[eunet.micro.acorn] The Active Book Co. Ltd - who they?

pete@abccam.abcl.co.uk (Peter Cockerell) (12/18/90)

A couple of people have asked recently what ABC is. It's not the 'Acorn
Business Computer', that's for sure. (Actually, it was Acorn Business
Machine, and was a BBC with a Z-80 Second Processor housed in a three-tonne
box. Amazingly it didn't sell that well...)

In fact, ABC stands for The Active Book Company. We are designing a lap-top,
keyboardless (stylus-driven) machine which uses the ARM as the core of a
custom chip which we (well, the hardware guys) designed. In fact, we're the
first users of of the static ARM cell, whose clock you can stop to save
power in idle moments.

The other noteworthy thing about the Active Book is that most of the
software above the OS level is being written in Smalltalk. It takes
something as powerful as the ARM to make this a realistic proposition.

Hope this helps. (Just don't ask me when the product will be ready...)

Pete XXX