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RiscPCs were fab, says Wordwise author By Chris Williams. Published: 1st Dec 2005, 18:15:17 | Permalink | PrintableKnowledge of Acorn seems to stop at 1998, though  In a brief adulatory interview this week, Computer Concepts founder Charles Moir praised the RiscPC as he talked about his adventures in software development. The Wordwise author, who bought Gaddesden Place at the age of 23 with the mountain of cash he earned from software sales in the early Acorn microcomputer market, built up the company that eventually brought the RISC OS platform ArtWorks and Impression.
Casting his mind back to the time after the launch of the BBC B in the 1980s, Moir enthused: "The IBM PC was not very popular over here. It was too expensive, clunky and not homegrown. The IBM PC was inferior in almost every respect to our British computers."
Although the Intel 8086 architecture wasn't at all appealing to Moir, he believes now he should have ported the Wordwise software to the PC platform when Acorn showed its first signs of financial distress. He added, "The Acorn RiscPC however was a great modern desktop that provided features which took years to finally come out in Windows."
Hitting back at Moir's claim that the RISC OS market has entirely disappeared, at least one present user got onto the letters page of the The Register, who published the interview. Steve Bradbury wrote, "I spend some 95% of my working day on an Iyonix, a direct descendant of the RiscPC, now running on a PCI architecture with an Intel XScale processor - an ARM design, the one successful spin-off from Acorn."
Moir's company Xara recently began moves to open source its vector art software package.
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