Acorn Computers | Code Like It's 198x

On the morning of 20 February 1985, Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry signed away control of the company they had started six years earlier. Acorn had made the BBC Micro, the computer that went with the BBC’s television series and into thousands of British classrooms, and in 1983 its flotation had made both founders multi-millionaires. Now it had run out of money. The Italian firm Olivetti paid about £12 million for 49.3 per cent. Two months later a small team at Acorn received the first samples of a processor they had designed themselves, and by the afternoon it was running BBC BASIC. The computers Acorn built around it never sold in great numbers. The processor, the ARM, outlived the company and went into billions of devices.

Fast facts

Founded: December 1978 in Cambridge, by Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry.
Computers: System 1 (1979), Atom (1980), BBC Micro (1981), Electron (1983), BBC Master (1986), Archimedes (1987), A3000 (1989), Risc PC (1994).
Software: its own label, Acornsoft, publisher of Elite.
Owner from 1985: Olivetti, with 49.3 per cent in February and 80 per cent by August.
Processor: the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), designed by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber; the team became Advanced RISC Machines Ltd in 1990.
End: workstation division closed in 1998; the company renamed Element 14 in January 1999 and broken up that year.

From fruit machines to the Atom

Chris Curry had worked for Clive Sinclair for years. Hermann Hauser was an Austrian-born physicist. In December 1978 the two set up Cambridge Processor Unit (CPU), and their first customer was Ace Coin Equipment, for whom they designed controllers for fruit machines. The company registered on 5 December 1978, number 1403810, carried the name they traded under: Acorn Computers Limited.

Acorn’s first computer, the System 1 of 1979, was designed by Sophie Wilson and sold mainly to engineers and laboratories. Then Curry pushed the company towards the home. The Atom followed in 1980, and in the summer of 1981 Acorn was selling it by mail order from 4a Market Hill, Cambridge, at £120 plus VAT as a kit: £140 in all, or £174.50 assembled. It had a full-sized keyboard, 2K of RAM, a BASIC with a built-in assembler, and, as its advertisement put it, “the home computer that grows as you do”. Curry later said the keyboard, bought in Hong Kong, cost three or four times as much as the processor.

Wilson’s software and processor work is one of the careers followed in women’s contributions to computing, alongside the working conditions and records that shaped how such work was recognised.

Winning the BBC

In early 1981 the BBC was looking for a computer to go with its Computer Literacy Project. Its first choice, the NewBrain from Newbury Laboratories, could not be made to work in time, and the BBC went back to British manufacturers; other firms, Sinclair among them, were in the running. The BBC’s team told Acorn what they wanted, and Hauser, by his own account, played Wilson and Steve Furber off against each other until both agreed to build a working prototype of their planned Proton computer within the week. Furber, then still a research fellow at Emmanuel College, not an Acorn employee, had drawn up a design at home the year before. The prototype was wire-wrapped by hand, and it would not run until the small hours of Friday, the day of the BBC’s visit. When the BBC arrived, Wilson recalled, “there was BASIC running on the machine prototype”.

Acorn won the contract. The BBC had expected the company to sell about 12,000 BBC Micros in a year; Acorn had nearly 12,000 orders by Christmas 1981, and by later accounts the machine sold about 1.5 million. In the summer of 1982 Acorn still could not keep up, and the first issue of Acorn User, the company’s own magazine, printed a delivery timetable. Acorn’s profits rose from £3,000 in 1979 to £8.6 million in the year to July 1983.

The BBC Micro became a common machine in British schools, backed by a government scheme that paid half the price of an approved computer, and Acorn sold a network, Econet, that linked a classroom of them together. Its software label, Acornsoft, published languages, business programs and games, and in 1984 launched Elite.

In the autumn of 1983 Acorn went public. Acorn User reported that its entry onto the Unlisted Securities Market “was the biggest the City has seen” and made “its two bosses multi-millionaires”; Hauser became chairman and Curry managing director of the new Acorn Computer Group plc. In the same issue the BBC Micro was due to be launched to the American press, with Curry flying to New York for it, although the Wall Street Journal had quoted an analyst calling the venture “a shortcut to disaster”.

The Electron and the crash

Acorn’s answer to the ZX Spectrum was the Electron, a cheaper computer that ran BBC BASIC. Acorn launched it in August 1983 at £199, but its custom chip, like the BBC Micro’s before it, was late, and few machines reached buyers for Christmas. “The big launch day came and we hadn’t got a product,” Curry said later, “and we lost a whole year.” By the time the Electron was plentiful, in 1984, it faced a cheaper Commodore 64, the Spectrum+ and Amstrad’s CPC 464 with its own monitor.

