I recall seeing a Macromedia Director player but never heard of a DirectX port. In any case the lack of hardware floating point in most of their machines was looking like a big mistake by the mid 90s. Their compilers were also way off the pace and that was getting to be a problem.
Tbh I think I am slightly bitter about having stuck with Acorn a bit too much, and should have jumped away sooner. It is clear Acorn knew they were toast even before the Risc PC. A lot of these very impressive developments were consequently glorious wastes of time, which is kind of tragic too.
I'm not sure if the directX port ever saw the light of day. At that point the top brass were putting their hopes in the 'Network Computer' [1] and Set Top Boxes, so it may have shipped with one of those, or been intended to.
Brian McCullough's book How the Internet Happened (https://www.amazon.com/How-Internet-Happened-Netscape-iPhone...) angles this in terms of the centralized digital superhighway versus the open distributed internet. (Where thin clients, set top boxes, etc. are in the first group and web browsers and WWW protocol are the second.)
Essentially, by 2005 the open internet had won, but the iPhone (or more precisely: the App store) became the dream of a thin client and became the platform NCs had initially targeted — turning the internet into a walled garden with a vengeance.
The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was. Nowadays it would have much more traction thanks to SaaS.
In tech, one step ahead is an innovator. Two step ahead is a martyr.
> The NC is one of those things that feels like it was simply to far ahead of where the technology and the mind set of users was.
They were just like X dumb terminals that predated them by about a decade: far behind what the technology was offering with storage and computing power becoming cheaper every year.
I'm glad they never caught up, and hope the same happens to Chromeboxes/books; I don't want prices of common hardware I use go up because of market shrinkage due to lots of people ditching real computers in favor of dumb terminals where even the simplest service is something that they must access and run remotely with no or reduced local storage/computing power.
Sorry for having an unpopular opinion, but to me SaaS is like going back 40-50 years to the mainframes era, and essentially is a way to put everything behind a counter so that users can be charged tomorrow for what today is still free.
Trivia at this point. But the Oracle Network Computer was a low-end x86 box running FreeBSD and a full-screen Netscape Navigator. Very much a product of its time.
(WebTV, later purchased by Microsoft, was the more successful product in this space.)
Acorn did the reference profile NC for Oracle, and it was an ARM7-based machine with NCOS, a stripped down version of RISC OS. The Acorn-built NCs were then sold under a variety of brandings, including Acorn's own and Xemplar (the Acorn/Apple education collaboration in the UK). Was the Oracle Network Computer a later variant?
Tbh I think I am slightly bitter about having stuck with Acorn a bit too much, and should have jumped away sooner. It is clear Acorn knew they were toast even before the Risc PC. A lot of these very impressive developments were consequently glorious wastes of time, which is kind of tragic too.