On Tuesday 27. November 1990 Apple, VLSI Technology and BBC Acorn Computer announced the formation of a joint venture called Advanced Risc Maschines ltd in Cambridge. More precisely, the headquarters were in a beautiful historic barn from the 18. Century in a village called Swaffham Bulbeck, a few miles east of Cambridge.

Apple took over according to reports at the time at 1.5 Million pounds ($ 3 million) about 27 percent of the new company. Other sources later reported 43 percent, the same as BBC Acorn Computer’s share. The remaining percent are said to have been shared by VLSI and Nippon Investment and Finance.

The task of the new establishment was the further development and marketing of the ARM processor brought in by BBC Acorn, which from then on was no longer called the Acorn RISC machine, but the Advanced RISC machine.

Apple’s Vice President Larry Tessler said at the time that his company had no specific plans to use the ARM chips in its computers. Inexpensive low-power RISC chips would, however, create “exciting new products” in the industry. Apple sees its first engagement with a chip company as an investment in supporting good technology rather than a source of future products.

With 120 Billions of sold ARM processors, nobody can keep up.

(Image: ARM)

Well, of course it wasn’t quite like that, because Apple was definitely looking for suitable processors for new products like the planned Newton Messagepad. It evaluated AT & T’s Hobbit, but wasn’t that happy with it. It would then take almost three years before Apple actually introduced the first Newton Messagepad 100 with ARM – 610 – Introduced processor.

The parents The British company BBC Acorn Computer, which at the time was about 80 percent belonged to the Italian Olivetti group, brought in fewer pounds, but mainly “natural produce”: Twelve engineers and a valuable processor architecture. The “parents” of this architecture, Sophie Wilson and Stephen (Steve) Furber, were not among them. Sophie Wilson initially stayed at BBC Acorn, then was also CTO at Eidos Interactive (“Lara Coft”). But she continued to support the joint venture as a consultant.

She later developed the Firepath processor at Broadcom, which was mainly used in DSL modems. She still works in Broadcom’s (Avago) DSL department today. She received numerous honors such as admission to the Royal Society. In addition, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge (2016) and last year the order “Commander of the British Empire. Only in May of this year did Dr. Wilson gave an exciting online lecture on the future of microprocessors during the David Wheeler Lectures.

After Acorn, Dr Stephen Furber accepted a professorship at the University of Manchester, where the 67 – year old can still be found today, where he developed the asynchronous processor Amulets and worked on the SpiNNaker project (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) in Manchester , which is supposed to simulate a small part of the human brain with a million ARM processors.

And of course he also received numerous awards such as membership in the Royal Society and the Commander Order.

You can read the story of how doctors Wilson and Furber at Acorn developed the ARM architecture in the “ARM story” from c’t 2002 which is available online.