Christmas 1984 went the other way. Acorn User reported that Acorn had spent £4 million on advertising to sell 300,000 computers and sold two-thirds of that; it had cut the Electron’s price by £70, and 100,000 were still unsold. With losses in the United States and Germany as well, the company lost £11 million in the six months to January 1985. “It became clear in mid-January that we could not pay our bills,” said Alex Reid, the new acting chairman.

Olivetti

The Olivetti deal of 20 February 1985 gave the Italian company 49.3 per cent, with the right to go to 50.1. Hauser and Curry’s share fell from 87 per cent to 36, they became deputy chairmen, and 120 staff, a quarter of the workforce, were to lose their jobs. By August Olivetti owned 80 per cent. When Acorn’s shares returned to the market that month after a seven-week suspension, provisional losses for the year were almost £28 million. Olivetti’s Alessandro Uboldi became chairman, Brian Long managing director, and the two founders stepped down as deputy chairmen to become ordinary directors. In 1986 Acornsoft was folded back into Acorn and its games label passed to Superior Software.

The Acorn RISC Machine

The processor came out of frustration. Wilson and Furber had tested the new 16-bit processors for a successor to the BBC Micro, and found that none could make use of the fast memory Acorn knew how to build. A visit to the Western Design Center in Phoenix, a two-bungalow company making a 6502 successor, convinced them they could design a processor themselves. Andy Hopper, an Acorn director, had shown them Berkeley’s research on reduced instruction set computers (RISC), which kept each instruction simple so that it could run fast. Hauser gave them, in Wilson’s words, “no money and no people”. Wilson designed the instruction set and Furber the design of the chip itself, and VLSI Technology in California made it.

The first chips reached Furber on 26 April 1985. “The chips arrived in the morning and by the afternoon they were running BBC BASIC,” he said. “Acorn beats world to super-fast chip”, Acorn User reported in October: a 32-bit RISC processor, run as a second processor attached to a BBC Micro. The chip had worked first time, and the magazine judged that this “was undoubtedly a factor” in Olivetti staying with Acorn. It used so little power that Furber once found a test chip running with its power supply disconnected, drawing current from the circuits around it.

The Archimedes

The first Archimedes was announced in the summer of 1987, built around the ARM and three companion chips for memory, video and input and output. It was far faster than an Atari ST or an Amiga and cost far more, and most machines went to schools. An American research centre in Palo Alto had been writing an ambitious operating system for it, but never finished; Wilson’s team wrote a simpler one, Arthur, in a hurry, and RISC OS replaced it in 1989. The cheaper A3000 followed that year, and the Risc PC in 1994.

In November 1990 Acorn, Apple and VLSI Technology set up Advanced RISC Machines Ltd to take the processor on without the computers. Apple wanted a version for its Newton handheld. Furber left to become a professor at Manchester, and Wilson was seconded to the new company. ARM licensed its designs instead of making chips, and within a few years they were in mobile phones.

The end of Acorn

Acorn’s last years were spent between those two businesses. In September 1998 it closed its workstation division, the part that made computers, and cancelled its next machine, Phoebe. In January 1999 Acorn Computers Limited was renamed Element 14. Acorn still held 24.2 per cent of ARM. In April 1999 The Register reported the deal that took Acorn apart: ARM offered two of its own shares for every five Acorn shares, valuing Acorn at £269.8 million, while Acorn’s set-top box business went to Pace Micro Technology and its chip design business to its managers. That team, Element 14, designed chips for broadband lines, and Broadcom bought it in 2000 in a deal EE Times valued at about $600 million. The registered company that had been Acorn Computers Limited became Cabot 2 Limited, which handled Acorn’s leftover obligations, and was dissolved in 2014.

The computers carried on without Acorn. Castle Technology had exclusive rights to build and sell Acorn-branded machines from shortly after the workstation division closed, and a new company, RISCOS Ltd, held the licence to develop RISC OS for desktop computers. In 2018 RISC OS Developments bought Castle, and with it the rights to the operating system, and republished its source code under the Apache 2.0 licence, free for commercial use for the first time.

ARM floated on the stock exchange in 1998. SoftBank bought it in 2016, and it returned to the stock market in 2023. Its processors are in nearly every mobile phone.

