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The Acorn Archimedes and the first ARM processor
- rbanffy 6y agoAcorn was anything but obscure. They made the BBC micro and its offspring.
- mannykannot 6y agoNot obscure, but an unlikely originator of a globally-significant processor architecture.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoWhy unlikely? The UK has always had a significant presence in CS, both theoretically and in practical engineering.
- mannykannot 6y agoI am not saying that the UK was an unlikely place for this to happen, but that it was unlikely that this particular company would do it.
- forinti 6y agoMost 8 bit micros were designed to be just as cheap as possible. The Beeb was a really well designed machine (both the hardware and the software). You could only expect the next step to be a great machine.
- mannykannot 6y agoEven so, going from designing computers using off-the-shelf components to creating your own processor design with an innovative architecture was a bold and risky bet. Not many computer manufacturers took this route.
- rbanffy 6y agoIt mostly killed Acorn. Olivetti acquired them.
- vidarh 6y agoBecause there were multiple relative giants in the 80's and 90's that had their own processor designs. The competition was broad, and much of it from far more well funded companies. For all of them to falter and ARM to succeed was a real long-shot. Even well into the 90's, when several companies were looking at switching CPU architectures or supporting alternative architectures, ARM was just not on the radar for most developments, because people were looking to compete with x86 on performance. People talked about the Alpha, MIPS, PPC, PA-RISC, not ARM. When ARM started appearing on the radar as more than a low end embedded option towards the end of the 90's, it was DEC's StrongARM family. It was a very long way coming. Which makes it all the more impressive that they made it.
- factsonly 6y agoThe main benefit of the ARM processor design was very high performance per watt which carved out a significant niche that then grew into a massive market
- rbanffy 6y agoIn the beginning, it had great power characteristics, but it was also much faster than any x86. That it evolved in the direction of power efficiency is more an effect of it being power efficient and being popular with embedded manufacturers, which created a feedback look that guided it to extreme power efficiency with reasonable performance, while x86 went the route of performance, power be damned.
- mhh__ 6y agoIsn't that mostly because all the RISC's either killed themselves or got killed, rather than ARM outcompeting as per se? With the Alpha especially, it was a good architecture but (before my time, so I may be wrong) DEC seemed to have no idea how to actually sell it sustainably. Those companies probably would've been shocked at the idea of today's world where your average consumer can buy 20 billion transistor chip just to play games on and everyone owns about 10 other smaller processors (as opposed to a computer being a thing you either bought for your family, or a massive workstation that costs as much as a car)
- lsllc 6y agoDon't forget ICL and the 2900 Series mainframes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limite...
- nr2x 6y agoBBC Micro and its evolution to mobile dominance is one of my go-to examples for how a lot of private sector innovations were originally high risk investments subsidized by the public.
- mhh__ 6y agoDoes that make sense? I'm glad it got funded in the first place but the invention of the RISC concept itself seems like one step amongst thousands.
- klelatti 6y agoThat's pretty debatable. The British government never explicitly supported development of Arm technology. Acorn had a commercial arrangement with the BBC and schools bought BBC micros (including Archimedes but also others such as the PCs) but its a stretch to say that Arm was subsidized by the public. Inmos which was a government supported CPU designer at about that time is long gone. If anything the lesson from Arm is that it succeeded because of acute awareness of the commercial needs of its customers - e.g. the addition of Thumb to the ISA - and the need to build an international client base.
- spacedcowboy 6y agoInmos and the transputer morphed into xmos[1] - same basic ideas (the David May[2] connection) but refined, and the programmable gpio is pretty nice - seriously there aren’t many chips where you write your SDRAM controller in software... [1] https://www.xmos.ai/ https://www.xmos.ai/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)
- klelatti 6y agoInteresting! I used a piece of (financial services) software that used Transputers in the 1990. Today the equivalent software would run on GPUs. Do you know how commercially successful Xmos is?
- segfaultbuserr 6y agoIt's really sad to hear that Acorn Computers is described as "obscure" nowadays... I wonder how many people aren't even aware of the British heritage of ARM. Anyway, the Nvidia acquisition has put everything to an end.
- guiriduro 6y agoThe greatness of British inventors is only exceeded by the small-mindedness, short-termism and self-sabotage of British investment and successive governments.
