A history of ARM
By Jeremy Reimer, Sep 23, 2022
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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/a-history-of-arm-part-1-building-the-first-chip/
Part 2
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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/a-history-of-arm-part-2-everything-starts-to-come-together/
"It was 1983, and Acorn Computers was on top of the world.
Unfortunately, trouble was just around the corner.
The small UK company was famous for winning a contract with the
British Broadcasting Corporation to produce a computer for a
national television show. Sales of its BBC Micro were skyrocketing
and on pace to exceed 1.2 million units.
But the world of personal computers was changing. The market for
cheap 8-bit micros that parents would buy to help kids with their
homework was becoming saturated. And new machines from across the
pond, like the IBM PC and the upcoming Apple Macintosh, promised
significantly more power and ease of use. Acorn needed a way to
compete, but it didn't have much money for research and
development.
A seed of an idea
Sophie Wilson, one of the designers of the BBC Micro, had
anticipated this problem. She had added a slot called the "Tube"
that could connect to a more powerful central processing unit. A
slotted CPU could take over the computer, leaving its original 6502
chip free for other tasks.
But what processor should she choose? Wilson and co-designer Steve
Furber considered various 16-bit options, such as Intel's 80286,
National Semiconductor's 32016, and Motorola's 68000. But none were
completely satisfactory.
In a later interview with the Computing History Museum, Wilson
explained, "We could see what all these processors did and what
they didn't do. So the first thing they didn't do was they didn't
make good use of the memory system. The second thing they didn't do
was that they weren't fast; they weren't easy to use. We were used
to programming the 6502 in the machine code, and we rather hoped
that we could get to a power level such that if you wrote in a
higher level language you could achieve the same types of results."
But what was the alternative? Was it even thinkable for tiny Acorn
to make its own CPU from scratch? To find out, Wilson and Furber
took a trip to National Semiconductor's factory in Israel. They saw
hundreds of engineers and a massive amount of expensive equipment.
This confirmed their suspicions that such a task might be beyond
them.
Then they visited the Western Design Center in Mesa, Arizona. This
company was making the beloved 6502 and designing a 16-bit
successor, the 65C618. Wilson and Furber found little more than a
"bungalow in a suburb" with a few engineers and some students
making diagrams using old Apple II computers and bits of sticky
tape." ...
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