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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Acorn was anything but obscure. They made the BBC micro and its offspring.

It'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.

The greatness of British inventors is only exceeded by the small-mindedness, short-termism and self-sabotage of British investment and successive governments.

Let'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-l...

Plenty of similar stories in the US. In particular our Superconducting Super Collider which would have been around 3 times the energy of the LHC. We spent $2 Billion on it, dug 14 miles of tunnel, and then shut it all down and let it fill up with water. What a colossal waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

To be fair it was a bit early technology-wise and they would have had to rip the entire thing out and start again three times since. We did pretty good out of copper in the end.

The expensive bit of putting in a fibre network is the holes and ducts.

Once you've got that you can replace fibre relatively cheaply. Guess what, BT's labs were well there too. They also invented the tech for blown fibre installation before anyone else.

BT were the world leaders until the Torys thew that away, for who knows why.

IMHO twisted pair copper or coax is nothing more than a slow cludge compared to real fibre.

...and by market she really meant wholly foreign owned corporations in the form of NTL and Telewest. Personally I blame Norman Tebbit for screwing the pooch on that one.

Still it's not like the current bunch of "classics" graduates have any more forsight, sadly.

I would like to learn a bit more of the details of how this developed from start to finish. Were there any other bidders apart from NTL and Telewest? This must be a matter of public record somewhere.

That question sort of leaves out the option of not selling off public works in the first place.

Only in your head. What part of "start to finish" is ambiguous? Don't put words in my mouth.

Thank you pidg -- I would be posting this if you had not. Such an important and unfortunate blunder.

There 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.

> 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.

> It's really sad to hear that Acorn Computers is described as "obscure" nowadays...

Commodore is probably obscure to many people nowadays, but it was probably quite influential to many people of a certain generation.

The universe moves on.

They mean "obscure if you're American." The same way The Clash is an obscure band.

More 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

Let's solve that with this little gem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCFVX6lzHU

BBC 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.

That'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.

Inmos 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/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)

Interesting! 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?

They’re doing pretty well in audio, iirc. I tend to use FPGAs for most of the things I’d use an xmos for, but I’m probably not their market. If you want a microcontroller with guaranteed low latency input/output, they’re pretty neat, and the links between chips can be very useful.

Thanks!

I don't know but I have a portable dac from iFi that uses a XMOS processor for some operations. They warn against flashing firmware meant for other XMOS-based dacs, so it must have a certain market share in the segment.

Agree the word subsidy may not be the best, but that The BBC Micro contract changing the trajectory of Acorn as a company is undoubtable.

Does 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.

Back 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.

Ok, we've changed the title to the less objectionable subtitle above.

Assuming there was not an earlier production RISC-based personal computer.

I'm not sure the new title is correct!

IBM PC RT was released in 1986 vs 1987 for the Archimedes.

I knew it! Ok, I've melted the title down further.

That'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)

That's a fair challenge. I'm not sure it had workstation performance though! It was the first desktop RISC machine though I think?

I 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)

I 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.

The BBC micro was expensive, and much more capable than anything Sinclar ever offered (prior to the QL, and, in its case, not by much).

I 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.

> 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).

My 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.

Yes, 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.

Not 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.

NL:

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.

Interestingly 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".

I'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.

And there still is a pretty active BBC Micro/Master/Archimedes user group even today.

From Ireland, and used them (a3020) extensively in primary school

I am a retrocomputing enthusiast and I wonder where did they all go.

Not obscure, but an unlikely originator of a globally-significant processor architecture.

Why unlikely? The UK has always had a significant presence in CS, both theoretically and in practical engineering.

Because 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.

Isn'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)

Sort of, but the point is that ARM avoided that, while half a dozen companies with financial muscle allowing them to try and fail far more ended up failing outright or relegating themselves to niches.

ARM could have just as easily ended up making similar mistakes and died. That they didn't is pretty remarkable.

The RISCs that survived are the ones that went where no x86 could go.

> Isn't that mostly because all the RISC's either killed themselves or got killed

Every ecosystem where Windows was relevant ended consolidating on x86, because that was the platform that had best Windows support (Microsoft didn't even make their own software available on most of those).

POWER survived because it has its own ecosystem. Alpha was axed by Compaq, because Windows on Alpha sucked and they knew little else, PA was starved to death by HP with lack of investment, then buried by moving to Itanium (with the spectacular results we all know). SPARC wandered in the desert until Oracle acquired Sun and promptly bled it to death.

The 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

In 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.

This is absolutely the key point.

They didn't try to compete on performance and didn't try to compete with Intel - both would have been losing strategies. Instead they competed on cost, power and on the ability to work better with other firms who didn't want to support their own architecture.

The comparison with MIPS I think is most interesting. MIPS could easily have taken the markets that Arm dominated but the strategy wasn't right.

Don't forget ICL and the 2900 Series mainframes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limite...

I 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.

Most 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.

Even 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.

It mostly killed Acorn. Olivetti acquired them.

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