You missed the best story ... The best one is where they are testing the ARM chp and they realise they forgot to power it (turned out it was running off voltage leak from the rest of the circuit) The ARM 1 was a co processer to the BBC mico, most of the archimedes you showed where ARM 2 . The first system on a chip ARMs were in the later 3000 series Archimedes ARM 250 (video VIDC/audio was on the same chip) Nintendo had ARM very early to make a Game Boy follow up but didn't use it because the origonal game boy sold so well they used it later for the color then SP . The thumb 16bit memory controller you mention I believe was initially intended for the Nintendo.

@Scorpiove

8 ай бұрын

The Game Boy Color did not use an ARM chip but the Game Boy Advance and onward did.

@mistie710

8 ай бұрын

Actually, the chip used in the Newton was the ARM 610, which was the same processor that was eventually used in the RiscPC range of Acorn computers. By that time the majority of Acorns had been using the ARM3, which was basically an ARM2 with a cache on the chip which was used on the A3000 and A4 laptop, and the ARM250 which was the original SoC combining the main ARM2 processor and all the support chips on one piece of silicon which was used in the A3010, A3020 and the A4000. The picture you showed when introducing the Archimedes was actually the A3000 which was the first machine to actually DROP the Archimedes name.

@patdbean

7 ай бұрын

​@@ScorpioveA3000 was ARM2 at 8mhz A4000 A3010 and A3020 were ARM250 at 12mhz A5000 was ARM 3 at 25 or 33mhz RISC PC Was ARM 6 at 30mhz later ARM 7 at 40mhz later strongARM at 233mhz

@TheSulross

7 ай бұрын

The main take away from this account of UK micro computer history is that Sophie is not a woman but a trans dude - when first was learning about UK micro computer history thought it was really cool that a woman had a prominent role - creating BBC BASIC and other really cool things. But no - Sophie was born a man. So nothing there to chalk up for women - not so surprisingly, all these cool achievements were due to men.

@patdbean

7 ай бұрын

@@TheSulross how on earth is that the "main take away"? At most it is an interesting factoid.

this channel is my new obsession mahn

@weirdweirdidgafwtf321

9 ай бұрын

Yep 🤘🤘🤘

@johnyi205

9 ай бұрын

Totally agree

@akinladearidunu235

9 ай бұрын

Same

@Jc.69-lo4sz

9 ай бұрын

Same 😂

@Sam-gy5rb

9 ай бұрын

Facts

That's why my phone comes with chips and not french fries.

@tortysoft

8 ай бұрын

I love that !

@johnhayward7173

8 ай бұрын

😂 ACorn(y) quip if ever I heard one.

@bigbang4674

Ай бұрын

And it use an arm processor

ARM name originally meant Acorn Risc Machine before the arm company was founded and the name becoming Advance Risc Machine

ARM was initially Acorn Risc Machines. I worked at the BBC in the UK, bought a BBC Micro and then an Archimedes. I wrote about all of them in magazines. I wrote programming tutors for the Arc. I'm not a business person. That's why I'm not rich.

as a brit growing up at the time this is incredibly nostalgic and well researched. i always knew risc and *nix would live long through the wintel hype of latter years.

Thank you John. I am a developer and I lived through all of what you have so nicely now filled in for me. I remember RISC and its promise...but I did not know the twists and turns in your fascinating documentary. Fabulous thank you! I am British so it makes me doubly happy to know that a British woman with 800 lines of fantastic code, and a CEO with a brilliant business model never seen before, in both cases, have revolutionized the word, hand in hand with American smarts.

@nwaldschrat4099

7 ай бұрын

The women at that time was a man: Roger Wilson.

I remember getting the BBC Microcomputer as a 12-year-old at school. The computer networking labs were rapidly expanding into our schools. I was lucky enough to get get an Acorn for my birthday, we played the most boring games and used basic language. I am now fortunate to have worked for Hermann Hauser in some of his best new tech companies. Today, I am working with Professor Steve Furber in AI development for the betterment of mankind.

@jwadaow

9 ай бұрын

Is that in the University or in industry?

@Insectoid_

9 ай бұрын

My dad was an IT teacher. We always had tonnes of them around. There were some great games on the BBC. I loved Repton :)

@kiyoponnn

8 ай бұрын

There are those who will use AI for malicious purposes so please don't be naive by saying stuff like "for the betterment of humankind"

@MorganMadej

8 ай бұрын

WoW!

@MorganMadej

8 ай бұрын

​@@kiyoponnnWhy be Malicious? Everyone is entitled to express oneself. You are the one with a problem!

Correction. ARM = Acorn RISC Machine. They changed it to Advanced later on.

@tortysoft

8 ай бұрын

- and did their very best to hide the original A name.

Funny hearing it called a zee x 81...it was the zed x 81 😊

@JohnGeorgeBauerBuis

7 ай бұрын

It’s just localization.

