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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Sinclair was the UK's Steve Jobs - transformative products at super-cheap prices, which kicked off an entire industry.

The shared differentiator was industrial design. Sinclair spent a small fortune on making products look distinctive. The most successful designs (ZX81, Spectrum, QL) were done by Rick Dickinson, but you can already see it in the sleek black plastic Sinclair Executive and the flamboyantly gold plated Sovereign from the 70s.

All of these products were designed to look exciting and futuristic.

The internals were penny-pinched to a ridiculous extent, and were usually flawed and often not all that functional.

But the externals won design awards and caught the imagination of ordinary non-technical users, because they looked like nothing else on sale at the time.

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A key difference between Sinclair and Jobs was Sinclair's hostility to quality control and UX. Cheap at all costs! I would liken Sinclair to Jay Miner, perhaps: an engineering genius with a tendency to hit the reset button on business affairs over and over again.

Closer to Jobs in the UK scene was--and I know this is maybe a funny claim--Alan Sugar. The key similarity being the mid-1980s intuition that computers needed to be simple all-in-one consumer products. Jobs was tuned to the needs of the creative and professional classes, whereas Sugar was aiming for working class families, so the machines were very different.

But the reality is there aren't easy matches. The UK didn't produce people who were good at computers, good at business, and had access to enough capital to achieve escape velocity in the 1980s. Even when ARM bore fruit it was sold off, same as everything else there.

America was a much richer market and Apple would never have reached the masses in a poorer place.

Spectrums didn't just kickstart programming in the UK but in places in Central/Eastern Europe too. I'm from Zimbabwe and they reached us too long before anyone could afford standard American fare.

That cost was absolutely critical. ARM and Raspberry Pi show you how the UK has been incredibly good at bringing computing and computing skills to people.

We programmers from everywhere have patched together Linux from bits and with this cheap commodity hardware, have made a world in which there is no locked door in our own house which we are denied the right to open.

Yeah those costs allowed many (not only) kids in poorer countries to actually own a first computer. Apple even at those times would not be reachable. Spectrum clones were extremely popular in central/eastern Europe, for many an introduction to computers.

ARM does originate from education — the Acorn RISC Machine was created by Acorn following on from the success of the BBC computer, which was developed to improve computing education in schools. It was first used in the Acorn Archimedes computer.

Acorn Archimedes which used it was relatively expensive though — £686 (without monitor) in 1990.

http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochu...

> ARM does originate from education

But all our observations are in hindsight, who could predict that ARM/RISC would be a winner in the XXI century? Apple and mobile devices drove that wave, and Intel failing miserably in the space.

I think the people that created it knew it was important because prioritising performance per watt was a strange strategy and yet it was a killer strategy. ARM was in phones and PDAs long before Apple used one in an iPhone and it got there because of performance/watt. It had already reached 100s of millions of users before the iPhone was released.

The PC industry and phone industry were very different and the PC guys were sleeping at the point where ARM showed it was going to change everything. I think the most humorous thing is that the turning point was kicked off by Intel with it's StrongARM which showed everyone that ARM was much more than a microcontroller architecture. Whoever decided to drop that should win a buffoon of the century award.

Also ARM's licensing model hasn't made it a megacorp. I suggest (without data so be sceptical) that Qualcomm and Apple and Samsung and so on have all made much more money than ARM did and that's why they tolerated ARM and adopted it. So it was the fact that they weren't making some play for dominance that was absolutely critical - especially as a non-American company.

StrongARM was DEC originally then developed into XScale at Intel when they acquired that division from Digital as part of a lawsuit settlement I believe.

The funny thing about the ARM performance/watts thing is that it wasn't originally a design goal except for the need to use a plastic rather than ceramic package to save money. They were aiming for 1 watt but ended up at 0.1 watt!

Dead right. Sorry.

Another article on the same site has a good summary of the history of ARM — there was plenty I wasn't aware of: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses

> ARM was in phones and PDAs long before Apple used one in an iPhone and it got there because of performance/watt. It had already reached 100s of millions of users before the iPhone was released.

I put the iPhone and Apple as an example since they were very unique in customizing ARM for mobile devices. Sadly, we are waiting for M1, M2, M3, and M4 processors in the PC space.

Regarding a timeframe, it was around XXI century that ARM reached its users. There was a big time gap between the 70/80s microcomputers and mobile devices. Palm Pilot, for example, use the Motorola 68k. Psion started using ARM devices in the late 90s, before that they used an x86 variant. Newton was a failure, although it shows Apple mind clarity about ARM.

Reminds me of the posters for Linux that I saw at the time

"In a world without borders and fences, who needs Windows and Gates"

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