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For HN Readers who care little about an obscure computer from the UK, Micro Men is an incredible movie about the people behind the 80s UK computer revolution an
by iuguy 16y ago
For HN Readers who care little about an obscure computer from the UK, Micro Men is an incredible movie about the people behind the 80s UK computer revolution and the chip design at the core of pretty much every modern smartphone. It's as much about the egos, the business behind it all and the race for dominance over the burgeoning home computer market as anything else, and has Martin Freeman and Alexander Armstrong in title roles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEV1gefvy_k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEV1gefvy_k
Incidentally, Acorn (who ended up getting the BBC project) went on to design their own CPU for their next generation computing lineup, a funny little chip design called the Advanced Risc Machine, or ARM, now the most use CPU design in the world.
- rbanffy 16y agoSo, in the end, the Archimedes really won ;-) I remember an article on BYTE (badly missed) that pictured an Archimedes as capable of doing floating point math faster than a 386 with a 387 attached. I always wanted one.
- rbarooah 16y agoNot to mention that you could power an ARM2 by collecting the waste heat from a 386 using a thermocouple.
- rbanffy 16y agoI don't know about the 386, but you could power a lot of stuff out of the heat of a Pentium 60.
- Nick_C 16y ago> BYTE (badly missed) Coming back apparently: http://technologizer.com/2010/12/22/good-grief-byte-is-coming-back/ http://technologizer.com/2010/12/22/good-grief-byte-is-comin...