A > ACORN COMPUTER  > Archimedes A3000     

Archimedes A3000

The Acorn Archimedes A3000 was based on the Archimedes A410 but in an 1040ST/Amiga A500-style wedge unit. Designed for the home market, it was intended as a replacement for the BBC Micro and like the earlier Archimedes models it was only really used in British schools up until very recently.

Acorn started to phase out the Archimedes name and the machine was now simply badged Acorn A3000. Rumours have it that some of the Acorn A410 models had serious reliability problems and had to be recalled, so the Archimedes name was dropped to boost the machine's reputation.

Like the Atari and Amiga computers it had a built-in keyboard and disk drive located on the right-hand side, but unusually it also had two stereo speakers on either side of the unit. This form factor is ideal for a school environment as it doesn’t take up too much space and was often used with a metal plinth allowing a monitor to stand on top, usually an Acorn-badged Phillips 8853 (AKF12) or 8833 MK11 (AKF17).

The A3000 had two expansion ports. The internal one was a cut down 8-bit version of the type found on the earlier Archimedes machines. The second one, on the rear of the case, was a 16-bit version fully compatible with both earlier and later machines.

The operating system could read PC 720K disks and provided improved facilities for hard disk and networking, as well as some apps included in ROM which would appear on the task bar, such as Paint, Edit, and other useful programs.

The A3000 was replaced by the A3010 and A3020 models in 1992.

Thanks to Jonathan Hayward for his help.