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How to emulate the Acorn Archimedes

Les Pounder heard that mighty oaks grow from little acorns, but all he found was a Raspberry Pi and an Arm buried in the garden.

OUR EXPERT Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker. He blogs about hacks and makes at bigl.es.

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The names Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser are forever linked to Acorn computers, the BBC Micro and the fun BBC TV movie Micro Men, which documents an important era in the home computer wars. But they, and many others, are also linked to a chip that’s in our pockets, TVs and our Raspberry Pis.

There was a time when Arm, the CPU platform that powers our world, was a gamble. Launched in 1987, the Acorn Archimedes range of computers were powered by the Arm CPU. Arm stood for Acorn RISC Machine (later changed to Advanced RISC Machines Ltd), and were a departure from CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) CPUs common in many machines of the era.

The Acorn 300 series ran on an Arm 2 CPU, which performed better than Intel’s 80286, and with much lower power consumption. The honour of the first Arm CPU goes to the second processor addon for the BBC Micro. Costing £800 (over £2,000 in 2022) the Archimedes range came in multiple configurations, including the A305 and A310 which even saw BBC branding continuing on from Acorn’s successful BBC Micro range. This was something that led to a brief issue between Research Machines and a Microsoft-led industry group claiming that machines should be “business standard”.

No matter what Archimedes you had they were all compatible with RISC OS. But that wasn’t Acorn’s first OS. Early machines came with the Arthur operating system. But Arthur was plagued by bugs, despite a number of patches. It wasn’t until 1989 that we saw RISC OS, a true multi-tasking OS that drew praise from developers. For £29 you could purchase the upgrade kit and run RISC OS on your Archimedes.

The Acorn Archimedes machines were powerful – more powerful than the Motorola 68000 found in Commodore’s Amiga and Atari’s ST machines – but this power didn’t translate into market share. The home computer scene of the 1980s and 1990s was heavily fragmented between the giants (Commodore, Atari, Apple and IBM). Most UK-based readers will have experienced the Archimedes in school, as many educational providers continued to support the legacy created by the BBC Micro. But from the mid-1990s this all changed as IBM PCs became the dominant machines, and Apple rose to pop culture status. Acorn’s legacies are the BBC Micro (and the generation of coders it produced) and the Arm. Without the Arm CPU, we wouldn’t have the Raspberry Pi inspiring another generation of coders.

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Linux Format
May 2022
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