Support from Acorn Developers is crucial for Phoebe's success. Acorn were predicting that the majority of software applications will work on the new machine with little modification, although authors may wish to modify their products to exploit the new features. A notice on compatibility was published in the show guide.
Radical changes are likely in the hardware market, however. With its PCI bus, EIDE interface and support for multiple processors, Phoebe will cause many developers to rethink their product lines.
I spoke to several developers at the show regarding their plans for Phoebe, and it appears that there will be no shortage of expansion. This does not represent an exhaustive list of companies developing for the new machine - if any developer would like to publicise their plans, I would be happy to hear from you. Nick.
All the developers made the point that their work is critically dependent on obtaining working hardware and a stable OS from Acorn. Some believed that they had almost exhausted the work they could do before experimenting with prototypes in a real machine.