Archimedes: 1987 Microcomputer of the year Acorn's Archimedes - also known in at least some parts of the press as the ARM[source: "Archimedes plus software at Acorn show", POCW, 17th July 1987, p. 6] - had been launched in 1987 and first started shipping to dealers in early Autumn. Acorn's Stephanie Newman noted that Acorn "[has] our dealer network and we have a number of retailers in the high street, who will be getting machines around the middle of September". There had been some concern that the first machines released might still have their operating system supplied on disc - a sure sign that development was not yet complete - but this was also discounted, as Acorn confirmed that the OS would be shipping on actual ROM[source: "Archimedes on course for shops", POCW, 4th September 1987, p. 11]. The Archimedes was officially launched in the week of the 19th June 1987, along with an Acorn claim that the four mips ARM RISC machines were the fastest microcomputers in the world. Hyperbole aside, the Archimedes did achieve the significant milestone of being the first commercially-available RISC-based machines ever. The idea for the RISC - Reduced Instruction Set Computing - architecture was first developed by John Cocke at IBM's Research Centre whilst he was looking into developing fast controllers for telephone switching systems. The initial ideas were then developed at the University of Berkeley in California, and it was here that the name "RISC" was first coined. The idea was the perfect antidote to the increasing complexity of mainstream chips, which since Intel's 4004 were becoming faster and larger, but also more complex. Intel in particular was saddled with backwards compatibility - as each chip added new features and instructions, it also had to retain support for all the instructions that went before. The entire architecture of Complex Instruction Set Computing became obvious example of Pareto's Law in action - 20% of the instructions accounted for 80% of operations. RISC architecture was a chance to re-think this design by instead only supporting a small set of instructions, all of which were the same size and structure and which all executed in a single cycle. Programs would generally be about 30% longer, as complex instructions needed to be assembled from many smaller ones, but the payback was that the running program would require only about a fifth the number of clock cycles, and so would run much faster[source: The background to RISC, Practical Computing, October 1986, pp. 92-93]. Acorn's Archimedes was provided in two ranges - the 400 series having more memory and more expansion, whilst the 300 series was cheaper with fewer options. The 300-series machine was swiftly adopted as the official micro of the BBC, replacing the previous BBC Master and Master Compact, with which it retained compatibility, at least, as Acorn managing director Brian Long pointed out, for "legal" software, thanks to its Version 5 BBC Basic. Compatibility also included the new operating system - known as Arthur - which Acorn suggested would give "a high degree of familiarity to users with BBC Micro experience". The BBC's endorsement of the machine might have seemed surprising as even the 300 series wasn't exactly affordable, weighing in at £940 for the no-monitor 512K model with a 3½" floppy - that's around [[940|1987]] in [[now]]. Also launched was a PC card known as SpringBoard, which provided the same ARM chip which could run machine code software at four times the speed of a DEC VAX 11/750 minicomputer. Perhaps surprisingly, Acorn itself didn't expect its ARM chips to have a lifetime much more than 10 to 14 years, according to managing director Brian Long, although he wouldn't be drawn on actual sales targets[source: "Acorn RISCs it", POCW, 26th June 1987, p. 6]. Thirty-six years or more and countless billions of shipments later, ARM chips are still very much in existence, shipping in more than 90% of all mobile phones produced[source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Market_share].
cheap PC clones were starting to make an impact, so Acorn needed to do something The Archimedes was also important for Acorn because the company had so far mostly been relying on its educational market, were there was a tradition of resistance to radical technological change and so where its 8-bit BBC Micro - in various revised forms - was still doing some business. However, the rest of the industry had by this time left Acorn far behind, with the rest of the world on 16-bit or even 32-bit technology, such as Intel's 80386 or the quasi-32-bitness of the 68000. Not only that, but in its native market cheap PC clones were starting to make an impact, so Acorn needed to do something. Whilst launching anything that wasn't an IBM clone was risky, the Archimedes had a significant advantage in that it could still run much of the existing BBC Micro software that schools were using, plus it still had the BBC name attached to it. It also had the advantage that it was also genuinely speedy, coming in at nearly four times faster than the Compaq 386 in integer and floating-point maths and ten times faster than an Atari ST at string handling[source: "Risc analysis", YC, August 1987, p. 35]. A disadvantage was that, as Guy Kewney of PCW pointed out, "most programmers know the languages of Intel and Motorola, [but] relatively few can play with the likes of Sun Sparq, or the Transputer, or the ARM"[source: "End to the chip debate?", Newsprint, PCW, June 1988, p. 92]. [extra: domesday_cch.jpg|A Domesday Laserdisc setup, running on a BBC Master, at the Centre for Computing History, Cambridge] Not that Acorn's education market was completely dead, as in 1988 Acorn was still managing to secure the odd deal like the one with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which took 40 BBC Master 128s as part of a system to teach English to diplomats. The £40,000 deal had come about after the Ministry had been impressed with the Acorn language teaching system in use at the British Council, and was won against international competition. Acorn's Michael Page said of the deal that: ~"To sell British technology in what is regarded as the major centre of hi-tech expertise and development is, in itself, a significant coup. It is an optimistic sign that Japan could once more become a lucrative export market for UK manufacturers, following [Japan's] recent trade differences with European companies[source: "Acorns to Japan", POCW, 14th January 1988, p. 5]. The deal also included an information system about the UK, based upon the famous Domesday laserdisc archive project, launched in 1984.