Also the name for an early Risc OS machine. Unlike earlier Risc OS machines this one was built as a flat box containing all the computery gubbins with the keyboard attached via a wire so that you could lie back in your chair as you blew up vector office blocks in Starfighter. This was succeded by the A5000 and eventualy the Risc PC.

The Acorn A4000 was a computer which was designed to compliment the A30x0 line of machines (A3000, A3010 and A3020), and was quite a departure from that series in many ways.

Unlike these machines' all-in-one approach (where everything was in the keyboard, including the floppy drive et al), the A4000 was more like an IBM clone in its design, with a seperate keyboard that plugged into it instead. (Oddly, the mouse plugged into the keyboard, Mac-style). Essentially, the A4000 was a lower-end A5000, its case being smaller and its specifications similar to the A30x0s.

In traditional Acorn fashion, the operating system was on ROM, now with RISC OS 3 being the default instead of the clunky OS 2. This boasted many advantages over the previous incarnation, such as (finally) changing file copying from a single-tasking CLI operation to a proper GUI command. The days of having to patiently wait for a copy to finish before getting on with one's work were over.

Internally the machine boasted specifications well in advance of older Acorns. A 32-bit ARM250 running at 12Mhz was powerful stuff back in the early 90's, and the massive 2-4Mb of RAM ensured this was a system with potential. As for storage, eat your heart out A3020 - sporting not only the ubiquitous 3.5in floppy disk drive, but an 80Mb hard drive as well meant the A4000 was now the top-of-the-range Acorn system.

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