From: bsalter@acorn.co.uk (Brian Salter)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Acorn News Release - World Didac
Date: 14 Apr 92 11:46:03 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, England


 Acorn Computers at World Didac 1992

Acorn Computers of Cambridge in England will be attending 
the World Didac 1992 exhibition, being held in Basel from 
the 5th to 8th May, with an impressive line up of products.

Acorn is a specialist computer company selling into 
markets that require high performance combined with a 
high degree of functionality but at cost effective prices.  
Major markets within the United Kingdom are Education, 
Training, Imaging and Industrial applications.  Acorn has 
subsidiary companies in Australia and New Zealand, it 
part owns the RISC chip design company Advanced RISC 
Machines Ltd, and it sells its computers in over a dozen 
countries around the world.

The United Kingdom is one of the leading countries in the 
development of educational computing in schools.  Since the 
introduction of computers into British schools in the early 
1980s, Acorn has been the market leader. Today Acorn's machines 
are found in nine out of every ten UK schools, and over half 
the computers being bought by schools are Acorn products.  

Contributing to the success of Acorn's products is the close 
relationship the company has developed with third party software 
and hardware developers. Already there are over 2,000 software 
applications that have been written to run on Acorn's RISC computers, 
and this number is growing daily.

The Acorn A3000 sells more than five times as many as any other 
machine into UK schools.  It was the first RISC computer system 
to sell for under M-#1,000, and together with its high performance 
and great flexibility of use it is used widely in primary and 
secondary schools for general word processing, spreadsheet and 
database use,  as well as for control and monitoring, music, 
special needs and many other specialist educational applications. 

Last September saw the launch of Acorn's new A5000 system which 
set a new standard for quality, speed and power.  Running at 13M-= 
mips, and supplied with 2MB of RAM, a 40 MB hard disc, the ability 
to read and format more than 10 different floppy disc formats 
(including up to  1.6MB), together with a VGA monitor supplied as 
standard, the A5000 sells into Education at M-#1,249 (ex VAT).  The 
A5000 was also designed with international use in mind; it is a 
simple job to translate the operating system commands into any 
other language purely by changing a text file. 

As well as working under Acorn's proprietary multitasking RISC 
operating system,  Acorn's computers can, via software emulation, 
work with DOS and the X Window System, making it possible, for 
instance, to "export" text and graphics from DOS-based programs to 
RISC OS applications, or vice versa, with great ease.  Acorn also 
supplies an X/Open branded UNIX for advanced users in Education.

Already there are over half a million computers used within UK 
schools, and 64% of these are Acorn machines.  Higher Education 
is also responsible for a great deal of computer spending and most 
British universities , as well as many overseas, use Acorn solutions 
in disciplines ranging from computer science and physics to 
computer aided design.

Within the United Kingdom the Government has taken an enlightened 
view of the need to promote high technology in schools.  CD systems 
are being installed in all secondary schools and Acorn's CD systems 
allow access to CD-ROMs containing DOS or RISC OS formatted 
information.  Because RISC OS is fully multitasking, text, sound 
and graphics can be extracted from the CDs by pupils and then 
incorporated in to their own work, making an Acorn CD system a 
useful resource for the whole school.

Unveiled only within the last few months, Acorn's "Replay" system 
offers full motion video running at 25 frames per second without 
hardware assistance. "Replay" thus offers the whole installed base 
of Acorn RISC machines the ability to access proper multimedia 
applications at very low cost. 


The British Government is also evaluating interactive video and once 
again Acorn is leading the field, offering the facility to access IV 
educational material at around half the cost of comparable systems 
from other manufacturers. 

On the Acorn stand at World Didac there will be demonstrations of 
"Replay", of the Acorn CD-ROM system and of interactive video. The 
A3000 and A5000 will both be on show together with examples of 
networking via TCP/IP and Ethernet and the lower cost Econet system. 

Also at Didac alongside Acorn will be representatives of the strong 
educational  software community who write applications for Acorn machines.  
ESM, who won a gold award for their Desktop Folio educational DTP 
program will be there, showing a range of curriculum solutions including 
a number of theme packs for English, Maths, Science and History. 4Mation 
will be showing off a number of drawing, art, and DTP packages

ENDS