An Acorn in the iPhone

Daniel shows some love for Windows?

I just wanted to add for the readers that the Acorn Archimedes was actually a revolutionary and important computer. Not just the footnote offered by Daniel.

1) It was the first ‘home computer’ to use a RISC processor. Significant in that it was released in 1987; Apple took until 1994, a full 7 years later for its first 601.

2) In 1987 and more so in 1988 RISC OS, the operating system for the Archimedes is also interesting in being the first desktop OS designed to run on a RISC platform. RISC OS lives on as an embedded operating system till this day making it one of the few 80’s OS’s to be still actively developed for and is broadly licensed.

Apple took until System 7.1.2 and 1994 to have an OS designed for a RISC platform. To compare, MS never achieved a RISC implementation of their OS; while SUN an early champion of RISC released their first in 1989. NeXTStep, which became Apple’s OSX was ported to RISC in 1993. SGI IRIX, a very significant version of UNIX was coded over to RISC in 1990

3) The company, British, who also designed the processor, not just the computer grew and morphed to become a little company you might have heard of. ARM. Who ultimately was the only successful ’small name’ processor manufacturer to survive from that era and also the only genuine surviving RISC processor manufacturer. I suppose MIPS is sort of still alive.

4) Apple in fact respected the work of Acorn so highly, that prior to 1990 they recognised their RISC processor as the only hope for a new platform being devised in those hallowed halls. Apple then worked with Acorn to develop the ARM as the processor for the Newton.

So the Acorn Archimedes that Daniel footnotes is the direct ancestor of the iPhone’s brain in its chip and spirit, in the Newton; and led the way for Sun, SGI, NeXT and Apple in developing an operating system that ran on RISC CPU’s.

Not a small matter by any means.

Posted in response to Daniel Eran Dilger on Roughly Drafted