Acorn Computers Plc announces its 1988 figures today, but in the meantime has added three new models to its Archimedes 400 family of low-cost RISC-based workstations and promises a new machine between the 300s and 400s next month. The new models run up to 10% faster than their predecessors by virtue of improved memory cycle efficiency, and run the Cambridge company’s new RISC OS multi-tasking operating system, which supports up to 4Mb of main memory but runs all existing Archimedes packages. The machines come with built-in graphics and hard disk controllers, four slot backplane and co-processor bus, for which a floating point co-processor will be available in the summer. The base 410 has the operating system in 512Kb of ROM, 1Mb of main mmeory and 800Kb 3.5 floppy for UKP1,200. The 420 adds a 20Mb internal Winchester and has 2Mb RAM, running Acorn’s software emulator of MS-DOS; it costs UKP1,700. And the 440 has 50Mb disk and 4Mb RAM, and costs UKP2,500. They are available now.
