Technology | Nostalgia | 1980s

Remembering the Acorn Archimedes Personal Computer and the Evolution of ARM Technology

The origins of ARM CPU architecture in the 1980s — now powering billions of devices including smartphones — and the first computer to use it

This is an updated version of an article I wrote a few years ago for some of my now-defunct blogs.

Archimedes A410/1 Photo by PaulVernon1974 used under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

In the early 1980s, Acorn built a range of popular computers in the UK, including the BBC Micro.

In 1983, they started developing a new 32-bit processor called ARM. The name initially stood for Acorn RISC Machine.

There’s an interesting four-page article about the ARM chip in the November 1985 issue of Personal Computer World. Image provided by the author

Inspiration

The idea of Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) began with the IBM 801 in the 1970s.

Acorn was inspired by papers from UC Berkeley and Stanford about RISC. Another source of inspiration was the design of the 65C816, an enhanced version of the 65C02.

The 65C02 was a low-power version of the 6502, a popular 8-bit microprocessor used in machines…