The article... well, it doesn't bury the lede, but it does completely omit it outside of the headline. For anyone who doesn't know the context: The BBC Micro was built by Acorn Computers, which proceeded to design the Acorn RISC Machine -- later renamed to Advanced RISC Machine and thence to simply "arm".
In many ways, the tuple (BBC Micro, Acorn Computers, arm) is analogous to (IBM PC, Intel, x86).
As a schoolboy I was one of a handful who were in the computer club. We had a CBM (PET) 3016, a few Acorn System Ones and a UK101 that was built by our physics teacher.
One day this big grey prototyping keyboard case turned up. There was a microcassette unit fitted for loading and saving programs, and the whole thing was connected to a colour TV via an umbilical cord that looked like a vacuum cleaner hose.
We were given task sheets with projects to complete on this unit, and we could control the TV from the keyboard, read Teletext pages AND download programs.
It was a fun piece of kit that stayed with us for a couple of months.
In hindsight, I realised that the unit was a pre-production BBC Micro and we'd been part of a pre-launch test programme thanks to that same physics teacher.
I can remember attending a meeting of the Cambridge University Computer Society (in 1985?) when a presenter from Acorn (Steve Furber?) talked about the new CPU they had developed.
I think the right adjective for the reaction of those present was 'incredulous'. A small team with no previous experience had created a powerful 32-bit design from scratch when 8-bit architectures were still commonly used.
Had anyone told us that 40 years later we'd all be carrying around the 'descendants' of that first Acorn RISC Machine in our pockets then we'd have been utterly astonished.
I remember seeing their first RISC machine, the Archimedes at a computer show. Everyone thought RISC was going to be the future of computing because it was just so fast. Eventually it was I guess but x86 delayed it for a while.
I always loved Acorn computers. My schoolfriend and I released a commercial game on the Archimedes, and in 1994 I wrote a 3D demo suite for Acorn's new RiscPC machine (powered by ARM, of course). The good old days of hacking around!
The BBC micro was revolutionary. Had a few of these in school in the 1980's. This was the first machine I came across where you could program inline assembly, out of the box. Got me started on adventures with the amazing 6502 family, assembly language, RISC, hardware and a ton of fun things.
BBC basic on this platform was amazing, inline assembly, SWI & SYS calls made calling firmware & inline assembly programming a breeze. Mapping memory and registers to basic variables was trivial. Such a nice programming experience.
I recall a few years ago writing a BBC basic program under Riscos that used the Raspberry Pi's BCM2835 undocumented random number generator - no problems. You can see how simple the source code is here:
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 33.6 ms ] threadIn many ways, the tuple (BBC Micro, Acorn Computers, arm) is analogous to (IBM PC, Intel, x86).
As a schoolboy I was one of a handful who were in the computer club. We had a CBM (PET) 3016, a few Acorn System Ones and a UK101 that was built by our physics teacher.
One day this big grey prototyping keyboard case turned up. There was a microcassette unit fitted for loading and saving programs, and the whole thing was connected to a colour TV via an umbilical cord that looked like a vacuum cleaner hose.
We were given task sheets with projects to complete on this unit, and we could control the TV from the keyboard, read Teletext pages AND download programs.
It was a fun piece of kit that stayed with us for a couple of months.
In hindsight, I realised that the unit was a pre-production BBC Micro and we'd been part of a pre-launch test programme thanks to that same physics teacher.
20 GOTO10
RUN
I think the right adjective for the reaction of those present was 'incredulous'. A small team with no previous experience had created a powerful 32-bit design from scratch when 8-bit architectures were still commonly used.
Had anyone told us that 40 years later we'd all be carrying around the 'descendants' of that first Acorn RISC Machine in our pockets then we'd have been utterly astonished.
https://bbc.xania.org/
Does this 60% number include laptops? If not, I'd wager that number is greater than 95%.
I recall a few years ago writing a BBC basic program under Riscos that used the Raspberry Pi's BCM2835 undocumented random number generator - no problems. You can see how simple the source code is here:
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/15091