One of the great success stories of the UK’s technology industry is Arm, Advanced RISC Machines, a semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge launched in 1991.
Arm’s primary business is the design of ARM processors (CPUs) used in virtually all modern smartphones. Its chip design instructions and technologies are used by the world’s largest chip manufacturers such the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and technology giants Apple and Samsung to make their own chips.
The origins of Arm go back to 1983 and Acorn Computers with the acronym originally standing for Acorn RISC Machine. Acorn Computers’ first RISC processor was used in the original Acorn Archimedes and was one of the first RISC processors used in microcomputers.
Archives of Information Technology (AIT) has captured the personal histories of five key contributors to these Cambridge Fen phenomena companies: five acorns who built a multi-billion-pound industry. We have also created a playlist on our YouTube channel, which also includes a clip from our interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, who hired our first pioneer below.
The five pioneers are:
Chris Curry who co-founded Acorn Computers which not only had its own range but also designed and sold the BBC Micro launched in 1981.
Steve Furber principal designer of the Acorn microcomputer and of the BBC Micro which eventually sold 1.5 million computers linked to the BBC’s Computer Literacy project and co-designer of the RISC microprocessor at Acorn.
Dr Hermann Hauser who he co-founded Acorn with Curry, guided its development including the design of the RISC microprocessor and became a venture capitalist.
Andy Hopper who co-founded Acorn and conducted pioneering research into local area networks, ran the Olivetti Cambridge Research labs and co-founded at least ten IT companies.
And Sir Robin Saxby who was the first CEO of Advanced RISC Machines (ARM), the microprocessor company spun out from Acorn in 1991. He started with 12 engineers and helped build the company with his business model to a size where it was worth £23.4 billion in 2016. (In August 2023 Arm announced it has filed paperwork to sell its shares in the US and was looking for a valuation of around £47bn.)
The five played different roles in creating Cambridge’s world-class technology hub, generating vital technologies that power, computers, mobile IT and networking. The aim of AIT is to capture the past and inspire the future and we hope you are inspired as you listen to the stories of these five pioneers.
Launching the BBC Micro
Chris Curry (1946-) worked for Sir Clive Sinclair on hi-fi systems and helped launch Sinclair’s first calculator. He set up a microprocessor design company with Hermann Hauser and Andy Hopper whose first product was a control processor for a fruit machine.
They decided to build their own microcomputer kits and then a complete system in 1979 which they called Acorn “because it was going to be an expanding and growth-oriented system”.
They were in competition with tens of other start-ups selling microcomputers. In the early 1980s the BBC wanted to run a series of TV programmes to encourage people to take up microcomputers. They were working with an Acorn rival but were not getting very far.
Acorn put together a crash team to design a microcomputer under Steve Furber. They demonstrated the prototype and won the contract which led to 1.5 million shipments, mostly into the education sector. Through this initiative millions learned to programme microcomputers, often developing games, kick-starting the UK computer games industry.
Adopting RISC
Dr Professor Steve Furber CBE was searching for the follow-on product for the BBC Micro and found that the microprocessors then on the market had a deep design flaws: they all had adopted the architecture of minicomputers with the extra complexity involved.
Dr Hermann Hauser told Furber of some academic papers in the USA proposing a reduced instruction-set computer (RISC) architecture instead of the complex instruction set computer (CISC) architectures microprocessor vendors had adopted.
Acorn decided to design its own microprocessor using the RISC approach. Furber led the small design team which included Sophie Wilson.
Wilson had written the BASIC language for the BBC Micro and devised the instruction set for the RISC microprocessor they were designing. Acorn did not want to make the microprocessor itself so used a silicon foundry to turn its design into a processor.
On April 26 1985 Acorn got the first RISC microprocessor back. They called it the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), later changed to the Advanced RISC Machine.
Furber and the engineers at Acorn found that the ARM had a remarkable property: it used hardly any electricity to run, far less than the CISC microprocessors on the market. This made it ideal for mobile devices.
