Talk:Acorn Archimedes/Archive 1

Archive 1

What, no photo???

-- User:70.149.166.7 17:45, 6 October 2005

You could also try requesting one at Wikipedia:Requested pictures#Computers -- Solipsist 17:04, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

The current photo could be replaced with one showing a native CRT monitor. One such image is this A3020. But personally, I think an older machine would be preferable, as a reference to the origin of the series. -- Trevj (talk) 15:53, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

There are some others on flickr but they show an Atari monitor. -- Trevj (talk) 16:22, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Silly me! Soon we'll be able to use the A310, A540 or similar from Chris's Acorns -- Trevj (talk) 16:31, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

backward compatibility

Was the Archimedes backward compatible with the RISC?

Huh? The Arm processor the Archimedes used had a RISC architecture, if that's what you mean. Cpc464 01:31, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

IIRC, the Archimedes was the first RISC computer designed for home use --Rbanffy (talk) 15:06, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Future work

I'd like to get this moving again. Aside from a picture (we definitely need a couple) it's lacking simple things like an infobox and a refs section. It also fails to mention that 4th Dimension were the best games company that ever existed, which is objectively true. Chris Cunningham 15:37, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I must say I don't like the current picture; the flat screen monitor, while cool, is not really typical. I'm sure loads of people have one kicking around, but if not I could take a picture of my A310 with the 'original' and IMO much more typical rebadged-as-Acorn Philips monitor (AKF11 IIRC). (It's probably better if someone else has a photo, the flap covering the controls on mine has broken off and hence has a visible chunk of blu-tac holding it on. ;-) ) - S --195.137.91.247 23:27, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

I really agree a photo with a matching Acorn monitor should be added. And one can always digitally restore the device (it's not like "cheating" as long as it reconstructs the original appearance) --Rbanffy (talk) 15:06, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

A420

I seem to recall the A420 is an urban myth: only the A410 and A440 were released, though all three were released as A4xx/1 versions. And if I'm going to be pedantic, none of the 300 or 400 models had an 'A' prefix: they were called Archimedes 410/1 (for eg) 81.179.140.82 16:23, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Not true, I've got one sitting here. It was the A410 (not A410/1) that was never actually produced. 85.211.7.182 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 14:14, 1 August 2010 (UTC).

Impact

If I remember correctly:

• Tesco only switched to RM after Acorn ceased producing desktop computers.
• The major cause for blame for Acorn losing market share to the IBM PC was not multimedia capabilities - even latterly for the most part the same software was being produced for all 3 platforms including 3 in 1 CD ROM. The biggest impact was the growth of parent school governors who wanted to see machines like they used at work.

80.177.52.130 (talk) 12:13, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Why no mention of the ARM processors in the "Impact" section? Whilst the Archimedes might be consigned to history, and RISCOS very much a niche OS, the processor technology developed for these machines is now ubiquitous. Should it not be mentioned? Captain Sumo (talk) 10:20, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, very much so. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:43, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

List of models

The recently added 'ARM core' column is incomplete as I don't know these and don't have time to check them at the moment. --Trevj (talk) 12:30, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm willing to be corrected, but I was always pretty sure that there were essentially only the ARM2/ARM3/250mez/ARM250 cores? The A3xx & A4xx were all ARM2 machines. The A4xx at least could also be upgraded (user upgraded in fact, as it was a socketed chip) to ARM3. a_man_alone (talk) 14:08, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

A quick look through the enviable and comprehensive Chriswhy pages - which are heartbreakingly nostalgic - seems to confirm that they were all Arm2. I've updated the list. a_man_alone (talk) 14:14, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you I suspected Mr Whytehead would have the info! Me, I jumped straight from 6502 to ARM610! --Trevj (talk) 14:20, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Discussion at Template talk:Acorn computers#Proposed move/new title

You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Acorn computers#Proposed move/new title. Trevj (talk) 18:03, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Fred Harris introducing the Archimedes, with Roger Wilson

These video links will be useful here. -- Trevj (talk) 18:43, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Those links are dead, but this appears to have the same content: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mou73QdF-NU --Guy Macon (talk) 12:14, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Comparison articles

