In attempt to give its operating system strategy a leg-up, Acorn Computers Plc has decided to give its network computer hardware reference designs away for free to those that take its RISC OS operating system. The Cambridge, UK company announced plans earlier this year to re-write RISC OS to support multiple RISC and CISC processors – at present it only supports the company’s ARM RISC processor and its derivatives. The new version is called Galileo and is due by the year-end. Oracle Corp licensed a scaled-down version of RISC OS as the basis for its own NCOS. Versions of Acorn’s design are also used by the likes of Idea Corp, RCA, Zenith and Akai. The company is giving away both the reference and production specs, which is a set of schematics that a company could hand to a manufacturer to get them to make NCs that conform to the spec.
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