Since other people are reminiscing about ARM: - It was the first language I wrote real programs in, back in the late 80's on the Acorn Archimedes desktop machi

Since other people are reminiscing about ARM: - It was the first language I wrote real programs in, back in the late 80's on the Acorn Archimedes desktop machines it was originally built for. The A in ARM originally stood for Acorn, not Advanced. - Writing ARM demos I was always jealous of the Amiga's blitter, but then I discovered STMIA could store multiple registers pretty darn fast. - I chose to go to Manchester University purely because Steve Furber, one of the chip's designers, would be a lecturer on my course. - He spent weeks taking us through diagrams of the x86's instruction decode hardware. I was convinced that any processor that had to expend so much of its silicon just decoding instructions was doomed, not my best insight. - The instructions' simplicity did make it easy to build low-power versions however, hence its ubiquity in mobile devices. Steve seemed as surprised by this as anyone, it definitely didn't seem like a design goal at the start. - His main research project was a clockless version of the ARM chip, with asynchronous logic, called Amulet, really interesting technology that never caught on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor - ARM is the only British-born computer technology company I can think of that achieved lasting international success. I'd welcome any other examples.