Seeing as this article is about the series of computers, I thought it'd be worth comparing content with similar articles. Some examples are Apple II series and Atari 8-bit family. What others are there? -- Trevj (talk) 15:16, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

And some high quality articles (although not series) are Macintosh Classic, iPad, ZX Spectrum, MacBook and MacBook Pro. -- Trevj (talk) 16:19, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Old discussion

"it could run a piece of software faster and with better visual quality than the more-famous Commodore Amiga" - I was an Archimedes owner, so I have no axe to grind, but is that true? Faster maybe, but I'm not sure the standard graphics capabilities were unambiguously better than the Amiga. For a start, didn't the Amiga have some sort of hold-and-modify display which allowed all 4096 colours on screen at once, as opposed to a maximum 256 colours on the Archimedes? And the palette was not very flexibly redefinable in 256 colours on the Archimedes either, but I have no idea what the Amiga's capabilities were. -- S — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.219.24.100 (talk) 12:38, 4 November 2003 (UTC)

The Arc graphics chipset was actually inferior in speed to the Amiga one, but the seperior CPU meant it could out-perform it anyway. Compare Zarch (Arc) with Virus (the mildly stripped-down version of Zarch so the Amiga/ST could handle it). The Arc was better at handling higher screenmodes than the Amiga. I was an Amiga500 owner, & I think the Arc was the better of the two. The CPU was so weak that it greatly limited what could be done with the chipset's capabilities. Crusadeonilliteracy 13:44, 4 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I looked it up: The CPU in the Amiga500 was 0.7MIPS, whereas the 8MHz ARM CPU in the early Archimedies was 4.5MIPS. Ouch was the Amiga was underpowered with its 1970s CPU. I knew the 68k was slow, but I didn't realise it was in the same league as the CPU in the Apple II. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Crusadeonilliteracy (talk • contribs) 13:06, 28 January 2004 (UTC)

(While this discussion is old, that last statement still deserves a reply for the sake of others who might read it.) "I knew the 68k was slow, but I didn't realise it was in the same league as the CPU in the Apple II." It wasn't. You have to very be careful when comparing MIPS values from different architectures. The 68000 was a very different architecture from the Apple II's 6502, and its instructions were much more powerful. Even if you consider memory bandwidth alone, an 8 MHz 68000 had about 4 times as much bandwidth as the Apple II's 1 MHz 6502. The same warning about MIPS comparisons applies when comparing a CISC architecture like the 68000 to a RISC one like the ARM. Colin Douglas Howell 06:09, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

It's quite an invalid comparison indeed. The Amigas CPU may have been inferior to the Archimedes, but it's laughable to compare it to a 6502. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.69.146.66 (talk) 13:29, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, 1 mips for an 8 bitter means 1 mio 8 bit adds per second while it means 1 mio 32 bit adds for a 32 bit cpu. That means at the same mips rating a 68000 is roughly 4-5 times as fast as the 6502 as you have to do the carry stuff on your own there too. Then again the 68000 has only a 16 bit ALU and 32 bit adds take 1.5 times as long as 16 bit. In reality we compare 0.33 mips 8 bit vs. 0.7 mips 32 bit so that the Amiga's 68000 is roughly 8 times as fast as the C64s 6510. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.102.155.35 (talk) 16:11, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

It is a hoax that the 68k was much inferior to the ARM2, the same CISC instructions cannot be compared with RISC, since CISC can complete operations in fewer clock cycles than RISC

Synthetic comparison: ARMv2 is 0.5MIPS / MHz; 68k is 0.2MIPS / MHz. Closest comparison to the real world: ARMv2 is approximately 300 Dhrystones / MHz while 68k is approximately 250 Dhrystones / MHz. About a 20% more, better but not a lot.

