History: 1981-2006

The early years

ROMs The BBC Micro was unusual in that you could install ROM chips inside, and that's how we shipped our software. This has the great advantage that the software became permanently installed in the computer, had instant start-up and required no RAM. Xara (then called Computer Concepts) grew to become the largest developer for the Acorn computer - first the BBC Micro and then the Acorn Risc based computers. The second time around (Archimedes) we had to start again from scratch, as we'd spent a year or two developing Atari ST software.

The Atari ST This was a revolutionary computer in its day. Perhaps the first affordable 32-bit architecture (68000 processor was a delight to work with, compared to x86 based processors in IBM PCs). It had a Mac-like desktop. It had loads of RAM - 128KBytes to be exact. Isn't it extraordinary to consider that 128k BYTES of memory was regarded as a large amount, and even more amazing to think that a great many software packages, including word processors and even DTP packages could be written to work in that space! We developed only a few packages for the Atari ST. The main one was Fast BASIC, a BBC-Basic like basic interpreter / compiler. BBC Basic was widely regarded as one of the best Basic dialects around - clean and modular. It included an inline assembler, which was hugely important for us because most of our programs were written in assembly language. The version we did for the Atari ST came on a ROM cartridge that you plugged in the side.

Archimedes We knew about Acorn's RISC developments from the very beginning. The BBC Micro used the 6502 8-bit processor which was very simple, but very fast (for the time). Acorn wanted to find a 32-bit replacement and, for one reason and another, decided to develop their own brand new 32-bit architecture, that had the simplicity of the 6502, but was true 32-bit. What they created was not only the first affordable 32-bit processor, but the fastest chip around, by a large margin. It easily beat the rather poor 8086 16-bit processor that powered the IBM PC at the time. So once Acorn announced their first computer, it was off Atari, and back to developing Acorn software. That computer was simply the most advanced, from a hardware and software point of view, and we had to work on it. We created a wide range of products for the Acorn Risc computers, including hardware products such as the LaserDirect, which was the world's first sub £1000 600-dpi laser printer. In 1990 we also developed our own Postscript clone (ShowPage) which was the beginning of a line of products taking us to Xara Xtreme today. But despite having world beating technology, poor management doomed Acorn. We could see this coming from the start and knew we would have to switch platform in order to survive.

Why not the Apple Mac

Windows

Xara was born

Project Camelot

Take on the world

• By having a much better product, that's much easier to use and learn, at a much better price.
• By open sourcing the codebase - something Adobe or Microsoft are never going to do.
• And thus providing the open source world with what was recently described as 'without doubt the best graphics product I've ever seen on Linux'.
• And thus attracting not just a whole new group of users, but developers who will want, and have the freedom to, progress and develop the product as well.
• Add onto that our internal development team, and you have the best of all worlds. A large development team, and the ability to deliver not only Linux but also Mac versions more cost effectively than would ever be possible any other way. So project Camelot continues with a new common cross-platform version with very active development and a big new future.

Timeline