My School, Woodlands High School, Falkirk, was the first in the world to be fully equipped with RISC powered Acorn Archimedes computers, I remember a whole lorry turning up with over 300 pc's, courtesy of the oil giant BP, who ran the local refinery, these RISC computers had capabilities we could only dream of, but one things stands out, a desktop Acorn 3010 rendering a fully 3d world in realtime, without having to pay over £14,000 for an SG server was staggering, and just pointed to how powerful RISC systems could be, and here we are, nearly 30 years later, with ARM dominating the chip market, simply because the underlying architure is so efficient, its no wonder APPLE dumped Intel, and took the modular RISC architure and molded it into the most efficient chips the world have seen to date.

@uku4171

9 ай бұрын

Do you think RISC-V could become nearly as popular or overtake ARM?

@honkhonk8009

8 ай бұрын

Tbf modern X86 architectures are pretty similar to arm. I heard compilers are gonna ship mostly risc instructions to x86 now. Their optimized for risc operations more than cisc ones now.

I used a BBC Micro in secondary school. So many great memories coding and playing games.

Highest quality and good content as always John.

@KaiseruSoze

9 ай бұрын

Compliments vs constructive criticism. He knows it's good. How can it be better?

@cutsign

9 ай бұрын

@@KaiseruSoze can it get better than this?

Man it’s crazy how different history could be if just one thing changed. ARM is so vital to so many things even outside of mobile. The routers that people use to provide internet all run off ARM, cars rely on ARM. Heck even laptops like the MacBook are reliant on ARM now.

@uku4171

9 ай бұрын

Do you think RISC-V could become nearly as popular as ARM? Would there be downsides?

@KaiseruSoze

9 ай бұрын

Have a look at a vector processor.

@SianaGearz

9 ай бұрын

I think as many home routers run MIPS as ARM. Fundamentally if it wasn't ARM, it would have been Super-H or MIPS or a combination of both.

@iAPX432

9 ай бұрын

Apple's MacBook are not reliant on ARM, only on ARM ISA (from years ago). ARM could disappear tomorrow that wouldn't change the ability for Apple to create new chips for a long time, and in fact this might be beneficial for them as no longer obligated to respect ARM ISA and IP.

@crashniels

9 ай бұрын

​@@uku4171once it becomes performant it will be popular since it doesn't have any fees or very little compared to what companies have to pay for arm. Google is already preparing Android for it.

well I must admit the computer education was a huge success! the UK has became the global programming powerhouse by the early 90s!

In the early days (in my home country, Nigeria), we have an investment bank called ARM. In marketing for them we often encounter the ARM processor company but felt safe because the markers are different. Great video!

@iuc7254

9 ай бұрын

Cool to see another Nigerian in this corner of the internet❤

@ibrahim4717

9 ай бұрын

I'm Ghannaian

@MetalRocksMe.

8 ай бұрын

I’m both 🙂

Yes , many F1 Teams are based in the UK & many products we used today were designed by British designers & UK based Recording Studios produced some of the High Fidelity recordings we enjoy today! Many British or UK actors , actresses & musicians helped many American Movie Studios to be as successful as of today! 🙏 Thank You So Much & God Blessed UK 🇬🇧 ... 🌷🌿🌎💜🕊🇬🇧

Great video, but you should have mentioned Steve Furber, the original chip designer

This was a rollercoaster through my childhood....had a sinclair spectrum, played with a BBC micro at school, then an acorn achimedes at school for which i did loads of word processing/ gaming, bought an olivetti pc.......fastfoward to 2000s and watched BBC micromen film/documentary about the clash between sinclair and curry and then only realised the significance !! ...great documentary !!

9:43 The Archimedes had an ARM2 processor, not ARM1. The ARM2 was slightly faster at 8Mhz compared to 6, and it had hardware multiplication and a fast interrupt mode.

John is epic with his titles 😁

British names are s understated. "Winter of Discontent". "The Troubles". Haha.

Cambridge (England), the birthplace of the Raspberry Pi, the biggest selling British computer of all.

@megatronskneecap

9 ай бұрын

People world wide use Raspberry Pi’s.

@abagatelle

9 ай бұрын

@@megatronskneecap They do indeed

@lawrencedoliveiro9104

8 ай бұрын

The latest-generation Raspberry Pi 5 has been launched.

@ragez9589

3 ай бұрын

and its also made in wales not china

@Raderade1-pt3om

21 күн бұрын

Also WWW

Great content John !!! Very informative indeed !

Insightful and informative, thank you!😊

This is the most valuable channel, I’ve learned crazy amounts of information and my mind is now blown by how big is the world and how much tech has helped, even for me that work daily with tech and animation Congrats man, this is gold

Love you channel❤ So insightful. I have learnt a great deal from this channel about big tech companies. Great job and keep it up👍

great show ... a bunch of stuff I vaguely heard about but didn't understand the connections so satisfying to hear it all put together like this

No huss, no fuss, to the point with no super-complicated tech jargons. Excellent video explaining the story a tech company.

Actually, the Apple Silicon processors are based on the ARM _instruction set,_ not on ARM's processor IP. The AS processors are home grown CPUs with ARM instruction set compatibility, but do _not_ use ARM designed CPU cores.

@megatronskneecap

9 ай бұрын

The first A5 processor in the iPhone 4 was entirely ARM based. Along with the Samsung processors in the iPhone 2G to 3GS.

