How Amateurs created the world’s most popular Processor (History of ARM Part 1)

It's late at night and a pair of legendary computer wizards receive a phone call from their boss. He asked them that it is impossible to build a computer that will change the destiny of an entire generation at a time, but what none of them knew is that this will only be the beginning of a chain of events that will make a small group of missionaries from Cambridge lay the foundation for a technology that would likely affect the lives of every person on Earth. This is that story. It's the second half of the 70s. In Cambridge, UK, and company co-founders Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry are trying to figure out how to take their small company to some big projects.

Chris Curry had until very recently been second in command at a local consumer electronics company called Sinclair Radionics. by the legendary Clive Sinclair, who we covered in a previous video with his own set of strange and slightly violent antics, but at this point, if his intention was to enter the

world

of micro

processor

s and home computers, they needed something major. Talent, talented technicians who make their IT dreams come true and, luckily for them, Hermann knew exactly where Stalin's best group was, the legendary institution that is the University of Cambridge and within this University there was a specific club that was of

part

icular interest to them: the Cambridge University

processor

group. society of nerds fascinated with the promising

world

of processors and the home computer revolution, after asking around, he was introduced to the

most

talented students in the group, a doctoral student named Steve Ferber and a surprisingly young student, the one and only Sophie Wilson.

Ferber was knee-deep in her PhD in aerodynamics and had developed a wealth of mathematical knowledge, and Wilson, for her

part

, was the resident tech wizard. His fascination with microprocessors had begun after some friends told him about a surprisingly cheap microprocessor that had just hit the market. market the Moss 6502 and with the new Talent now under their wings they set out to make some money. Chris, after watching the growth of Apple Computers, was inspired to choose a name that would place them above Apple in the movie book and I will refer to an old English saying Big oaks grow from small acorns and computers from acorns were about to start growing into a mighty tree 1980 as a new decade rolls around things in acorns computers are heating up yes, a Plug and Play home fully packaged and ready to use Computer like companies in the United States United are no longer making kits for enthusiasts to build.

We can put a beautiful case around our computers and make it happen. Chris, how the hell are we going to fund any of this? We do not do it. If you have the money for that level of production, don't worry, we'll have one take some pretty pictures. Put a full page ad in the best electronics magazine in the country and people are going to love it so much that they are going to send us checks for pre-orders, who will have the production funds in no time, this sale first produced the subsequent mythology, it is something Curry had learned from his old boss Sinclair and, although Hauser was obvious, the growing UK computer market loved it. and they soon had the funds to make the acorn atom into a completely pre-built and packaged computer designed around Wilson's favorite month six 2 and powered by Acorn's basic and highly powerful interpreter for the basic programming language that Wilson herself had programmed and With additional features like networking capabilities and the ability to mix machine code with basic instructions, it was in many ways superior to the Microsoft basic that

most

of the industry will rely on even as it competes with products like Chris' zx80 or the boss who found the product. some modest success, but as the employees of the still small company discuss what to produce next, they encounter an unexpected disagreement: if we build workstations, the computers are going to be huge in the workspace, the workstations look at everyone the atoms we sold, we should definitely make another one. home computer for normal people, how about this?

I can design a computer that uses two microprocessors, one microprocessor would be connected to the i o and sold as a home computer, but when connected to the second microprocessor it becomes a much more powerful machine that could be used as a workstation, you can do that, for which began the development of the next project. They'll take the first half of Sophie's idea and turn it into a home computer codenamed Proton, with future plans to sell the other half as an expansion to make it a powerful one. workstation but the timeline for this project was about to be radically shortened thanks to an unexpected organization that would change everything for the country BBC the UK public broadcaster was producing a television program to educate the general public about computers there was no unifying operating system.

Back then, computers were a mess of mutually incompatible systems with somewhat unique quirks, so for the program to work the BBC needed a single flagship computer to center the program on and this presented an opportunity so that everyone in the UK computer industry understood what this meant, whoever got this. A juicy government contract will net millions of pounds in free advertising and millions of computing souls for overseas schools and universities. Claire had launched into this with characteristic arrogance of hers by presenting the Sinclair x81 set as the obvious candidate for this competition, but the flat keyboard lacks expansion capabilities. and the general attitude of Sinclair had turned off the BBC immediately and Chris smelled an opportunity to re-sell first and run later our next computer is exactly what you asked for many expansions and ports a high quality keyboard high performance that we can easily adapt to a proton for whatever the BBC needs, can we visit the office to see it next week next week yes, yes, I'm sure we'll be ready now.

