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).
zabzonk · 3h ago
> In many ways, the tuple (BBC Micro, Acorn Computers, arm) is analogous to (IBM PC, Intel, x86)
Except the BBC micro didn't use an ARM processor - it used a 6502. Whereas the IBM PC did use the Intel processor.
afandian · 2h ago
Depends how nitpicky you want to be. There was an ARM “BBC Micro”.
Except, of course there was the Archimedes. Which was a BBC Micro on steroids.
Besides, it did say 'in many ways' so I think that this is really needless nitpicking.
djmips · 1h ago
Let's be serious, the BBC micro is awesome but it's no more the ancestor to my phone than an Apple II.
Lio · 54m ago
Well the ARM's original goal was to run BBC BASIC faster than the BBC B could run assembly code.
To that end the ARM instruction set was heavily inspired by the 6502 in the Beeb and cruicially the BBC Micro was used to simulate the ARM before it went into production.
Latter the original ARM development kits were connected as second processors to Beebs courtesy of the Tube connector.
I think it's fare to say that without the BBC Micro there would be no ARM processors.
> Well the ARM's original goal was to run BBC BASIC faster than the BBC B could run assembly code.
That seems an unlikely goal given BBC BASIC was interpreted! Happy to be proven wrong but I've never heard one of the original team say that.
pjmlp · 21m ago
It could be the point of what optimizations would be possible on the interpreter.
One of the optimizations Google introduced on Android 7, when they backtracked for AOT at installation time introduced in Android 5, was that the DEX interpreter was rewriten from scratch in cleverly manually written Assembly, before handing it over to the JIT/AOT infrastructure.
BBC Basic was also one of the few that allowed direct inline Assembly, instead of having to go through DATA blocks.
rjsw · 1h ago
It is a bit closer link than that, the same people designed the BBC micro and ARM1.
cesaref · 55m ago
If he'd been talking about the Acorn Archimedes, he'd have had a point.
jacquesm · 36m ago
No, he'd have even less of a point.
Kim_Bruning · 1h ago
Sort of true, but yet, what does my eye spy on an early Archimedes A310 keyboard?
Sure, but modern x86 has very little in common with the 8088.
mojuba · 2h ago
Depends on how you define "common" but the entire lineage 8080 -> 8086 -> 8088 are backwards compatible and therefore are very much related.
jacquesm · 33m ago
It goes further back than that, just not as backwards compatible. 4004 -> 8008, 8080 and so on. Just like the 6800, 6809, 68000 etc progression. All of these are families that have more in common with each other from one generation to the next than with other such families. It's logical: usually those were the same teams designing them with better tools and more money at their disposal, as well as a vastly increased transistor budget. Notable exception: the 6800 is in many ways simply an improved 6502 but by a different manufacturer.
klelatti · 1h ago
8080 -> 8086 not compatible although assembly code translation was possible.
mananaysiempre · 15m ago
Some parts of the lineage are nevertheless very important. When I wrote a 8086 assembler, I’ve come across the idea of of writing the instruction encodings in octal instead of hexadecimal purely by accident, described as some sort of little-known neat trick hidden from the casual reader of the CPU documentation. It’s only by reading the manual for the Datapoint 2200 much later that I found a confirmation that this was very much intentional and (in the distant past) documented.
linker3000 · 2h ago
Well, I still own the ancestor - a BBC B.
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.
jacquesm · 31m ago
Wow! I have heard about these but have never seen one. And I was pretty close to the fire at the time so amazing that you actually worked with one. I did get a pre-production Archimedes when it was still in development and had a great time porting stuff to it.
grahar64 · 2h ago
A BBC micro was my first computer. Americans had Amegas or something, but I had a BBC and a big book with example BASIC programs.
jameshart · 1h ago
The American equivalent of the BBC Micro was very much the Apple II. Both based on the 6502, both dominated the market of ‘first computers purchased en masse by schools’ in the 1980s in their respective countries.
I always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.
DrBazza · 52m ago
For whatever reason, Acorn dropped the ball.
At the time the Archimedes blew the nascent PC and every other machine out of the water, and yet couldn't get a toe-hold in the US market for reasons I've never quite understood. At the same point MS Windows looked shoddy at best in comparison to RiscOS.
jacquesm · 23m ago
Acorn didn't so much drop the ball as that the industry took off in a way that they simply could not have dealt with for the exact same reason that your EU start-up that is successful usually ends up being acquired: lack of access to easy capital. SV was well established by the time that the personal computer took off and even though they found their own nice niche (education) they never started out to conquer the world, they achieved their goals - and then some, see linked article - and managed to pivot fast enough and well enough to eventually give intel a run for their money, which is no mean achievement.
RiscOS wasn't even on the table for the likes of IBM and that is what it would have taken to succeed in the business market. But for many years the preferred machine to create Videotext or ATEX (automatic typesetting system) bitstreams was to have a BBC micro and there were quite a few other such interesting niches. I still know of a few BBCs running art installations that have been going non-stop for close to 45 years now. Power supplies are the biggest problem but there are people that specialize in repairing them, and there are various DIY resources as well (videos, articles).
