This was one of the most powerful desktop computers available. When they introduced the first hard disc, it was 20Mbytes. Here's some stats to blow your minds: The Archimedes computer, with the first ARM processor, ran at 8MHz, had 500Kbytes (half a megabyte) of RAM, and no hard disc. You've probably got half a dozen ARM processors in your pocket right now! It would have been insane to imagine at the time that the ARM chip that we started programming in 1985 was to change the world, with more than 50 billion ARM processors now shipped. Smart phones and tablets would simply not be possible without ultra-efficient low-power processors - and the Acorn ARM chip was the chip that made it all possible. Acorn died, but the ARM chip they created thrived. No one cared about power usage then, but because Acorn's chip was so simple and so small, it's power usage was a fraction of the complex Intel and AMD chips. We could see this coming from the start and knew we would haveĪcorn might have messed up, but the chip those few people in Acorn developed (the Acorn Risc Machine - or ARM for short), largely by an act of good luck has become, far and away, the world's most popular processor (and most people have no idea about this). In 1990 we also developed our own Postscript clone (ShowPage) which was the beginning of a line of productsīut despite having world beating technology, poor management doomed Acorn. We created a wide range of products for the Acorn Risc computers, including hardware products such as the LaserDirect, which was the world'sįirst sub £1000 600-dpi laser printer. That computer was simply the most advanced,įrom a hardware and software point of view, and we had to work on it.

So once Acorn announced their first computer, it was off Atari, and back to developing Acorn software.

It easily beat the rather poor 8086 16-bit processor that powered the IBM PC at the time. What they created was not only the first affordable 32-bit processor,īut the fastest chip around, by a large margin. Acorn wanted to find a 32-bit replacement and, for one reason and another, decided to develop their own brand new 32-bitĪrchitecture, that had the simplicity of the 6502, but was true 32-bit. The BBC Micro used the 6502 8-bit processor which was very simple, but veryįast (for the time). We knew about Acorn's RISC developments from the very beginning.

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