Wednesday 4 December 2013

Within ARM's Reach

Here's a short (under two minutes) mini-feature of Sophie Wilson, who devised the ARM processor's instruction set (Prof Steve Furber designed the hardware of the processor) while at Acorn Computers some thirty years ago.

One fun thing I recall from the early 'nineties where this very same individual was demonstrating the Acorn Archimedes series computers at an exhibition, and showed a work colleague of mine what could be done within moments (a rotatable 3-D textual logo, in the Draw and Euclid programs, dragging and dropping from one into the other). My colleague's immediate reaction was "I want one!"

There's some amazing information to be gleaned from this brief clip, which was made over six months ago, such as the fact that by then a good 35 billion ARM chips had been shipped – well beyond the total number of all others ever produced, added together. Also, the sheer reach of the ARMs, almost everywhere in portable and other technology now, some definitely not realised by most people.

The few comments at the video's YouTube page also tell a story or two...

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments welcome, with 'clean' language, though not anonymous attacks. Note that comment moderation is enabled, and anonymous comments have again been disallowed as the facility has been abused.