The A305 and A310 were launched in June 1987. It was the first RISC CPU based computer in the world. There were 2 models, the A305 and the A310. The A305 could be upgraded to the A310 specification.

The RISC-based A310 excelled on integer programs, but the lack of FPU showed up in the 'Savage' benchmark, where slow IEEE-754 compatible emulation routines in the C library hurt the performance. Remarkably, the A310 could run Savage in interpreted BASIC in 32.8 seconds, only about 50% slower than the Compaq Deskpro 386 equipped with a 80287 math coprocessor.

The A310 ran an operating system called Arthur. It was based on earlier OS Acorn wrote in 1979 for the BBC Micro, a 6502-based PC. Arthur was quite modern for a PC and included features like modularity between the OS and file system (two different file systems were supported), a graphical user interface (GUI) called Desktop, and a built in scripting language. A310 was installed with an ARM2 processor and 1 MB RAM.

This machine has the Arthur operating System 1.2 installed.

The Arthur OS was only supposed to be a stop gap while Acorn continued development on the ARX system, the original project led by paul Fellows was only given 5 months to develop it from scratch. However the ARX project was delayed time and again, until eventually it was dropped when it was deemed possible for Arthur to have a window manager and full desktop. It was also small enough to fit in the 512K of memory, where as ARX required 4MB of RAM and a hard drive.

From the Archimedes brochure:
"The Archimedes 310 personal workstation - world beating technology in an affordable microcomputer. The Archimedes range of microcomputers represents a British breakthrough in the application of RISC technology to personal computing. Acorn has designed and developed the RISC microchip for the Archimedes range to bring practical benefits to all microcomputer users.

Acclaimed at its launch with the British Microcomputing Awards 'Micro of the Year' title, the Archimedes system has also won the 1988 TOBIE award for Best New Technology Application of the Year. In the words of Personal Computer World magazine, The fact is that the ARM chip is amazing, and the Archimedes which uses it is equally wonderful."

Manufacturer: Acorn
Date: 1987

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH51418. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.