The problem with this issue is that Proton was, at best, at the idea stage and trying to convince the team. To achieve the madness of deploying a prototype in a week, they will almost need a miracle, but Hauser had an idea on how to stimulate his workers, something that will become something of a legend in technology

history

and tell-all circles. the story, I thought. It was appropriate to have someone there. This was quite late in the negotiations with the BBC, we planned a visit to Acorn on Friday and this phone call happened the weekend before that Friday, we hadn't even designed it, I mean I had a document.

Design for the machine, but not a detailed design. Hermann called Sophie and said: Hi Wilson, can you create a prototype with a proton before the weekend for the BBC to review? You're crazy? That's impossible, huh, that's weird. Ferber said. he could wait, he what, maybe he knows something I don't know, okay, so Herman called me and said: Hey Steve, can you prototype the proton by the end of the week? You're drunk? Herman Wilson said it was doable how well maybe then no, I, you know it was a long time ago so I don't trust my own memory and the finer details, but certainly something like that happened.

It took a little while for the couple to figure out the rules, but it was too late. Knee-deep in the project, what followed was one of the most intense weeks in the

history

of computer development, as the entire team worked hard to get the Prototype ready in time for PPC's visit and worked until the final seconds. with Wilson literally programming the CRT controller's Last Bets when Curry and Hauser delayed the BBC from going up the stairs, but the BBC was so impressed that this ragtak team had made more progress in a week than other companies had in years that they They awarded the multi-million dollar prize. pound government contract Now, with the right time and money, the prototype needed to be turned into a full-fledged product, the enormous number of chips used by this computer needed to be simplified with the help of a couple of semi-custom chips built using what Gay was called an increase where the chips had a bunch of pre-made electronic components and then I'll let their connections be designed into a semi-custom circuit, a lot of responsibility will fall on Ferber, who under pressure will prove to be a particularly skilled.

Circle designer um, yes the BBC microwave was launched with two front ulas and one for the video system and one for the serial interface, a cassette interface etc., long time viewers might remember Ferranti , since it was this same technology and the same company that made Sinclair computers possible and will also be the subject of a side mission video, but this time the technology presented some problems and the serial interface chip worked fine, but the video processor, the video process as we call it, gave us all kinds of problems. It was quite sensitive to temperature, the problem was that the video processor was operating at speeds quite close to the limits of the technology.

One of the features of BBC micro was that it worked fine when you turned it on, but in about 10 minutes. Later it would get hot and then start breaking the pixels on the screen due to the video processor, so they were saved by a second source of a similar technology, an American company, they used a different manufacturing technology that was much sturdier to overheat and will become a powerful ally very soon all the pieces were in place to power the new computer that will be called BBC micro, the official computer of the pbc educational program that will sell millions and become a platform that will teach the entire UK population about computers, but if you remember earlier in the video, what had been proposed was a two part computer where the micro VPC was just the first part ready to connect to a second processor to become a powerful workstation work and now that they had the money, their drive and the name for the second part, when they started experimenting with connecting a second processor to the micro, they discovered something unexpected: newer and supposedly superior processors like the Motorola 6800 and the national semiconductor 32016, They were complicated super devices with extensive instruction sets.

Wilson and Ferber had even traveled to the national semiconductor laboratory in Israel and were amazed by the complex facilities and all the personnel necessary to manufacture this part. Israel was pretty much what you would expect from a large American company with a large setup and a large team that, having repeated problems debugging and yet actually offering practical improvements in performance were minimal, especially in terms of of being able to make use of faster memory, the only test that really gave them positive results was simply another 6502 running on a faster clock. If they were missing something given this result, all hopes were pinned on a successor to the 6502 when Wilson and Ferber traveled to Arizona to visit the laboratories of the Western Digital Center run by one of the members of the original design of the 6502 and specifically this guy in a previous video they were surprised to discover something different, yeah, that was really very interesting.

You know, we went to Phoenix, Arizona, to the so-called Western Design Center, expecting to find bright, classic American offices with big, classy windows, but what we discovered was the Western Design Center was operating out of the Bungalow in suburban Arizona, um, and They were using school students to design basic gate cells and so on in Apple computers, their entire operation was less sophisticated than anything Acorn had done, perhaps they had seriously overestimated the technical capabilities needed to create a simple microprocessor, so... What if they could design their own microprocessor that would ultimately satisfy them while the idea was communicated to the rest of the team at home?

