We have to put up with Alan Sugar on the apprentice (and jokes about him on the Now Show) - Amstrad is dead people, likewise Sinclair appeared in a tv remake of his life a year or two back. The Spectrum is long dead. Nothing now remains of this my geek generation peice of computing history. These people brought you the useless emailing telephone and the C5 respectivly. Why are they the 80's computing people on my telly?

I didn't have a Spectrum or an Amstrad I had an Acorn BBC (guess I'm middle class). The BBC model b, like the Spectrum and CPC is no longer with us, but unlike Amstrad and Sincalirs its legacy is still with us.

What has it got in its pocketesess?

The BBC is gone, gone too is Acorn, its debts paid off in shame by its own subsidury company. You've heard of intel right? Ibm? Apple? M$?The big boys of the computer world? Well there's another much quierter big boy out there called ARM. You've got an ARM processor on you right now, you may even be reading this on one, chances are you've more than one. The A in ARM stood originaly for "Acorn" who made the BBC, Sinclair and Sugar may be with us in popular culture, but nobody, even me, can name the guy behind Acorn but from (and originally designed on the BBC) come a franckly stunning array of computing devices. The future, possibly, of computing. When I say you've go one on you, the hottest phone on the block is the iPhone - deep in its guts, beneath the apple logos, your collection of smutty texts and Stephen Fry Tweets at its beating heart, the CPU, is an ARM core designed via Acorn's spin off of its Acorn RISC Machine processor. Not got an iPhone? Well it doesn't matter what you've got from a old chocolate block Nokia through Android to the iPad 2 and your shiny new tablet they're all direct (ish) decendents of the ugly (and lets be honest - it was) box with Elite and Chucky Egg on it. Even if I'm wrong and you one of the 2% or so mobiles that don't have an ARM in them you've probably got one somewhere, in your car or your washing machine, your modem router or some of your toys.

Nintendo DS - ARM, iPods - ARM, your TV set top box will probably have one. I mean these guy's out sell intel CPU's by an order of magnitude. OK so they don't make them them selves, but when you buy one of these devices a company in Cambridge's cash till goes "kching".

The Future's Bright

I keep hearing stories about ARM, only cos I'm a geek and even most geeks don't realise the UK connection let alone the BBC Micro. Now some of the stories are far fetched, but, and its a big but, they're not so far fetched as all that. Recently I hear ARM chips taking on intel in servers in the near future. I hear Apple laptops may soon swich to ARM from intel. Now there's a lot of rumor and speculation in there. But what made ARM the worlds most dominant mobile and imbeded processor are ideal suited to the buzz words of the current IT industry.

From Ugly Duckling to Swan

T'was an acident, almost, Acorn couldn't afford to go for the top end computing market, they didn't have the muscles, they also couldn't find a chip to upgrade the BBC micro/master line. So they decided to design one them selves. It had to be cheap enough and powerfull enough rather than the ultimate. This led to them using the design system that your all familur with. Keep it Simple Stupid, the processor they came up with had feature that turned out to be really really handy. It was cheap, much faster than anything else in its price range and because of its simple internal structure allowed for things a complicated CPU can't do. Like stop in the middle of stuff, and carry on where it left of. A feature that's very handy for saving battery. The upshot was, for the time, a quite powerfull, cheap CPU which, crucially, needed very little electrisity.

Now here we are in the 21st centuary, faces lit by our smart phone screens, Intel are rattled, Microsoft are rattled, a couple of years back we all did everything internet or IT with an intel CPU and a Windows OS - it was that or a god awful Amstrad emailing telephone. Now we use facebook on our tellies, our phones and soon tablets. They don't run on intel and they don't run Windows. So when you hear the rumors you wonder, is ARM the next big thing (not that is isn't already). Then you hit the facts, Windows runs on x86 - intel's cpu's. Well Microsoft is making windows 8 run on ARM as well. Intel hates it - it sells Atom chips to netbooks, it doesn't want to, every cheap Atom (intel's low power chip), is a lost sale of a posh chip. Microsoft has to sell windows cheap to netbooks, cos the price of a netbook is so low the full windows price would make them so expencive the makers would have to use linux on the, which is free.

So tell me again why the hell do I have to look at Alan Bloody Sugar on my bloody telly? I bet is poxy email bloody telphone no body buys has  an ARM CPU in it..

In the words of Monty Python "What did Acorn ever do for us!"?

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