Xara
UK-based software company founded in 1981
Xara is an international software company founded in 1981, with an HQ in Berlin and development office in Hemel Hempstead, UK. It has developed software for a variety of computer platforms, in chronological order: the Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Z88, Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and more recently web browser-based services.
History
The company was founded in 1981 by Charles Moir. It started by developing for various 8-bit systems, such as the Acorn Atom and BBC Micro. It was originally called Computer Concepts, Ltd.; the company name was changed to Xara, Ltd., in 1995, and later to The Xara Group, Ltd. iXara Ltd started to explore cloud developments, and since 2016 both companies have been subsidiaries of Xara GmbH.
Atari ST and Acorn Archimedes development
Dissatisfied with the evolution of Acorn's product range, having "stretched the BBC micro beyond the limit", Computer Concepts announced in late 1985 that the company would concentrate on development for the Atari ST, noting that its need for software was similar to that of the early days of the BBC Micro. Support was set to continue for the company's BBC Micro products, however, and despite showing the Atari ST at the Acorn User Exhibition in 1986, the company introduced new products for the BBC Micro: the Inter-Base and Inter-Word office suite products.
The company remained underwhelmed by Acorn's product range and the introduction of the BBC Master series in 1986, with one representative dismissing the series as "a real let-down" and uncompetitive with the emerging 16-bit competition, while comparing the performance and cost of the PC-compatible Master 512 unfavourably to the Atari ST. However, the potential of Acorn's RISC processor was acknowledged, raising hopes of "a tidy, all-in-one, expandable, fast, large memory RISC-based micro for around the £1000 mark".
In 1986, Computer Concepts released its first piece of software for the Atari ST, Fast ASM, but the company's development focus returned to the Acorn platform when the Acorn Archimedes was released in 1987, pledging "almost exclusively ARM-related" development and indicating that software developed for the Archimedes would not merely be conversions of ST-based software already in progress. Various existing BBC Micro products were to be offered to run under emulation on the Archimedes, but the principal new product was to be a "WYSIWYG wordprocessor which makes full use of the RISC windowing environment". This word processor would eventually be released as Impression.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11838854. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1995, 2016 and 1985.
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