Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Congratulations to Xara on 25 years of business. Xara is one of those quintessentially British companies that finds a niche and sticks with it -– not always entirely voluntarily -– but any IT outfit that manages a quarter century in this country deserves a round of applause.

You may know Xara better than you think. It started off as Computer Concepts, a two-man outfit flogging software for the Acorn Atom –- the forerunner of the Acorn Proton, better known now as the BBC Micro. CC wrote a word processor for the Beeb called Wordwise that quickly became an industry standard; the company continued to produce Acorn software into the now-mythical age of the Archimedes. This led to graphics software, which led to Windows software, which most recently led to open source -– go and have a look.

I nearly ended up working on a project for them, back in the heady days before the Acorn Risc Machine had become the embedded ARM and the Archimedes was still a thing of wonder rather than an evolutionary dead end. It was the late '80s. Computer Concepts had looked at the Amstrad PCW8256 word processor and wondered to itself whether there was a market for something like that but capable of doing proper graphics. They called in Alfa Systems, the small yet sparkly design company for which I worked, and we all trooped over to the Computer Concepts