What Acorn’s owners played

The official image of Acorn’s machines was educational; its magazine’s pages show what owners did with them as well. Through the mid-1980s the charts in Acorn User were full of games, often expensive ones: Acornsoft’s Elite and Revs cost £14.95 on cassette and £17.65 on disc, against £9.95 for most games. Spectrum publishers came too. Ultimate advertised Alien 8, Jet Pac and Lunar Jetman for the BBC Micro with the line “some poor souls have been missing out on the Ultimate experience … so to prove that we are not prejudiced in any way”, and in April 1986 a reader asked the magazine to review more games and to introduce “a ratings system of some sort”, so that “we might get an idea of whether a game is worth spending money on”. In 1993 the magazine still called Elite “the greatest Acorn game of all time”, while regretting that David Braben’s sequel, Frontier, would “appear first on other platforms”.

Sources

Your Computer, June/July 1981, pp. 22 and 34: Acorn Atom advertisements (£120 plus VAT; £140 kit and £174.50 assembled including VAT and postage; 4a Market Hill; registered number 1403810).
Acorn Computers, Atomic Theory and Practice (1980): the Atom’s BASIC and assembler.
Acorn User issue 1, July/August 1982: the delivery timetable (see the BBC Micro entry).
Personal Computer News, 1–7 September 1983, p. 59, and 8–14 September 1983, p. 4: the Electron’s launch at £199.
Acorn User issue 16, November 1983, p. 11: flotation on the Unlisted Securities Market; Hauser chairman, Curry managing director; the BBC Micro’s US launch.
Acorn User issue 33, April 1985, p. 9: the Olivetti deal of 20 February 1985 (49.3 per cent, about £12 million, shareholdings, redundancies); losses; the Electron’s stock and price cut; Christmas 1984.
Acorn User issue 39, October 1985, p. 9: the ARM working as a BBC Micro second processor; Olivetti at 80 per cent; the return to the Unlisted Securities Market on 13 August; losses of almost £28 million; the new board.
Acorn User issue 43, February 1986, p. 161: the software chart and prices.
Acorn User issue 45, April 1986, p. 16 (Ultimate advertisement) and p. 61 (reader’s letter).
The Acorn User Games Review, December 1993 supplement, p. 33: Elite and Frontier.
Acorn User issue 199, October 1998: the Phoebe computer; issue 214, December 1999, pp. 6–7 and 76: Pace and what was left of Acorn; RISCOS Ltd’s licence; issue 215, Christmas 1999, p. 8: Cabot 2 Ltd and Castle Technology’s rights to Acorn-branded products.
Acorn User issue 267, Christmas 2003: “the ill-fated Phoebe launch” (see Acorn User).
Retro Gamer issue 42, 2007, p. 59: Cambridge Processor Unit, Ace Coin Equipment, the System 1 and the Atom.
Retro Gamer issue 3, 2004, p. 20: the closure of the workstation division in September 1998 and the name Element 14.
Tim Danton, The Computers That Made Britain (Raspberry Pi Press, 2021), chapters “BBC Micro”, “Acorn Electron” and “Acorn Archimedes”: interviews with Hauser, Curry, Wilson, Furber, Hopper and others on the Atom, the BBC prototype, orders and profits, the Electron’s delays, the Olivetti years, the ARM’s design and first silicon, Arthur, Advanced RISC Machines and ARM’s later history.
Companies House, company 01403810 (web): incorporation on 5 December 1978 as Acorn Computers Limited; renamed Element 14 Limited on 15 January 1999 and Cabot 2 Limited on 3 August 1999; dissolved on 15 June 2014. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/01403810
The Register, “ARM acquisition sees Acorn dismembered”, 27 April 1999 (web): the terms, the 24.2 per cent stake, Pace and the design business. https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/1999/04/27/arm-acquisition-sees-acorn-dismembered/1328552
Broadcom, “Broadcom to acquire Element 14”, press release, 4 October 2000 (web, SEC filing). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001054374/000109581100003858/a66254ex99-1.txt
EE Times, “Broadcom to acquire Element-14 in $600M deal”, October 2000 (web): the value and Element 14’s origins in Acorn. https://www.eetimes.com/broadcom-to-acquire-element-14-in-600m-deal/
Wikipedia, “Arm Holdings” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): ARM’s return to the stock market in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings
OSnews, “RISC OS goes open source with Apache 2.0 license”, 23 October 2018 (web, secondary): RISC OS Developments’ purchase of Castle Technology and the Apache 2.0 release. https://www.osnews.com/story/30817/risc-os-goes-open-source-with-apache-20-license/