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rubatuga
Now they are trying to extract every penny from its licensees and competing with their customers.
BallyBrain
I love the Acorn story and British computing in general. BBC made a good movie on the subject called Micro Men. Definitely worth a watch despite some inaccuracies. Note that Sophie Wilson was previously known as Roger Wilson and has a cameo at the end of the film.
afandian
For anyone interested in this era. I have a couple of sets of RISC OS 2 ROMs chips from 1988 sitting on my desk. I don't know if they still work. If there's a good home in the UK I'd be happy to post them.
ochrist
Nice article. Just a couple of comments:

Doesn't the x86 chips also use microcode? There are several differences between RISC and CISC not mentioned here.

(also Sophie was called Roger at this point in time, so the article has been retconed)

nxobject
> The ARM chip was also designed to run at very low power. Wilson explained that this was entirely a cost-saving measure—the team wanted to use a plastic case for the chip instead of a ceramic one, so they set a maximum target of 1 watt of power usage.

With my (limited) understanding of how ARM conquered the market, I guess this turned out to be a very consequential cost-saving measure.

joz1-k
BTW, there are also other interesting, low-power RISC architectures that are used in millions of devices, but most people have never heard of them. For example:

  * SuperH [0], 32bit only, now basically dead, but microcontrollers are still available
  * AVR32 [1], 32 bit only, also quite dead
  * ARC [2], 32/64bit, still quite popular in an automotive
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperH

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR32

[2]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(processor)>

nasretdinov
> In fact, one of the first test boards the team plugged the ARM into had a broken connection and was not attached to any power at all. It was a big surprise when they found the fault because the CPU had been working the whole time. It had turned on just from electrical leakage coming from the support chips.

So this not an urban legend after all, and it's about the first ever ARM CPU! Very cool story indeed

commandersaki
The link to the IBM RISC paper didn't seem to work and I'm not sure if this is the paper that they're linking to since it is from 1990, but I found one of IBM's paper on RISC: https://sci-hub.se/10.1147/rd.341.0004

What I didn't realise is RISC existed and was an initiative by IBM prior to Dave Patterson research and coining of the term.