- mhh__ 6y agoThere are just so many projects that we've either canned or try to do on the cheap with disastrous results. We're the only nation to develop launch capability not to use it, for example. British soldiers had a barely functional, unreliable, rifle for years (the SA80) because the phrase "Buy cheap, buy twice" still hasn't entered the minds of own managing classes. We are of course also running straight off a cliff soon, thanks to Brexit.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bartread 6y ago> British soldiers had a barely functional, unreliable, rifle for years (the SA80) This is true, although the problems were all with the original A1 variant which, from everything I've read and watched, was absolutely an under-designed PoS. The subsequent A2 upgrade programme addressed these issues but it took about a decade longer than it should have done before it was implemented.
- pidg 6y agoLet's not forget that Britain could have had mega fast fibre broaband in the 1990s if Margaret Thatcher had allowed British Telecom to proceed instead of 'leaving it to the market to decide'. https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-l...
- jhbadger 6y agoYes, but outside the UK the Beeb and Acorn were very obscure. Sinclair and Amstrad had some degree of recognition outside the UK, but Acorn was pretty much entirely UK specific.
- andylynch 6y agoNot just the UK. I remember in the mid 80s friends having Electron, and them being sold at the village show in very, very rural NZ.
- the-dude 6y agoNL: In 1986 my school had a classroom fitted with a dozen BBC B's and a server with the co-processor. Later that year Acorn dumped the Electrons and I was able to get a computer for a reasonable price. Electron User ( was that the name? ) was available at our kiosks.
- flohofwoe 6y agoInterestingly when I researched the Acorn Atom (very simple 6502-based home computer from the early 80's) for an emulator, I found a very active Dutch community which helped me out with some questions I had. But AFAIK the Netherlands seemed to be the only '8-bit Acorn enclave' outside the UK, in other European countries Acorn only became somewhat popular with the Archimedes 3000 which was marketed as an "Amiga killer".
- jacquesm 6y agoI've seen them in Germany, Belgium, France, and those were the only countries I had regular access to at the time besides Poland where I never saw any western machines other than an Atari 520 and the occasional whitebox IBM PC clone.
- jacquesm 6y agoAnd there still is a pretty active BBC Micro/Master/Archimedes user group even today.
- 6y ago
- te_chris 6y agoBack in NZ in the 90’s my first computers were, at home, an IBM AT dad had salvaged, then a compaq 386 laptop which ran dos, had one those GUI app loaders and windows. I spent more time in DOS. In the classrooms we had Acorns, until Pentium was released.
- antonvs 6y agoThey mean "obscure if you're American." The same way The Clash is an obscure band.
- notahacker 6y agoMore so tbh. There are surely a lot more Brits who thought they were cool in 1977 who couldn't name a Clash song than Brits who went to school in 1997 who haven't used an Archimedes
- jacquesm 6y agoLet's solve that with this little gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCFVX6lzHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCFVX6lzHU
- dang 6y agoOk, we've changed the title to the less objectionable subtitle above. Assuming there was not an earlier production RISC-based personal computer.
- klelatti 6y agoI'm not sure the new title is correct! IBM PC RT was released in 1986 vs 1987 for the Archimedes.
- dang 6y agoI knew it! Ok, I've melted the title down further.
- pvg 6y agoThat's a 'personal computer' only in the sense that IBM put 'PC' in the name - it's a $20k workstation. (Not suggesting that three's any point editing the title further)
- klelatti 6y agoThat's a fair challenge. I'm not sure it had workstation performance though! It was the first desktop RISC machine though I think?
- pvg 6y agoI know a lot less about these (the name and the fact they existed covers most of it) than the wikipedia page, but it's such an early commercial RISC microprocessor, first desktop seems like a plausible title. This made me wonder whether ROMP isn't a sort of 'lost' architecture. There are probably a lot more of other failed RISC designs still kicking around the world (the 88k, i960, etc)
- weare138 6y agoI think they're referring to the era before Acorn landed the contract for the BBC Micro when Sinclair was the dominant player in the market.
- rbanffy 6y agoThe BBC micro was expensive, and much more capable than anything Sinclar ever offered (prior to the QL, and, in its case, not by much).
- flohofwoe 6y agoI think outside the UK Acorn has been obscure, at least before the Archimedes. First time I learned about Acorn in Germany was when they started marketing the Archimedes against the Amiga, and I only learned a few years ago when diving into emulator programming that Acorn had built 6502-based computers before the Archimedes. AFAIK the BBC micro hasn't been sold outside the UK, or if it was, then it was vastly overshadowed by the Sinclair and Amstrad machines.