In the Amiga 500, the cpu power was secondary, the important thing was its custom chips that made the system look smooth and even with several simultaneous programs, I do not remember another that from 1985-1990 was comparable in graphics and sound capabilities in same price range, the Atari ST being somewhat more economical did not have blitter or sampled sound, etc. and much less Acorn. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hooankee (talk • contribs) 04:07, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

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We had access to a fun beast which was an Archimedes on a ISA card which we installed inside a 30386 PC; they shared the keyboard and display IIRC. The main idea was that we could run our Smalltalk port on the Archimedes. It soon became obvious that the 25MHz PC was being absolutely crapped on (in a left-behind-eating-its-dust kind of way) by the 8MHz Archimedes, with better graphics to boot. Phil 16:02, Nov 27, 2003 (UTC)

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I believe initially that Acorn set up a lab out on the West Coast of America to develop an operating system for the Archimedes. However, I this effort foundered and the abominable Arthur was hacked up until something decent could be developed. RiscOS (2 ?) was then developed to replace Arthur, and provided many of the features seen in modern GUI systems today. In some cases, such as saving files using drag and drop, RiscOS was better than even current systems. Jonathan

Yes, see ARX. I wonder what happened to it. It's a pity Acorn didn't dump Arthur for it, for as good as RISC OS was, an OS on par with MacOSX in the 1980s would've been quite a selling point. Crusadeonilliteracy

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A4 - 2 MB RAM (A5000 hardware in a laptop case)

This page states that the A5000 was an A4 in desktop form, not the other around around. Which is correct? Crusadeonilliteracy 03:54, 31 Jan 2004 (UTC)

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The story about archimedes being ditched in favor of win '95 is kinda pov, and sort of wrong too I think. Archimedes was obsoleted by the RISC PC (which is basically a much faster dual-processor Archimedes)) from the same company. I'm pretty sure Win '95 wasn't the major factor. (My poor wrists still remember Win '95 :-/ ). [For completeness: PCs were cheaper than RISC PCs though, so some people may have (unwisely :-P ) followed that 'upgrade' path ;-) ] Kim Bruning 10:55, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

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Without resurrecting the infinite number of "my computer's better than yours" battles from the 1980s, comparing the speeds of main CPUs when contending for "most powerful" system is simply nonsense. On many 80s machines, the speed of the main CPU was irrelevant, as it did no work other than to orchestrate all the other chips, which greatly outpowered the main CPU. If you compare Amiga and Arc games, you'll see that scrolling/sprite games are generally slow or very slow on the Arc, as the ARM is not designed for blitting and scrolling fullscreen games and its VIDC is no help. However, CPU intensive games (such as 3D games) perform far better on the Arc than on the Amiga. Kyz 02:20, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Indeed, the basic Lander demo blew people away at the time.

Actually, MEMC and VIDC do provide support for hardware scrolling the screen. The start, end, and start-after-VBL addresses for the video buffer can be programmed in the MEMC at addresses that are multiples of 16. This easily enables vertical hardware scrolling. The 16-byte minimum increment is too much for direct horizontal scrolling, but the VIDC allows programming the start and end of the graphics and the colored border part of a scan line independently at pixel resolution. If border and graphics overlap, the border overrides the graphics display. This can be used to create a graphics screen that is slightly wider than displayed and use the border to mask off columns of pixels on the left and right sides (at the price of having an always black border). MEMC 16-byte increments can be used every couple of frames to jump the picture horizontally and VIDC scan line shifting/masking can be used to smoothly scroll the frames in between.

What the Archimedes lacks, compared to the Amiga and Atari ST, is separate bit planes. All bits for a pixel (1, 2, 4, or 8) are contiguous in memory. This makes impossible the popular trick on the other machines of using some bit planes for background, some for foreground, and being able to redraw these independently. MEMC and VIDC also support a single hardware sprite, but that is intended for the mouse cursor and too limited for much else. IIRC, the hardware does not provide a horizontal raster interrupt (and nothing like the Amiga's Copper co-processor, of course), but an IOC timer-triggered interrupt can be efficiently used for the same purpose.

