Only in the UK, given its key role in school IT teaching. (I sold mine to the local secondary school. I still have the Amiga which replaced it) Even then, not in terms of the technology employed.Tbf the BBC Micro has ended up being arguably more influential than the PC.
ARMOnly in the UK, given its key role in school IT teaching. (I sold mine to the local secondary school. I still have the Amiga which replaced it) Even then, not in terms of the technology employed.
Of course - I was thinking of an alt-PC not the company which designed it.
I think GD's point is that as the ARM RISC architecture from the BBC Micro is at the heart of pretty much all modern smartphones and tablets, and those have displaced traditional PCs among many people, maybe the BBC Micro had the last laugh after all.Of course - I was thinking of an alt-PC not the company which designed it.
Hydrofoils are very weight and weight distribution sensitive, so I seriously doubt they'd be useful either for freight or as warships, they might be viable as mail packets.As the thread's been revived I feel like I can reply to this. Small hydrosails, dinghy size, could indeed come along at any time, and "somewhere in Polynesia" is a good guess for where because they built light and pretty strong. Building a big one, you're going to run into materials problems pretty fast; the strain on your foils trying to get something of 100 tons (low end of ocean-going size) up on the plane is going to be brutal even assuming you figure out a rig for one - I guess something not a million miles from Bermuda rig but that doesn't scale brilliantly, and you're going to have to be able to seriously throw it around if you want to go upwind!
Biggish Polynesian voyaging canoe as a mail packet is about the only conceivable use case I can think of and even then you're going to need some fairly serious innovation to get it stiff enough to be wide enough to be stable enough under sail to get up on the foils without wiggling itself apart.Hydrofoils are very weight and weight distribution sensitive, so I seriously doubt they'd be useful either for freight or as warships, they might be viable as mail packets.
I think you are right. As I said, my original post was about alternatives to the PC as a piece of hardware, which back then ran some variety of DOS, where the BBC and the Amiga were streets ahead. Early versions of Windows were really just a fancy front end for MS-DOS, and it took three versions to get it useable, even so. I have actually used a PC running Windows 2 - with a tiny CRT monitor.I think GD's point is that as the ARM RISC architecture from the BBC Micro is at the heart of pretty much all modern smartphones and tablets, and those have displaced traditional PCs among many people, maybe the BBC Micro had the last laugh after all.