Hauser realized that he had recently read something that fit this perfectly. question, hey, what is this? I've been following articles and press releases coming out of Berkeley and Stanford about a new approach to processor design. The focus was, of course, on the small instruction set computer, the idea that instead of making increasingly complex processors with lots of instructions. do something similar with a smaller but much faster set of simple instructions and then use those simple instructions to build complex ones for a much simpler design andFast and the simplest instructions meant a simple processor that could be designed by a small team, oh my goodness, they could actually achieve this, they could design a chip just like they did for the BBC micro chips and make it blsi Technologies manufactures them still believing that they will encounter some inevitable obstacle.

The team set about designing what is codenamed the Acorn resc machine. Yes, that's absolutely what the acronym meant at the beginning. Wilson designed the set of instructions he wanted to create something that was powerful yet simple, and then Ferber implemented those instructions as circuits that carefully simulated the results with a reference model program in 850 lines of BBC basic he. However, he ran into an additional requirement that presented an unexpected limitation. If we want to have any chance of keeping the education market happy, we need to reduce the cost as much as possible. What do you mean by what I mean is that the chip has to fit in a 50 Cent? plastic package cannot have any expensive additional cooling any other packaging will cost 20 times more get it?

Ferber was surprised by the draconian requirement to make the ship operate in a plastic envelope, meaning the chip will have to produce less than a watt of heat. Additionally, the tools and models they had to calculate how much heat each element of the ship would generate design were really archaic and inaccurate, so you will have to estimate and leave a considerable margin of safety. April 26, 1995, the day everyone in the company was finally waiting for. The first samples of blsi Technologies' first ARM chip arrive after a couple of small issues on the breadboard are fixed, the computers plug in and boot up running BBC basic, the company collectively holds its breath as a test command this time.

The command is executed and the message Hello world, it's me appears and R shouts in victory and rolls around the office. A bottle of champagne is open. It works and works very well, given the strict heat limits, it is further estimated that, by definition, the Nation will also have. To be really efficient in energy consumption, it is very curious that you connect a meter to it and measure how much energy it was consuming zero watts. Which doesn't make sense. This maid finds out that the power of the processor was not even connected, but how the processor was working unmistakably.

Where the world was getting energy from, apparently the chip is using zero energy. Now clearly, this cannot happen. And the research part showed that I actually couldn't establish the connection with the chip, but the chip was still executing the code. very happily um and the only explanation for this is that all the chips have um diodes on the i o pins to protect the chips from electrostatics, so if you walk on a nylon mat carrying the chip, you're less likely to blow it up um and so if there were external chip inputs on the 5 volts, which was the positive rail, then that could power the chip through these protection diodes and that must have been what was happening, the device had extraordinary power efficiency beyond what they had expected. the design that it ran only on filtered current with such a powerful and energy efficient device, perhaps they could aspire to much more than an expansion of the BBC micro or a next generation computer, perhaps it could be something more, it will be needed many other twists and This will become the chip inside all of our phones and we may get there in a future video, but one thing I can tell you for sure is that while the arm will become something, the acorn will not be So lucky, in fact, I'm willing to do it.

I bet a good number of users outside the UK have never heard of them before. Have you ever wondered why this incredibly innovative computer could never reach markets like the US? Well, that's a story I explored along with Professor Ferber in this month's episode of the Might size series where I explored stories tangential to the main video and as a bonus I'm also uploading the full interview with Professor Furberg that I recorded for this video. That's all. I mean, I was really glad that I'll talk about the decision and you know, my MacBook Air doesn't have a fan and of course for the last 10 years they've been mastering the process of building very energy efficient and powerful systems with their iPhones and their Pretty small iPads. go from a high-end iPad to a low-end Mac and all of this is available exclusively on nebula, a creator-owned streaming service that is undoubtedly making a career out of hundreds of independent creators like me thanks to its new initiative we call nebula I upload my new videos first, they are often weeks earlier than anywhere else and each video has its own exclusive nebula companion, some like this have two and the best part is that we have the manpower to make this as accessible as possible If you use any of my nebula links you will get an exclusive discount, which means that for annual plans it goes down to just 3.33 cents per month for a full year of the service and you will support me directly since being a great own service creator Some of that goes directly to the creators and pays for everyone who works on these videos.

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