—Naddy 01:06, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

The Amiga had a dual playfield mode, where you could independently scroll the two layers. But the bit planes sucked. For N planes that you want to affect, you have to do N blits. That means N times the setup overhead. It's less efficient than packed pixel. Mirror Vax 08:07, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

That is not fully true. You could blit all planes at once on an Amiga if bitplanes are interleaved linewise. Which can be realized easily with an additional line offset. Bitplanes just became less efficient when it came to per-pixel texture calculations like in DOOM. (Philipp, unregistered) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.218.5.34 (talk) 11:34, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Back in the days I switched from Amiga 1200 stock to A3010 and boy did I miss my Amiga. I mean what's the point in having such a powerful computer when you just do not notice the speed? Games? Amiga had better ones. OS? Preemptive multitasking made a huge difference for me. Then again the Archimedes had tons of fantastic software and it was a dream to program. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.102.155.35 (talk) 16:11, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Much too long

This article is too long.

In August 2022 a bot put a notice to that effect at the top of the article. Then there were 22,622 words. Now (25 January 2024) the article has 24,488 words.

Wikipedia:Article size § Size guideline recommends that when the number of words is >8,000 thought should be given to the size. An article with >15,000 words "Almost certainly should be divided or trimmed".

Alongside this is giving consideration to what is actually making the article so long. Wikipedia:Too much detail informs us that "Wikipedia is not supposed to be a collection of every single fact about a subject".

One contender is taking the A3000 section together with the A3010, A3020, A4000 section into a new article as because they were similar and for the same market.

The section RISC OS only needs to be 2 or 3 paragraphs to briefly summarise as there are already articles RISC OS and List of RISC OS bundled applications. In its present form it has much duplication.

It is hard to make an article shorter. I have various models in this product range so I am interested. But "Articles over a certain size may not cover their topic in a way that is easy to find or read" in Wikipedia:Summary style § Article size is relevant here. BlueWren0123 (talk) 23:50, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

It was actually @Millstream3 who added the maintenance tag in this edit. As I noted in the exchange with you on my talk page, one of the challenges is to unbundle sections of this page into other articles, but I do not want to get into a notability dispute with people about whether they think the A3000 series is worth another article, only to see it get deleted. Moreover, separate articles seem to suffer from duplication and maintenance problems, such as the Risc PC article which has non-subjective quality issues.

One thing I particularly want to emphasise is that a lot of the information I have added relies on its context. The RISC OS section is meant to communicate the software situation from the point in time that RISC OS, as opposed to Arthur, was first delivered for the Archimedes. Moving that content to the History of RISC OS article, whilst avoiding the wrath of the clique who continue to insist that RISC OS is some kind of modern contender, risks losing that context and thus putting the content at risk of degradation by being deemed off-topic in its new context.

I wouldn't mind, but the History of RISC OS article exhibits some of the same copy-pasting from the inaccurate history previously found on the Acorn Computers article, along with copious trivia: Element 14 being named after silicon - no, really?! I don't want to have to follow my contributions around Wikipedia and be saddled with fixing up yet more articles that people scrawled their recollections into fifteen or so years ago.

By the way, I am not listing "every fact" about this topic. But I am trying to give the treatment of the topic sufficient depth so that people do not keep trotting out myths and misunderstandings about what they thought happened thirty or so years ago. To take an example that I noted in my talk page discussion, people have had wild ideas about the performance of the Archimedes and had seemingly endless arguments about what "MIPS" means, all of which was put to bed by just reading a couple of sources and digesting what Acorn had claimed, which had nothing to do with what a lot of those arguing believed it did. I don't doubt that the discussion on performance can be condensed, but, sure, we could certainly trim all of that away and let people start arguing again in all their ignorance.

I don't know, really. People seem to want short and simple narratives these days, typified by the one continually doing the rounds about how Steve and Sophie designed the ARM (which random YouTube commenters take to mean that they "invented RISC") and then the eventual glory and market success was simply inevitable (it's in everybody's phone, those commenters have to point out), when a combination of luck and outside expertise actually intervened to stop the whole thing from slowly fading away or at least being substantially less successful. When the actual story is more interesting, why wouldn't anyone want to hear that instead? Sometimes, I really do wonder whether people want to learn about these topics or whether they just want their existing perspectives reinforced. I don't contribute to Wikipedia in order to facilitate the latter.

