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.
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.
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…