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Comment by satpanesar | Hacker News Reader

Tl;dr

"It's nice to just take a moment and reflect: because the British felt they were being left behind by the computer revolution, they decided to make TV shows about computers. To do that, they needed a computer, so an underdog British company came up with a good one. And when that little company needed to build a faster CPU, because Intel couldn't be bothered to answer their calls, they made their own. This in-house CPU just so happened to not use much power or make much heat, which got the attention of Apple, who used it to power what most people consider to be its biggest failure. From there, of course, the company went on to take over the fucking world. If I made that up, you'd say I was trying too hard to be quirky or that I'd seen too many Wes Anderson movies. But that's reality."

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Um, not really, with the Sinclair machines, the UK had more computers per capita than anywhere else at the time. They were very very limited, and ultimately the bet on ubiquity over capability didn’t pay off, but pretty much every kid I knew had one.

I was a docker’s brat in a run-down Northern city, we didn’t have much, growing up, but my parents bought me the zx81 components kit (£49) and a second-hand black&white TV (£20) for Xmas when I was 11, and that year at school, computers were the thing. Like, everyone had one.

I’d suggest the number of British expats in Silicon Valley who started programming on a BBC Micro or Spectrum suggests that it very much did pay off, just not in the way anticipated.

[grin] like me.

That’s a good point. I originally meant that the PC took over the world, but if you take a step back and look at the influence of that ubiquity, yeah. That’s a good point :)

Yup, and me ;-) I probably encounter at least one or two more expats I wasn't aware of per week at the FAANG I work for, and always make a point of asking them about this - certainly seems that the ubiquitous small machines that someone could completely understand have made their mark!

Annoying because over here in the UK everyone shrugs if you mention it now.

I think it depends upon the relative age of the people you're talking to.

I started playing with a ZX Spectrum back in the early eighties, as a youngster, and directly credit it with my IT-career.

I only wish I'd tried writing computer games at the time, instead of hacking existing ones for infinite lives!

Did you have a Multiface? Not all that cheap, but probably ended up teaching me more about low-level programming than anything else, short of writing a Spectrum 128 emulator for Risc OS :)

Sadly not, that would have made things a hell of a lot easier!

> ultimately the bet on ubiquity over capability didn’t pay off

Because they didn't know where to go from there. Instead of capitalizing on their existing userbase by making better machines that were also compatible with the currently popular model, they alienated their fans by making incompatible or barely-improved crap that nobody asked for: the ZX Spectrum 128, with just slightly more memory and a music chip but still using horrible graphics and tape storage, the QL, the Commodore 128...

The masters of both Sinclair and Commodore were tone deaf suit-zombies with no clue about the zeitgeist, no idea what gamers, the majority of their users, really wanted. Most of them were people who couldn't afford to run multiple computers (only having 1 TV or computer desk to spare) or part with their existing software library for minimal benefits.

On the other hand you had consoles like the NES and SNES, which offered enough new features and came after a long enough time for people to not mind the incompatibility.

> got the attention of Apple, who used it to power what most people consider to be its biggest failure

You could also argue the Newton was the predecessor to the iPhone.

That's not actually how it went, either. One of the major aims of the BBC Micro was educational use, with use in TV an afterthought, and the processor was designed after they'd already made several MOS-based computers.

One thing it's not clear to me is why did ARM was so much power efficient even at the beginning and apparently without being explicitly built as such

The ARM chip was low power essentially by accident. The designers wanted to keep it under (I think) 10 watts which would let them use cheap plastic packages for the chips. But they didn't have good power simulation tools so they needed to be very conservative with the design. When they manufactured the chips, they found the power consumption was closer to 1 watt.

Edit: as beagle3 pointed out, I got the numbers wrong; they aimed for 1 watt and came in under 0.1 watt. For more details, see Steve Furber's oral history, page 15. He says "Effectively, we used Victorian engineering margins on the power consumption of the chip." https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

May find it later when I am not on mobile, but iirc they aimed for 1W and ended up achieving 0.1W or so - at first they were sure something was wrong about their test rig because it seemed like an unpowered CPU was actually working - and then they realized that it was getting enough power through the data and address lines, even though the Vcc was not connected.

> The power test tools they were using were unreliable and approximate, but good enough to ensure this rule of thumb power requirement. When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.

> Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.

> As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."

> Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt.

https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech...

An incredible story, thanks.

Here's a link to the video of an interview with Steve Furber [1], who worked on the chip's development, discussing this.

[1] https://youtu.be/1jOJl8gRPyQ?t=508

I remember one quote from Hermann Houser (one of the founders of Acorn)... "I gave them two important things to develop the Arm chip. I gave them no money, and I gave them no people".

It's amazing what necessity can accomplish...

That's reminiscent of the famous "janitor" letter written by IBM's president Watson in 1963. He asked why the CDC 6600 was a better computer than IBM's when Seymour Cray's team had "34 people including the janitor" while IBM had a "vast development effort".

Cray's response (probably apocryphal) was, "It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question."

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/supercomputers/10...

I'd love to see a deep analysis of this, but I think a confluence of a few elements:

- fixed instruction width, small instruction set => simple decode

- instructions wide enough to load many constants into registers in immediate mode

- comparatively large register file (15 general + PC) compared to the 80386 (effectively 8 + PC, plus the segment registers) meant reduced need to fill/spill intermediate values, a tradeoff which gets better over time as the power consumption of bus doesn't benefit from Moore's law since it's off chip

- any-to-any register instructions saves space and time shuffling values within the CPU (again, a hassle on the x86 series)

- conditional execution bits were a nice pipelining assistance trick, not clear how widely used they were as they weren't included in Thumb

- not having the 8086's ridiculous segment system

Which can roughly be boiled down to 25,000 transistors vs 275,000 in the (roughly contemporary) 386.

It might be a consequence of Acorn's aggressively simple design for the CPU. They preferred complex software over complex hardware.

I don't think RISC makes software more complex, rather the contrary. You need to use more instructions to do the same task, but they are simpler, more regular. Especially when writing compilers, RISC is actually a nice target.

It was about packaging. If you run cool, you can get away with much cheaper materials by this saving significant portions of the total manufacturing costs. This was an explicit design goal.

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