Having written of all this, it might be constructive to consider other articles that supposedly demonstrate a better division of content. I noted that there are articles describing other computing systems that could indicate a formula to adopt here. However, finding a good one is difficult: Atari ST does not have enough content, Macintosh-related articles have been sliced and diced to absurd levels, the Apple II article links out to all the different models but fails to cover the software platform in any detail; maybe the Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64 articles show a reasonable approach. PaulBoddie (talk) 17:29, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

August 2024 Editing Bonanza

I see that considerable enthusiasm has been directed towards editing this article recently. Although it was indicated that the article was too long, and as a significant contributor to this article, I will admit that my own prose has not been outstanding, some of the recent edits have not exactly preserved the level of clarity or even coherence. To start with, the introduction now says this:

"These systems were powered by Acorn's own ARM architecture processors and ran on proprietary operating systems: Arthur and RISC OS."

Of course, what is meant is that they "ran proprietary operating systems" as opposed to "ran on" those things. Then the editing activity has introduced contradictions. For example, it is noted that the FPA10 was available for the A540 but then, in the section on floating-point hardware, it is stated that "[i]ts availability remained unclear". In the performance section, the correct statement noting the delivery of the FPA10 is given. I find myself with the unappealing task of proofreading casual edits by people who evidently don't know the history of these products.

And on that note, I see that a lot of the historical context has been cut. I appreciate that my own verbose prose needed condensing, but without context, people fail to understand things like why this range of machines wasn't more popular, why it didn't appeal to people, and so on. Ultimately, the way the technology and a strategy around it was developed determined the fate of Acorn itself. If that level of detail isn't interesting to the "TL;DR" brigade, it is possible to make separate articles covering the available software and various expansions and applications.

And it was certainly possible to discuss major edits on the talk page instead of going on a three-day bonanza that, reviewing the history, has produced some pretty destructive edits to this article. I find it all pretty disrespectful, really, not just from my own perspective but also from the perspective of those who provided the historical record that enabled this article to be written. PaulBoddie (talk) 20:55, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Speaking of the editpalooza, this edit "fixed" some spelling, asserting that "This is done because the alternate spellings are more widely accepted although the acorn was admittedly sold to a British audience." As a Yank with little sympathy with any fellow Yanks who are bothered by non-US-spelling, I restored some of them and put a {{Use British English}} template at the top; I left the "ize" vs. "ise" alone after discovering that there's such a thing as "Oxford spelling". If you think the article should use Oxford spelling, go ahead and change {{Use British English}} to {{Use Oxford English}}; if you don't, feel free to restore the "ise" spelling. (And, yes, go ahead and fix or restore anything you think is appropriate.) Guy Harris (talk) 21:33, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your own interventions. I wouldn't mind knowing why a bunch of people suddenly hit up this article. Has there been some kind of Wikipedia contribution event? Or did someone make some YouTube video about ARM that sent people scurrying in this direction? Now I'm going to have to review all the changes and probably even make time for the article reorganisation that I acknowledged would be necessary, even though I don't really have the time to dedicate to the exercise.

I was aware of the Oxford comma, and so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Oxford spelling is a thing. Given Acorn's own geographical positioning, maybe I should investigate if Cambridge spelling is also a thing. PaulBoddie (talk) 19:35, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

The more I read the current version of this article, the more I want to revert it to what it was before. Some of the edits are just terrible, like trimming the commentary of the first A300 and A400 machines to a single remark so that the "variously" qualifier makes no sense at all. The A540 is noted as "without Ethernet support" as opposed to "without built-in Ethernet support", which is exactly the kind of thing that leads to criticism of Wikipedia as inaccurate or counterfactual amongst people who know the topic well. I know that isn't important to people who just want to tell the world that the ARM processor is in billions of smartphones, which of course now appears in the introduction but, weirdly, not in the section about the machine's legacy.

One can discuss whether the dismal software situation in the early days of the machine is historically significant, but I think that eliminating most of the treatment of that topic is like glossing over two years of the machine's crucial early history. It was noted in the press that Acorn threw away much of the machine's advantage by only having Arthur and a piecemeal application strategy until RISC OS came along. I see that in the section about the machine's impact, the early Byte review and subsequent PCW follow-up, both by the prolific Dick Pountain, have been excised in the recent editing frenzy. Discarding those observations leaves the reader wondering why this apparent wonder machine wasn't more readily adopted when the answer can be deduced by anyone if those observations are left in.

