History of Acorn and ARM
In what can be called a slow week at the office, we thought we would provide you with a video link to a presentation by what many consider to be the grandfather of the original ARM chip – Steve Furber. Steve was an employee of the little known Acorn Computers company in the 1980s, where he and Sophie Wilson designed the ARM chip to be used by Acorn’s incredibly fast home computer, the Archimedes.
Although the Archimedes didn’t sell well (compared to Apple and IBM computers), it did carve a nice niche in scientific and educational markets, due to its phenomenal speed and ease of use. The 8MHz ARM2 processor in conjunction with Acorn’s Operating System, RISC OS (which was the first OS to run on an ARM chip), delivered a truly ahead of its time computing experience.
For those of you who do not know about Acorn computers may find the presentation rather long at around 80 minutes, so you may want to skip ahead to around minute 32 where Steve starts talking about the design of the ARM chip in 1984. The presentation concludes with a quick summary of Steve’s latest work, the Spinnaker project, where he is developing a computer ‘BrainBox’ consisting of around 1 million ARM chips. More information of the Spinnaker project can be found in an earlier article here.
Note: The video, unlike YouTube, does not allow you to skip to a section without first downloading that part of the video, which is rather poor. This will result in a rather slow download.