- jacquesm 6y ago> I think outside the UK Acorn has been obscure, at least before the Archimedes No way. The BBC Micro was seen all over Europe, if you could afford one you had one, and plenty of schools signed on to the econet and installed them by the dozens. Commodore was seen as not appropriate for classroom use ('a gaming machine') whereas the BBC Micro was seen as an educational tool. Which it actually was (it also made for a pretty good games machine, as many students found out to their joy).
- deepspace 6y agoMy first micro was a BBC, purchased all the way down in South Africa. Maybe it was not known in the USA, but computer magazines everywhere else were stuffed with BBC ads, accessories and software at the time.
- satpanesar 6y agoTl;dr "It's nice to just take a moment and reflect: because the British felt they were being left behind by the computer revolution, they decided to make TV shows about computers. To do that, they needed a computer, so an underdog British company came up with a good one. And when that little company needed to build a faster CPU, because Intel couldn't be bothered to answer their calls, they made their own. This in-house CPU just so happened to not use much power or make much heat, which got the attention of Apple, who used it to power what most people consider to be its biggest failure. From there, of course, the company went on to take over the fucking world. If I made that up, you'd say I was trying too hard to be quirky or that I'd seen too many Wes Anderson movies. But that's reality."
- wizzwizz4 6y agoThat's not actually how it went, either. One of the major aims of the BBC Micro was educational use, with use in TV an afterthought, and the processor was designed after they'd already made several MOS-based computers.
- spacedcowboy 6y agoUm, not really, with the Sinclair machines, the UK had more computers per capita than anywhere else at the time. They were very very limited, and ultimately the bet on ubiquity over capability didn’t pay off, but pretty much every kid I knew had one. I was a docker’s brat in a run-down Northern city, we didn’t have much, growing up, but my parents bought me the zx81 components kit (£49) and a second-hand black&white TV (£20) for Xmas when I was 11, and that year at school, computers were the thing. Like, everyone had one.
- jen20 6y agoI’d suggest the number of British expats in Silicon Valley who started programming on a BBC Micro or Spectrum suggests that it very much did pay off, just not in the way anticipated.
- spacedcowboy 6y ago
- codeulike 6y agoI had an Archimedes, the first Arm machine, in 1988 or so. It was marketed as the fastest microcomputer in the world at the time so I think Acorn knew they'd hit on something special. I was 14 and used to write games on the BBC Micro Model B and so upgrading to the Archimedes with it's speed, Sprite system and millions of colours was like suddenly being let loose in a huge unbounded creative arena. Good times.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoI grew up programming the BBC Micro Model B. Starting a new school they had a computer lab kitted out with Archimedes, and once the computer teacher realised I could use it better than anyone else in the school (mostly programming in Basic), she left me to my own devices in the corner of the lab whilst the other students played around with "Turtles" (if you remember those robots). I owe my career and livelihood to the Beeb.
- codeulike 6y agoMe too.
- jacquesm 6y agoMy very first computer was a 4 bit TRS-80 pocket computer (actually made by Sharp), then moved to the 6502, the KIM-1, then 'upgraded' to a better processor with the Dragon 32, and reasonably crappy but still much better than the KIM graphics (essentially just 6 7 segment LED displays), the 6809 was so much nicer to program for. Then the BBC Micro hit general availability and the software that shipped with it was lightyears ahead of whatever else was avaialble for personal computers, and BBC Basic was actually a fairly good language to learn structured programming (can you imagine an era before functions?). I too owe my career to the 8 bit machines that allowed me to own a proper computer.
- macjohnmcc 6y agoI took a 6502 assembly language class when I was in high school I already had some experience with it so I spent my time doing machine language monitor with disassembler and helped others. It was the best class I had at the time.
- DrBazza 6y ago"But what if, instead, you decided to make those CPUs all hail from a barely-known company from a country usually not the first to come to mind as a global leader in high-tech innovations (well, not since, say, the 1800s)?" LEDs, TV, the Bombe & Colossus, microprogramming, first jet liner, first compiled computer language, DNA, caesium clock, first commercial transistor computer, first electronic desktop calculator, the RSA cipher, lithium-ion battery, the WWW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_innovations_and_discoveries#19th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_innovations_an... and arguably, LCDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#1960s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#1960s And in the UK at the time of the BBC Micro, and the Archimedes, Microsoft and Apple were pretty much 'barely-known' companies.
