The little Acorn inside Intel
Published: 14 Feb 2002 15:31 GMT
It's not easy designing gadgets. Once you're past the easy bit of deciding what your new toy will do, you've got to work out what chip to put in. Do you go for Intel's XScale, Motorola's MX1 or Texas Instrument's OMAP? Or do you want to build the processor yourself, adding bits you need? Whatever you choose, the chances are very high that you'll end up with a design that traces its lineage back to Cherry Hinton, a town just outside Cambridge in the UK, and a company dear to the hearts of many an ageing British programmer: Acorn.
But Acorn would have been just another forgotten UK microcomputer maker alongside Memotech, Oric and Dragon if it hadn't been for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC decreed that it was going to teach the nation about computers, and commissioned some TV programmes. It then dawned on the Corporation that this wasn't much good if people didn't have computers, so it might be a good idea to get one made. The Corporation's friends in the government agreed, there was a prolonged period of very British fudging, squabbling and finger-wagging, and when the dust had cleared Acorn had the contract to make and sell the BBC Microcomputer -- universally known as the Beeb.
It was a great success, with over a million being sold. The BBC, happy that it had done its best to turn the UK into a nation of computer literates ready for the 21st century -- or 'anoraks', as most people called them -- retired from the scene. Acorn was left to its own devices. The basic Beeb architecture had immoderate amounts of expansion capabilities, but even with the network, second processors, expanded memory and other bolt-ons it remained an 8-bit computer in a world that was rapidly transforming into a 16-bit, IBM PC-minded place.
Acorn had the fixation, common among Cambridge computer companies of the time, that unless you did things your way there was no point in doing them at all. Rather than just buy in whole processors, Acorn approached Intel and asked to use the 80286 design in its own chips: Intel would have none of it. So Acorn started from scratch. The new processor had to be simple, because it had a design team of seven and no budget, and it had to be fast. Other processors took around 200 man-years to get going, Acorn didn't have that option. It also didn't have anyone who'd designed a microprocessor before: no matter.
Work started in October 1983 and on 26 April 1985 -- a mere five man-years from the tiny team -- first silicon was plugged in and worked first time. Oh, and there was the little matter of the support chipset; video, memory and input/output controllers, each designed by one person. By any standards, this was heroic: the fact that the design not only worked but worked spectacularly well raises the endeavour to the mythical. Not only did the chip run with extraordinary efficiency both in terms of work done and electricity used, but the instruction set -- the basic language it spoke -- proved a joy to write for. The Acorn RISC Machine was born.
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