Lio · 48m ago
Yep, Acorn competitor to the Amiga and ST would was the Archimedes (followed by the A series and Risc PC).
The Archimedes was powered by a 32-bit ARM 2 and it was awesome. :D
jacquesm · 22m ago
The first time I started up an Archimedes and ran Lander it really felt like the future had arrived. The smoke particles in particular (heh) were very impressive.
pavlov · 1h ago
The Amiga was much bigger in Europe/UK than the US, though.
The Apple II would be an example of the opposite.
DrBazza · 56m ago
Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were 16-bit 68000 chips.
The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following:
BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master
Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64
Atari 400/800 XL
Tandy TRS80
Oric Atmos
Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL
Amstrad CPC 464
Dragon 32/64
MSX machines
dcminter · 44m ago
The Sinclair QL was a 68k machine, not an 8-bit (and famously what Linus Torvalds had before he got a 386 based PC).
I cut my teeth on a ZX81 and even had a Spectrum +3 later on - that was the last gasp of the 8-bit Sinclair line, although the IP was owned by Amstrad by then.
zoeysmithe · 57m ago
The Amiga was more 2nd gen. I think the Micro equivalent was more like an Apple I/II. TRS-80/Tandy Color, or Vic-20/C64. The Amiga was Motorola 68000 based and at a clockspeed that really outran those zlog and 6502 based early devices.
The Amiga was a pretty impressive device with an OS that was fairly advanced. You could probably use it still today for word processing and sound design and not feel like you're missing much. The OS looks a lot like one of those super low-resource linux DE's.
klelatti · 1h ago
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.
digitaltinfoil · 1h ago
I still think about how great Castle Quest for the BBC was. That game was killer
In many ways, the tuple (BBC Micro, Acorn Computers, arm) is analogous to (IBM PC, Intel, x86).
Except the BBC micro didn't use an ARM processor - it used a 6502. Whereas the IBM PC did use the Intel processor.
https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acorn-BBC-Archi...
And the IBM PC used an 8088.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
Besides, it did say 'in many ways' so I think that this is really needless nitpicking.
To that end the ARM instruction set was heavily inspired by the 6502 in the Beeb and cruicially the BBC Micro was used to simulate the ARM before it went into production.
Latter the original ARM development kits were connected as second processors to Beebs courtesy of the Tube connector.
I think it's fare to say that without the BBC Micro there would be no ARM processors.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/a-history-of-arm-par...
That seems an unlikely goal given BBC BASIC was interpreted! Happy to be proven wrong but I've never heard one of the original team say that.
One of the optimizations Google introduced on Android 7, when they backtracked for AOT at installation time introduced in Android 5, was that the DEX interpreter was rewriten from scratch in cleverly manually written Assembly, before handing it over to the JIT/AOT infrastructure.
BBC Basic was also one of the few that allowed direct inline Assembly, instead of having to go through DATA blocks.
(detail: https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/user/custom/Acorn/32bit/A310/310... )
(full article for reference: https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Acorn-BBC-Archi... )
... and besides, it runs BBC BASIC!
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 always get the impression though that while the UK and European home computer era continued from a diverse eight-bit era of C64s, Spectrums, Amstrads and BBCs to the sixteen-bit era of Amigas and Atari STs, before the PC became dominant, in the US the early eight-bit home machines gave way much earlier to consoles - the NES at first, then the SNES and Megadrive.
At the time the Archimedes blew the nascent PC and every other machine out of the water, and yet couldn't get a toe-hold in the US market for reasons I've never quite understood. At the same point MS Windows looked shoddy at best in comparison to RiscOS.
RiscOS wasn't even on the table for the likes of IBM and that is what it would have taken to succeed in the business market. But for many years the preferred machine to create Videotext or ATEX (automatic typesetting system) bitstreams was to have a BBC micro and there were quite a few other such interesting niches. I still know of a few BBCs running art installations that have been going non-stop for close to 45 years now. Power supplies are the biggest problem but there are people that specialize in repairing them, and there are various DIY resources as well (videos, articles).
The Archimedes was powered by a 32-bit ARM 2 and it was awesome. :D
The Apple II would be an example of the opposite.
The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following:
BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master
Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64
Atari 400/800 XL
Tandy TRS80
Oric Atmos
Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL
Amstrad CPC 464
Dragon 32/64
MSX machines
I cut my teeth on a ZX81 and even had a Spectrum +3 later on - that was the last gasp of the 8-bit Sinclair line, although the IP was owned by Amstrad by then.
The Amiga was a pretty impressive device with an OS that was fairly advanced. You could probably use it still today for word processing and sound design and not feel like you're missing much. The OS looks a lot like one of those super low-resource linux DE's.
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.
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