of a company is to survive, sell stuff, and make money. One division of Acorn survives, makes money, and dominates the industry, and the A in its name stands for Acorn. (Some other bits survive inside Broadcom and things.) It focussed on the successful bits and executed superbly. As the desktop PC industry consolidated on x86 and MS OSes it moved away. Good move. That's keeping your eye on the ball, in my book. I can't think of any other company that did so well. Sun, SGI, Cray, DEC, all either dead, or acquired, or sold on and split up, or sold off the divisions they were known for, and little or nothing of their tech lives on. IBM still makes POWER servers and workstations. That's about it. But not PCs. Apple makes machines that use the Acorn ARM instruction set and can't run any binaries from their own PowerPC era kit, let alone 68k. It's doing great but by savagely chopping away legacy tech. I think Acorn did great by comparison!