- pikuseru 6y agoIt’s only obscure if you’re writing from a position of ignorance.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoAcorn was not obscure. It was a household name, with TV ads and such. There's this nice TV show about Sinclair and Acorn from BBC 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM (Micro Men)
- mattbee 6y agoAs a Brit I agree, I muttered my way through the parochial tone. Now imagine the parallel universe where it had been the Dragon 32 whose CPU had taken over the world :)
- UncleSlacky 6y agoAh, you mean the copy of the Tandy Color Computer...
- jacquesm 6y agoImproved copy. But still, a copy. That said, the degree to which the CoCo used software where other computers used hardware was very impressive and allowed for some pretty neat modifications without even touching a soldering iron. Oh, and the Dragon 32 actually had 64K of RAM which you could unlock entirely from software (it took a buddy of mine a couple of months to figure out how to keep the computer running when enabling that upper 32K after I figured out that it had the extra memory).
- sys_64738 6y agoI'd doubt a lot of people who knew about the BBC Micro would know who made it. Acorn was obscure as the company wasn't front and center of the BBC initiative.
- timrichard 6y agoThat drama is even more enjoyable the second time around with commentary from three of the Acorn team portrayed : https://youtu.be/yaonVYOTSsk https://youtu.be/yaonVYOTSsk
- klelatti 6y agoIf you really want to understand why Arm was so successful as a company I'd suggesting spending time listening to their their first CEO - Robin Saxby - in this engaging interview by Charbax from 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO5PsAY5aaI And they are unlikely winners not because they came from the UK (seriously?) but because of the weakness of their commercial position when they started. It's a really interesting story.
- contingencies 6y agoCan anyone recommend a straightforward way (eg. plugin, command line tool) to convert a Youtube link in to a skimmable transcript using the subtitles?
- terramex 6y agoThis video has no auto-subtitles, but in general if a video has them then click on the 3 dots next to 'Share' and click 'Open transcript' for full transcript with clickable timestamps. For more "straightforward", CMD way: youtube-dl --skip-download --write-auto-sub --write-sub [video_url] You can get youtube-dl from most package managers.
- contingencies 6y agoCheers, but Couldn't find automatic captions for FO5PsAY5aaI
- factsonly 6y agoDefinitively recommend watching micro men if you want a dramatized version of the acorn and Sinclair history
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bitwize 6y agoAmong British computer enthusiasts, Acorn was as well-known as Dell might be here. They're only obscure to the Yanks, who think they run everything in the computer trade because they have IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.
- vram22 6y agoAcorn was well known in its day, not at all obscure.
- fb03 6y agoI want a proper "open architecture" arm computer form factor to blossom sooo much. Imagine building ARM computers like we build our X86/X64 boxes today....
- mhh__ 6y agoI have a lot of doubts this will ever happen. If I'm not mistaken, the relative open-ness of modern PCs (being able to build a gaming pc for example) is basically an accident. It would be nice to have some regulation backing it up, too.
- userbinator 6y agoIt all started with IBM publishing detailed technical information for the very first PCs, i.e. the PC, XT, and AT. This included full schematics for the motherboard as well as the BIOS source code listing (it was copyrighted, but only in the "copy" sense.) Companies like Intel were also far less secretive about their processors' documentation in those days. This started the whole "PC clone" industry, and things like the ISA bus became a de-facto standard as a result. There was far more cooperation between companies to enable expansion and compatibility, but I guess these days they are more interested in the amount of additional profit made by forcing consumers to buy an entire new system instead of upgrading parts, hence trends like soldered RAM and storage, and some companies (notably, one with a fruit logo...) outright attempting to squash the aftermarket/third-party ecosystem. ARM (and many of its competitors, including MIPS and RISC-V) being only an IP core means they get put into lots of different SoC hardware where the only thing they have in common is the instruction set. (There is "embedded x86", but as the reason for choosing that is compatibility with existing hardware and software, those do tend to be quite PC compatible, if only missing some of the normal peripherals.)
- pjmlp 6y agoForgetting about Compaq's little trick there?
- jdkee 6y agoThere is RISC-V. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463749
- Torwald 6y agoThese machines featured RiscOS as the operating system. It is the OS on which the Dock (as in macOS Dock, Taskbar) was invented.
- ianetaylor 6y agoRiscOS definitely had significant influence on early Windows releases but the Taskbar ala Windows 95 was primarily a derivative of Windows 1.0 (minimized apps at the bottom of the screen) and Cairo (a reserved screen area) and Taskman (list of running apps)
- Torwald 6y agoThe Win95 UI was a copy from NextStep, down to the teal desktop, every nerd understood that one at the time. Sure, some elements from prior Windows version survived, like the DOS icon. > Windows 1.0 (minimized apps at the bottom of the screen) This could very well be the case. The Win95 Taskbar could be positioned at the other three sides of the screen, IIRC. At least it could be positioned at the top.
