Stapleford History Society 9th July 2024
A talk by John Biggs
The speaker is a distinguished consultant engineer, having been involved with Acorn/Arm since 1986. He was one of the twelve electronic and electrical engineers “thrown out” of Acorn and instructed to start ARM in 1990.
He began his talk by reminding us of some significant developments in the field before ARM Ltd, as we now know it, began its rise to almost universal dominance of the ‘chip’ business. Currently ARM and INTEL are the two major forces in the global industry but the industry began in some sense with the creation of the first transistor in 1947. Twenty-four years later the Intel processor used 2,300 transistors and the first email was sent. Motorola made the first mobile phone call in 1973 and in 1985 the first ‘chip’ was made in Cambridge. The first RISC microprocessor was the Acorn machine produced in 1985 for the BBC, with nine models and a total of 1.5 million sold before it was discontinued in 1994.
The label ARM means that the company produces Advanced RISC Machines. RISC stands for Reduced Instructions Set Computers. In this context a Set is a group of items. The older ones among us will remember studying the addition of pounds, shillings and pence. The shilling equalled a Set with twelve pence in it while the pound had twenty shillings in its Set. Because the engineers had reduced the complex instructions Set for the earliest computing machines, they could refer to their development as Reduced Instructions and were able to make much smaller ‘chips’. Bolstered by BBC money in 1983, Roger Wilson and Steve Furber were instrumental in producing the Acorn Archimedes. By 1996 ARM provided over ten billion ‘chips’ for Nokia mobile phones.
The first home for Acorn/ARM was a barn in Swaffham Bulbeck and the first chairman was Robin Saxby for whom cash was king. When the company could not afford pay rises, the staff were given stocks and shares and agreed that their intellectual property belonged to the company. By licensing the employees’ knowledge to others, ARM controlled the creation of ‘chips’ without having to physically make any themselves. ARM Ltd employees are still receiving payments from deals struck in the early 1990s.
The ARM motto might be ‘Simplicity, Elegance and Parsimony’, the instructions given to Roger Wilson and Steve Furber who were instrumental in developing the Acorn computer for the BBC, without any extra company money or people to help them. John Biggs ended his talk by reminding us that people are the biggest asset for any organisation and that for any job of work it will cost less if you employ knowledgeable people.
Report by Jane Steadman