Lessons from Discarded Computer Architectures - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 199

released by Acornsoft in 1985. This was a declarative language, very different from
the sequential algorithmic languages familiar to most programmers of the time. To
overcome this novelty, a Man in the Street Interface (MITSI) was written by Jonathan
Briggs at Imperial College London, and made popular by Jon Nichol from the School
of Education, University of Exeter [1,2]. Jackie Dean worked in Western Australia,
providing an antipodean link.
The BBC micro was put on sale, and additionally the British government Depart-
ment of Trade and Industry arranged to place one into every school, since the advent
of microelectronics was expected to have a major impact on commerce and work. The
Department of Education set up a series of national advisory units which continue
today as Becta (formerly the British Educational Communications and Technology
Agency). Production was discontinued in 1994 by which date over one million BBC
Micros had been sold in the UK and Europe [3].
Fig. 1. Logo of the BBC Computer Literacy Project
John Coll, an electronics teacher from Oundle School was hired to write the user
manual for the BBC micro [4] and also appeared in related television programs. This
author recalls sitting in his office to discuss a new programming project when one of
the operating system programmers rushed in. He had recoded some graphics routines
and saved 10 bytes of space in the ROM. This would make possible the inclusion of
an additional function!
The BBC micro was very popular in British schools. As part of the government
support for schools IBM sponsored a project for the Redbridge SEMERC (Special
Education Microelectronics Resource Centre) by M-Tec computer services (UK) to
create a card for the IBM Personal Computer which would replicate some of the inter-
face ports on the BBC micro. Devices such as the concept keyboard and various ro-
botic turtles (controlled by variants of the LOGO language) were so popular, this
sought to ease the conversion of educational software onto the more dominant plat-
form. The SNIC card (special needs interface card) had a short life.
Acorn went on to produce successors to the BBC micro: the Archimedes and then
the RISC-PC in 1994. However, the company was broken up in 1998, and Castle
Technology acquired the rights to market and produce this later machine [5]. The
RISC-PC was supplanted by the Iyonix PC in 2003, but even this was discontinued in
2008 [6].
One thing that did emerge from these discarded Acorn computer architectures was
the idea of a RISC (reduced instruction set computer). The first such processor was
incorporated in Acorn's 32-bit computer in 1985 - the Archimedes [7]. A new com-
pany, Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) was formed in 1990, and became very suc-
cessful in designing this new kind of chip. ARM processors had very low power