Acorn Computers

Acorn Computers defined British computing education. Their BBC Micro, developed for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, became the standard machine in UK schools throughout the 1980s. More significantly, Acorn’s need for a better processor led to the creation of ARM—originally Acorn RISC Machine—whose descendants now power most smartphones on Earth.

Fast facts

Founded: 1978 in Cambridge by Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry.
Key products: BBC Micro (1981), Electron (1983), Archimedes (1987).
ARM origins: designed in-house for the Archimedes, later spun off.
BBC contract: won the Computer Literacy Project tender over Sinclair.
Demise: acquired by Olivetti (1985); Workstation Division closed September 1998; renamed Element 14, with RISC OS sold to Castle and Element 14 itself going to Broadvision in November 2000.

The BBC Micro era

The BBC contract transformed Acorn:

Educational dominance: nearly every UK school had BBC Micros.
Quality hardware: robust 6502-based design with expansion ports.
Software ecosystem: educational software, games, programming tools.
Elite debut: the landmark space game launched on BBC Micro first.

The machine its owners kept using for games

Acorn’s identity was education, and it is the framing the company’s own history is told in. Acorn User’s pages show the readership pulling in a different direction throughout.

The magazine ran a software chart, and through 1985–86 the top of it is games. Elite — Acornsoft’s own — sat at #1 for months at £14.95 cassette and £17.95 on disc. Around it: Sabre Wulf and Jet Pac from Ultimate at £9.95, Repton from Superior, Chuckie Egg, Beach-Head from US Gold, and — at #2 in the Electron Top 10 — Beau Jolly’s Computer Hits (10) compilation.

Two things follow from that list.

BBC games were expensive. £14.95, against £9.95 for a full-price Spectrum cassette and £1.99 for budget. The education machine’s software was priced like education software even when it was a space trading game.

The Spectrum’s biggest publisher came to Acorn’s machine. Ultimate advertised in Acorn User in terms that acknowledge the awkwardness directly: “some poor souls have been missing out on the Ultimate experience… so to prove that we are not prejudiced in any way we present Alien 8, Jet-Pac and Lunar Jet-Man especially for the BBC Micro.”

And the readers wanted more of it. A letter in the same period asks the magazine to review more games — naming Citadel, Dr Who and the Mines of Terror, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Nightshade, Gyroscope and Twister — and to introduce “a ratings system of some sort”, so that “at least then we might get an idea of whether a game is worth spending money on”.

That is a computer-literacy machine’s official magazine being asked by its own readers to start scoring games like CRASH did.

Elite, and what Acorn lost

Acorn User was still calling Elite “the greatest Acorn game of all time” at the end of 1993 — nine years after release, and the highest praise the magazine had.

By then the sequel was going elsewhere. Reviewing what was coming, the magazine noted that David Braben had “almost completed Frontier… Unfortunately this time it will appear first on other platforms, but expect to see it pop up on Acorn machines some time soon.”

The regret in that sentence is the Acorn story in miniature. The machine that produced the defining British game of the decade could no longer command its sequel — and the company’s lasting contribution turned out to be the processor, not the computer.

How it ended

The fast facts give “eventually wound down (1998)”. Retro Gamer’s Acorn history gives the sequence, and it is a dismantling rather than a closure:

In September 1998, the Acorn Workstation Division was finally closed. Acorn changed its name to Element 14, and the computer hardware was farmed off; RISC OS finally sold out to Castle. The end came when Element 14 [was taken by] Broadvision in November 2000.

The Archimedes had sold “almost a third of a million” over six years — a real business by the standards of a British machine, and nowhere near enough. Meanwhile the processor Acorn had designed for it kept going: the StrongARM launched in 1996, and the same RISC line “can be found in many of today’s PDAs”.

That is the shape of it. The computer division was sold, renamed, and absorbed; the chip outlived all of it.

ARM: the lasting legacy

Acorn’s processor design outlived the company:

RISC philosophy: simple instructions, fast execution.
Low power: critical for portable devices.
ARM Ltd: joint venture with Apple and VLSI (1990).
Modern dominance: ARM powers most mobile devices worldwide.

The British computer pioneer