I see that the remarks about Acorn's operating system strategy to evolve RISC OS have been removed. Although unlikely to have been pursued, any exploration of using Workplace OS would have been significant, particularly if the porting of that software to ARM (which did occur) had been done for the benefit of Acorn. Meanwhile, the PC emulator section seems to have received the mostly harmless treatment, which is unfortunate given its fairly central role in Acorn's attempts to make the system appeal to a business audience.

While I definitely concede that the bitmap image editing section needed condensing, the current version of the vector image editing section has been trimmed so much that I question whether the person responsible ever even used this system at all, given the significance of ArtWorks for RISC OS and the follow-up product for Windows. Indeed, in the section on document processing, Impression has simply been removed entirely, neglecting the fact that it was a central element in Acorn's publishing industry product. If those responsible for these edits did indeed use RISC OS, they seem rather ignorant of the platform's most significant products.

Then, the development tools section has been gutted. Discussion of BASIC development tools has been truncated to only cover the built-in BASIC, and the C++ subsection is now incoherent because the remaining remarks have lost the context from the original paragraph that began by mentioning the abandonment of the platform by developers. Taking that very significant remark away leads the reader into wondering what Colton, Moir and Finn were on about. And without grasping the difficult development tools situation, the reader has no hope in understanding how the platform struggled to maintain its developer community or attract developers, sealing the platform's fate.

I accept that the section on graphical capabilities did go "into the weeds", but it is essential to understand that the Archimedes, like the Amiga, was being outpaced by generic PC-compatibles in the early 1990s, of great concern to the user community. I think it is important to note that efforts were being made to enhance the graphics by companies like State Machine, even if some of their products did not come to light. One might also claim that the floating-point section also went rather deep, but as noted above, cutting context away - such as the fabrication status of the FPA10 at a particular point in time - leads to an incoherent impression about the eventual availability of products. Also, by removing discussion of application support for hardware floating-point instructions, a crucial element in understanding the perspective of Acorn and various developers and their attitudes towards such technology, along with the consequences, is withheld from the reader.

As previously noted, I am inclined to revert to an earlier version and incorporate sensible refinements, as opposed to dropping entire paragraphs and rinsing out the meaning of much that remains. I see that User:WhyIsNameSoHardOmg- - was mostly responsible, tagging the edits with "Newcomer task", after someone set the ball rolling through the usual Wikipedia paper-shuffling edits and attempted fixes for the mess made along the way. Particularly galling is the reintroduction of the headline "4 MIPS" figure without the essential clarification about the kind of "MIPS" involved: essential to avoid flamewars about what "MIPS" is measuring, but also to understand how Acorn advertised its own product.

Well, if people want to slash away at other people's contributions, they should at least be aware that the shoe is on the other foot now. Particularly after this mysteriously high number of "Newcomer task" edits, any failure to engage constructively here on this talk page in future will be regarded as antisocial editing behaviour. PaulBoddie (talk) 21:42, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

I have now restored an earlier version, but edited to improve various sections where the wording was not very good, including the introduction whose tagging seems to have started this episode. This restored, but edited, version does not preserve the deletions that the previously identified user seemed intent on performing on various sections, although I have taken some of the rewriting efforts into consideration. See the first paragraphs about the A3000 as an example.

Although one may regard certain sections as being verbose, deleting contextual information does not aid the reader's comprehension, and there are plenty of cases where the reader might wonder about the significance of what remains after those deletions. For example, deleting remarks about the educational market but mentioning Longman Logotron assumes the reader is already familiar with that software publisher; otherwise, the mention is simply lost on them. And so on.

If the "too long" categorisation is a burden, we should make related articles relevant to things like software, hardware expansions, and so on, just as we see with other computer articles. Condensing the remaining text and referencing those articles is then completely acceptable, but only then. PaulBoddie (talk) 00:34, 23 August 2024 (UTC)