Apple approached Acorn when it was designing the Newton, a hand-help personal digital assistant with a stylus for handwritten instructions and notes. Apple came back for more when it was developing its smartphone. By then Furber was at Manchester University where his research includes using a million Arm processors to simulate the human brain.
Creating teams for resources for innovation
Dr Hermann Hauser (1948-) KBE, CBE, FRS co-founded Acorn and guided it through its growth and the success of the BBC Micro. Acorn overextended itself with, among other things, an attempt to enter the US education market.
It was taken over by Olivetti in 1985, then riding high as Europe’s largest IBM PC compatible vendor. Olivetti saw Cambridge as a centre for research and appointed Hauser as a vice-president of research to supplement its research labs in Italy. He founded the Olivetti Research lab in Cambridge and appointed Andy Hopper as its head.
Hauser was able to attract such luminaries of the IT world as Sir Maurice Wilkes (1913-2010), a co-designer of the first stored programme computer at Cambridge which ran in May 1949.
In 1988 Hauser left Olivetti to found the Active Book company, a venture which was eventually sold to AT&T.
In 1990 he helped to spin out ARM from Acorn. He continues to look for new ventures and in 1997 co-founded the venture capital IT partnership Amadeus based in Cambridge. It has raised $1 billion to invest in over 130 technology companies.
Launching entrepreneurs
Dr Professor Andy Hopper (1953-) CBE, FRS was born in Poland and emigrated to the UK in 1964. He studied computer science at Swansea under Professor David Aspinall who had just set up the computer technology course: Aspinall blended business awareness with encouraging his students to exploit the new range of microprocessors. (See https://assets.cs.ncl.ac.uk/seminars/161.pdf for Aspinall’s explanation of the unique structure of the course.)
Hopper pursued his PhD in Cambridge where we worked on early local area networks (Lan), specifically the Cambridge Ring, a token ring network on which he worked with Maurice Wilkes.
He launched a Lan company which came to the attention of Hauser and Curry at Acorn and it was taken into Acorn in 1979. Hopper was appointed managing director of the Olivetti lab, set up by Hauser, in 1986.
As MD he helped more than 10 venture operations become independent companies under the benign eye of Olivetti. He co-founded networking companies and cad companies. AT&T took over the Olivetti lab, let it run for a while and brutally closed it in 2002.
On the closure of the lab Hopper focused on his professorship at Cambridge here he developed a strategy to get over 200 ventures from Cambridge University into the market.
Building a multi-billion company
Sir Robin Saxby (1947-) FRS was brought into the newly-independent ARM a year after its foundation, in 1991, after working in a number of electronics industriesand was its first CEO.
He established two vital strategies for ARM: First, don’t make chips. Second, build a portfolio of supporting customers who will pay up front for some services.
The first strategy was essential if ARM was to survive. Acorn had used it to get the ARM processor going. The fledgling ARM could not have born the cost of building a semiconductor fabrication plant at billions dedicated only to a single microprocessor design.
So Acorn and then ARM used the spare capacity of existing semiconductor manufacturers and eventually the services of semiconductor foundries, companies who do not design any of their own chips but make those of design companies.
The second strategy is essential to provide cash flow. ARM would have to invest up front to contribute to design further generations of the ARM microprocessor but would have to wait for raiment for royalties on the design when used by others. The strategy was to get payments up from potential customers.
ARM microprocessors used very low power and were ideally placed to provide the engines for the explosion of mobile computing. By 2015, 15 billion microprocessors using the ARM designed were made a year. ARM was taken over by Japan’s SoftBank in 2016 for £24 billion, making many of its employees millionaires.
Between them these five have earned two knighthoods (Hauser’s KBE is a knighthood for a foreign national), three CBEs and a host of industry and professional awards for their contributions to the history of IT in the UK.
Related material
Find out more about the BBC Computer Literacy Project, which used BBC Micros, made by Acorn Computers.
