The Background section provides a brief history of the break up of Acorn Computers and what happened next. After that there are brief sections on each of the companies that built (or attempted to build) RISC OS based computers and RISC OS Ltd which provided continued the development of RISC OS. The companies are:
On "Black" Thursday 17th September, 1998 Acorn closed down their Workstation Division, cancelled the RiscPC 2 (aka Phoebe 2100) and cancelled the Acorn World show in 1998. The RISC OS market fragmented. In July 1999 Element 14 completed a buy out from Acorn and would concentrate on the set top box market. In October 2000 Element 14 was bought by Broadcom.
RISCOS Ltd was a new company jointly founded by many of the remaining companies and leading individuals in the RISC OS marketplace. Its mission was to continue RISC OS development where Acorn left off. After discussions with Acorn initially, and subsequently with Element 14, in January 1999 RISCOS Ltd obtained a license to sell Acorn's existing versions of RISC OS and to continue development of desktop RISC OS and sub-license desktop RISC OS to 3rd parties. Element 14 retained the ownership of RISC OS and would continue to develop it for Network Computers and similar devices.
When Element 14 was broken up, Pace Micro Technology Ltd bought RISC OS, but RISCOS Ltd's license was not affected. Pace continued to develop RISC OS for use in Set Top Boxes and other appliances. Later Pace sold RISC OS to Castle. This eventually precipitated the 2004 license dispute between Castle and RISCOS Ltd, which after a lot of confusing rattle throwing (for those on the outside), many misleading and contradictory statements (from those claiming to be on the inside) and silence from the 2 parties, was aledgedly amicable settled. However RISC OS has forked, probably irreversably, into Castle's RISC OS 5 and RISCOS Ltd RISC OS 4, Select and RISC OS 6.
In Dec 2006 RISC OS OpenLtd (ROOL) was launched to open source RISC OS 5. After a long pause while license terms were sorted out, ROOL started release RISC OS 5 sources. RISC OS Ltd are NOT part of ROOL and RISC OS 4, Select and RISC OS 6 sources are not available from ROOL. Recently there has been announcement that ROOL and RISC OS Ltd will cooperate to standardise and maintain common RISC OS interfaces.
Advantage 6 owns Stuart Tyrrell Developments which produces add-ons and upgrades for Acorn computers. Advantage Six has produced the A75 and A6, A6+ and A6T4 Windows computers which run Virtual Acorn .
In 2004 Advantage 6 announced the A9 range based on the ARM9 processor including the A9Home running RISC OS Adjust32 OS from RISCOS Ltd. In 2005 Advantage 6 demonstrated the A9Home at the 2005 Wakefield show and started selling beta test versions to experienced users. In 2006, also at the Wakefield show, CJE Micros started selling the A9home to the general public. [More details ]
Castle had bought the rights to the RiscPC and A7000 from Element 14 (the renamed Acorn) and continued to manufacture and sell them. In 2002 Castle lauched the first native 32bit workstation, Iyonix, based on the Intel Xscale CPU. [more details]
MicroDigital was set up from Focus IT to design, develop, manufacture and market new RISC based computers. MicroDigital produced their own design RISC OS computers. First the Medi, followed by the Mico, the Alpha and finally by the Omega. [more details]
MicroDigital ceased trading in 2005 and in 2006 their domain names expired and websites disappeared.
Millipede design and manufacture broadcast video board e.g. Prisma3 and Alphalock Studio. Because of the limitations of the aging RiscPC, Millipede designed a replacement motherboard called Imago [Wanted]. Although demonstrated at user groups and RISC OS Shows, the Imago never went into production and public sale due to problems with the FPGAs which replace the custom Acorn chips (VIDC and IOMD). [more details]
Millipede's website appears to be a placeholding banner only.
Not strictly "after Acorn" but near the end NetProducts produced the NetStations, based on Acorns NetStation, for NChannel. [more details ]
Pace used the NC OS derivative of RISC OS in Set Top Boxes, including the Bush Internet TV set top boxes. Later Pace first licensed and then sold RISC OS to Castle and now has no involvement with RISC OS. [more details]
RISCOS Ltd was given the latest Acorn RISC OS source as part of its license agreement. It picked up the peices of RISC OS 3.80, which had been planned for Phoebe. In July 1999 RISC OS 4 was released in ROM, and has been the OS for all new RISC OS designs. The Select scheme was launched to fund further development of RISC OS which has resulted in 3 releases to date. The Select releases are softloaded on top of RISC OS 4. In 2004 the latest Select release was ROMed as RISC OS Adjust (4.39). A 32bit version has been developed for Advantage Six's A9.
RiscStation produced the R7500 range. They also announced but failed to deliver a new RISC OS laptop to replace the A4. [more details]
Xemplar was founded in April 1996 as a joint 50/50 venture between Acorn and Apple to sell into the Education market. Ok, so it is not strictly after Acorn, but I have included it here. In January 1999 Acorn sold its 50% to Apple for £3 million. Xemplar resold the Acorn NetStation to the education market as the Xemplar Matrix NC. [more details]