Phoebe: Risc PC 2 No More

Background

On Thursday, 17th September 1998, Acorn announced they were dropping their Workstations division (responsible for the production of their RISC OS Desktop computers), cancelling Phoebe: Risc PC 2 and "postponing" Acorn World 98. The results of this restructure were the loss of 75 jobs.

As the first Acorn related site to carry the news (which first appeared in an announcement at Bloomberg), we are comitted to carrying up to the minute news and analysis on what could be the biggest news in Acorn's history.

Acorn were typically late in their own announcement of the news, but as most of the staff did not know about it it is understandable the webmaster was caught hopping. The Press Release

News

RISC OS Ltd. has obtain the source to RISC OS 4, their web site is up and running (though still a little bare). The announcement is positive - and mentions Millipede's new RiscPC motherboard.

The "Foundation" has been announced. See below.

A new company, formed by the Steering Group, RISC OS Ltd. will market Acorn/Element 14's existing RISC OS. Acorn had previously announced their intention to release RISC OS 4, but the new announcement is a promising sign.

Acorn have ditched their name because, according to CEO Stan Boland, it "carries too much baggage". The Register carries their announcement. The new name is Element 14 (the 14th element in the periodic table is silicon) and their web site is at http://www.e-14.com/.

There was another meeting, be held on 6-Dec-1998, for parties interested in Risc OS 4 (sic) to find out more about the proposed plans between the Steering Group and Acorn.

The Acorn Cybervillage has a form online for gauging genuine interest in Phoebe for "certain parties" however the style of questioning seems similar to that of Paul Middleton when he asked earlier in October, before the Steering Group withdrew from direct negotiations with Acorn.

Castle Technology have been confirmed as the official distributor of the current range of RISC OS machines which will continue to be manufactured by Acorn. Although they are not developing Phoebe the press release alludes to a forthcoming announcement.

There are now several groups interested in buying Acorn Workstations and there is a possibility of a management buy-out. This is, however, very optimistic.

Forbidden Technologies

Stephen Streater (of EIDOS) has a new company, Forbidden Technologies (their proposed machine), with lots of money to spend due to tax reasons so is saying he could produce Phoebe with support from the Acorn community. The production of a good GUI for Unix/Linux (which is sadly lacking) based on the principles of RISC OS is one good way forward which perhaps should be developed in parallel with someone developing Phoebe to production (as it is apparently a very impressive machine which is was almost finished).

Their suggestion is a hardware/software solution which would be a multiprocessor ARM based machine with Linux installed and this new RISC OS-esque GUI, when started it would go straight into this new GUI. Libraries would be available to mimic most of the functionality of the WIMP etc. This would be a very impressive machine, and eventually (when the GUI would be sold separately to the box) could well be the best GUI for Linux.

This is obviously the long-term view for the future of our platform, and Acorn's decision has given us the chance to develop something we might only have planned. Mike Kinghan, of Turing Tools, has written an article on this view - The Case For Linux.

The Steering Group

Robert Todd has announced that he is in negotiations with Acorn for rights to Phoebe and would hope to be shipping the first batch in November. There was a meeting on Friday, 25th September in Cambridge for developers, dealers etc. to discuss the future of the platform.

This meeting appointed Peter Bondar (who recently left Acorn and had earlier suggested a plan of action) to head up a new consortium with the task of maintaining and developing the existing Acorn product business.

There was a further meeting (Saturday, 10-Oct-1998) and a short announcement has been made.

Applied Risc Technologies (ART)

The future looked bright when the Acorn Cybervillage carried a Memorandum of Understanding between the Steering Group (now known as ART) and Acorn which described how ART would gain non-exclusive transferable rights to most of Acorn's hardware and software rights, this includes the source code to RISC OS and the means to manufacture Phoebe.

However, the Cybervillage withdrew the document as it was, allegedly, supposed to remain confidential.

ART have now withdrawn from negotiations as Acorn have gone behind their backs to talk directly to the manufacturers they were considering. It is thought to be the Dutch company, Royal Begemann, who rescued Tulip Computers earlier this year. The MOU mentioned above seems to have been genuine but Acorn have dissolved it.

After much discussion about a "teaser" news item on the Cybervillage the truth has come forward. The news does seem to be the release of RISC OS, it could also be the possibility of motherboard upgrades for existing Risc PCs. A price of £129+VAT is being mentioned for the RISC OS upgrade. Here is the press release reproduced verbatim (including the mistakes such as "RISCOS" ;-)), this was on display at the Acorn Midlands show on the 28-Nov-1998 and released to the press as well:

LIMITED PRESS RELEASE
25 November 1998

Acorn and the Steering Group have commenced a new initiative to
the future development and marketing of RISCOS to the Acorn
Community.
RISC OS is a highly-developed and stable operating system for the ARM
microprocessor platform and is widely used in both the desktop and
professional markets. RISCOS is fully Year 2000 compliant.

As part of its previous RISCPC 2 development program, Acorn has been
developing a high performance version of RISCOS, which will bring
greater functionality and power to the ARM platform.

Whilst these discussions are at an early stage, both Acorn and the
Steering Group are hopeful that an agreement can be reached quickly
which will provide a secure roadmap for current and future RISC OS users.

RISCOS Ltd. and the Foundation

RISCOS Ltd. (note no space) has been launched by the Steering Group to oversee the development of RISC OS. Paul Middleton announced it late in January.

The latest announcement gives details about a replacement to the old Clan. They are also taking over control of the www.riscos.com domain from Jason Tribbeck.

This is now the future of RISC OS - given their recent announcement the future for RISC OS looks bright. Will we have up to date machines to run it on though?

Other possiblities

Ned Abell is trying to get capital for his Blueskys project. Note, he is only looking for money to be invested in bringing Phoebe to market, not comments on the spec, promises of buying it etc.

ChiOS is Jason Tribbeck's attempt to produce a RISC OS compatible computer on a PCI card, suitable for slotting into modern PCs. However this option would probably not be as powerful as the Forbidden machine, but would be "more" compatible with existing applications.

Other sites

Acorn Arcade have a summary of the events so far and many of the rumours too...
Phoenix seems to be a consistent name for the replacement of Phoebe and Archive is becoming a central site for all the different strategies.
Show your support for the various options at Andrew Veitch's site.
ANS, in conjunction with Convergence, has its own site explaining the current situation.

If you have any comments please feel free to email us.

Jaffa Software are making their best efforts to keep this page up to date, but of course all information is given E&OE and without any guarantee to its accuracy, express or implied.