Acorn

Acorn is a British company which built microcomputers of 1978 until 2000. It became famous in the Années 1980 with its best-seller, Micro BBC, which became one of the most sold microcomputers the United Kingdom.

Acorn starts by marketing the evaluation card MK14.

In 1979, Acorn launches Atom, then two years later the BBC, and a version reduced of the BBC baptized Electron.

As of 1983, Acorn undertakes the microprocessor installation of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), on the model of Berkeley. Eighteen months later, the first processor is launched. Baptized ARM (meaning then Acorn RISC Machine and from now on Advanced RISC Machines), the silicon tracks of this microprocessor are engraved with an accuracy of 2 micrometers, thanks to technologies of Intégration to very large scales (VLSI - Broad Very Scale Integration). The processor can seem not very powerful with its 25000 transistors, however it carries out already prowesses: 4,25 Mips for 8 MHz! The most recent processor Motorola at the time, the MC68020, however arrive only at 2,5 Mips with 192.000 transistors, that is to say almost 8 times more.

In 1994, Acorn launches the RiscPC, which will be its last computer.

Acorn does not exist any more since September 1999. It initially changed its name for that of Element 14, then its division workstation (i.e microprocessing) was divided and its activity was taken again by several entities. It is Pace, another specialized company in the microprocessing, which took again the licenses of Acorn and sub-contract their development. The evolution of the products created by Acorn is currently ensured by:

  • Castle Technology Limited which continues to develop, build and sell the machines with the Acorn mark.
  • RiscOS Limited which continues to develop and sell the Operating system of Acorn, RISC OS, for the machines of office.

In 2002, Castle Technology ltd created the Iyonix PC, based on the processor Intel XScale. Iyonix uses the Operating system RISC OS version 5.

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