The A305 and A310 were launched in June 1987 and were the first RISC CPU-based computers in the world. They were two of the first models to be launched in the Archimedes range of Acorn computers.

The A310 ran an operating system (OS) called Arthur. It was based on an earlier OS Acorn wrote in 1979 for the BBC Micro, a 6502-based microcomputer. 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. The A310 was installed with an ARM2 processor and 1 MB RAM. The A305 could be upgraded to the A310 specification.

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.

Following its release the Archimedes 310 was awarded the British Microcomputing Awards 'Micro of the Year' title, and it also won the 1988 TOBIE award for Best New Technology Application of the Year.

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.