- ianetaylor 6y agoMac was more of an influence on Win95 than NeXT for obvious reasons. We had a couple of NeXT machines but didn't use them much. We had a couple of Archimedes machines and at least one team member was addicted to Lemmings :) Yes, the Taskbar could be docked on any screen edge. FWIW, I wrote some of that docking code. I preferred the left edge (ala NeXT), the designers preferred the top (ala Mac) but it broke too many apps so it ended up back at the bottom.
- lsllc 6y agoIt's still around as RISC OS Open: https://www.riscosopen.org/content/ https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
- oger 6y agoWe had a bunch of BBC Micros at school and they were really cool. A working LAN, a proper file server, logins - and ways to circumvent security ;-) Good old times!
- lsllc 6y agoEconet! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econet
- ngcc_hk 6y agoVery annoyed by the comment of no innovation since 1800. Basically computer is invented there, developed there and now sort of re-invented there. May be the intel and Motorola is just another Nokia, if one has to fight this undeserving fake war. An article about Uk innovation does not deserve to have an attack on a country which invented so many things, let alone computer itself.
- duskwuff 6y ago> Acorn was well-suited to design a RISC CPU since the chip they were most familiar with, the 6502, is often said to be a sort of proto-RISC design. I keep on hearing this claim, and I still don't buy it. The 6502 was not "proto-RISC". It was a pretty traditional accumulator design, with an instruction set which lacked most of the typical features of a RISC design like minimal addressing modes (6502 had plenty of weird modes, 65C02 added even more) or general-purpose registers (6502 had only A, X, and Y, all of which were special-purpose to some degree or another). Plus, the 6502 was hardly unique on the market. It was nearly a clone of the Motorola 6800, and wasn't all that far off from the Intel 8080 or its clone, the Z80.
- kristopolous 6y agoYou can run RiscOS, for free, without much effort, on a Raspberry Pi btw. Give it some time, it's strange and delightful. Last release was in October, as in under 2 months ago: https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2020/10/24/risc-os-5-28-now-available https://www.riscosopen.org/news/articles/2020/10/24/risc-os-... Firstly, it's unapologetically super-british in way you can only experience in person (games for instance, live in the "diversions" folder, settings are called "choices", the desktop background is called the "backdrop", the media player is subscribed to the BBC by default. Instead of asking for localization, the clock goes to British time, the prices are in pounds, and you need to go out of your way to tell it you have a US keyboard. There's apps for british football news, unmounting disks is called "dismounting", etc... it's fun) It's also unique in its own special way, not really fitting clearly into the UNIX or DOS lineage. For instance you can press some key sequence and get a shell, but in this unique way: It first appears at the bottom of the screen and then the graphical buffer of the UX scrolls up with your interaction like so: http://www.riscos.com/the_archive/rol/productsdb/images/split.jpg http://www.riscos.com/the_archive/rol/productsdb/images/spli... - this isn't unix, it isn't dos, it's its own special snowflake, really, feels closer to VMS than anything: http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_2.html http://www.riscos.com/support/users/userguide3/book3b/book3_... It also has this capability of fully interactive submenus with dialog boxes, icons, etc - it's kinda weird: http://timil.com/riscos/desktop_settings/menu.jpg http://timil.com/riscos/desktop_settings/menu.jpg You can just flash it onto a microsd card, pop it into the raspberry pi and boot it up. It's really easy. Give it a spin.
- JNRowe 6y ago> the desktop background is called the "backdrop" Hmm, non-British AmigaOS also used backdrop¹. Was that perhaps the common name back then? Plus, you can experience /some/ of the quirkiness of RiscOS on Linux by playing around with rox². rox-filer is packaged for Debian and it spits a Choices directory in to ~, even though it is now just a bunch of symlinks to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME³. ¹ https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Workbench_Menu_-_Backdrop https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Workbench_Menu_-_Backdrop ² http://rox.sourceforge.net/ http://rox.sourceforge.net/ ³ http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/book/export/html/163.html http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/book/export/html/163.html
- jgalt212 6y ago> Let's be honest: 2020 sucks - not if you were a VC - not if you were long BTC - not if you are a HF/PE manager - not if you were a senior manager at a bank In short, it was a great year for anyone with membership or strong correlation to the investor class.