BBC BASIC Running On A BBC Micro Birthed ARM On April 26, 1985

Today there are more ARM processors than people, they have shipped somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 billion chips over the past four decades, but the architecture comes from very humble roots.  The original revealing of the ARM architecture by a company called Acorn involved 808 lines of BBC Basic running on a BBC Micro which contained Acorn’s brand new RISC chip.  That chip was fabricated by the American based VLSI Technology, Inc who remained one of the biggest producers of ARM chips until they were bought by Phillips in June 1999; they are still technically a part of NXP Semiconductors.  Amusingly Qualcomm tried to buy NXP a few years back but ended up cancelling the deal, because ARM and Qualcomm just can’t get along.

The original ARM system pulled 120 mW of power to run, which was so low that they had some frustration testing the design as an ammeter connected to the chip registered zero power consumption, even though it was running.  You can read about some of the stories from the original ten person design team over at The Register and if you are ever in Cambridge you should definitely check out the UK’s Centre for Computing History.

For something completely different you can also enjoy the 50th anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.