@vernearase3044

9 ай бұрын

@@megatronskneecap I'm talking modern Apple Silicon processors - the term Apple Silicon processor was not even coined until the 'M' series of SoCs were introduced. AFAIK, Apple Silicon CPU cores are more efficient and faster than any ARM reference cores. Heck, I _think_ that ARMv6 was developed _at Apple's request_ since ARMv5 was unoptimizable due to the inability to schedule long instruction pipelines for use with an out of order execution unit.

@lawrencedoliveiro9104

8 ай бұрын

Apple machines only seem to get their performance by tying everything together into a monolithic mass, so you can’t upgrade anything. Basically all their machines now are glorified laptops.

@vernearase3044

8 ай бұрын

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 They get their performance with incredibly deep instruction pipelines - 690 instructions for the A13's Firestorm - and an extremely wide CPU with a massive reorder buffer and eight decoders capable of executing up to eight instructions simultaneously. Using unified memory shared by all components of the SoC, the CPU shares memory with the GPU eliminating the Wintel graphics overhead of transferring data from CPU to graphics memory. Because the memory is along-side the chip, they achieve memory access speeds well beyond what you can get in the Wintel world which is pretty much limited to about 50 GB/sec. They also contain IP blocks sharing the same memory which are capable of hardware encode/decode of various video formats and carry with them a world class image signal processor and an integrated neural engine (which also shares the same memory) for machine learning tasks. There's nothing in the architecture relating to laptops - though they do make marvelous laptops. If you want to call them glorified _anything_ call 'em glorified game consoles which also take advantage of unified memory. The memory architecture of standard Wintel machines is based more on marketing silos than performance-directed structures - this allows mother board vendors, CPU vendors, GPU vendors, and memory vendors to independently sell you their products and ties them together with much lower performance interconnects.

@honkhonk8009

8 ай бұрын

@@megatronskneecap When the guy says Apple Silicon, he means the chips that Apple makes themselves. No shit previous Iphones are gonna use ARM lol. ARM doesnt make chips exactly, they just sell the ISA license.

A good video and I love to see this story told to a wider audience. I do think you have the emphasis slightly wrong in a couple of places though. Minor points that don't undermine the overall worth of this great video, but for what it's worth... It is fair to mention Sophie Wilson a lot, she was indeed the driving force behind the ARM instruction set (those familiar with her and her coding style can actually see some of her personality in the instruction set!). Having said that though Steve Furber played a big part in the logic level design and also in the design of the BBC micro. I think anyone in Acorn at the time (e.g. me) would consider the ARM design as primarily a joint effort between Sophie and Steve. Additionally you say that the actual chip was designed by VLSI. It was fabricated by VLSI but the physical chip layout was done at Acorn and the final tape-out then sent to VLSI for fabrication. Although there was of course a lot of cross-pollination of ideas, broadly speaking Sophie did the overall instruction set architecture, Steve Furber translated that to the higher level logic design, and then a small 3 (or was it 4; I forget) person in-house Acorn team led by Jamie Urquhart - located in the same building as Sophie and Steve (and me) - did the physical chip layout to be sent to VLSI for fabrication. The other small niggle that I have is that personally from the perspective of someone in the AR&D group at the time I'd say that you get the emphasis slightly wrong between Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser. For us (the technical folks) Hermann was always the driving force at least as far as the technology was concerned, often wandering round the building in the evenings chatting to people still there, and Chris Curry was seen as the sales and commercial guy with little input to the technical side of things.

Thanks for very great content. I've learned a lot from your channel.

Thanks for this video. It was really insightful

A fruit machine is just the English name for a slot machine.

It's secretly British but then all semiconductors are secretly Polish because of Jan Czochralski

i love the background music, it really works well with your story. some youtubers just add bg music to fill in, whoevers adding this understands the emotion of the parts your saying. cool

Excellent storytelling, John. Viewers might get the impression that RISC was something new with Acorn. But it has a history, grounded in the Control Data Corporation's computers going back to the 1960s, like the CDC6600 that I used. My cheatsheet for reading memory dumps was handwritten on the blank side of a Hollerith punchcard, so short the instruction set was. These computers (which ultimately morphed into the Cray supercomputers) were all based on discrete component hardware (i.e., not integrated circuits). Very old school. Other commenters here have mentioned Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC and the MIPS chips. ARM is inspiring because having carried the RISC torch forward in the face of entrenched CISC architecture as exemplified by intel's x86 family. Up with RISC, down with CISC!

@dwaynemcallister7231

7 ай бұрын

Interesting comment, thx!

I was born in Sheffield in 1979 and at school we had a bbc micro I used all the time! We had an MSX at home to play games and before that a ROWTRON!

John Coogan: Your iPhone Is Secretly British The British: We know nothing about that!

@hanniffydinn6019

9 ай бұрын

I’ve known since I was a kid! Computer enthusiasts know! 🤯🤯🤯

@TehKaiser

9 ай бұрын

You might think that, I couldn't possibly comment.

@tortysoft

8 ай бұрын

When Acorn went bust, I kept myself sane with the knowledge the ARM was in EVERYTHING. BBC BASIC - by Sophie Wilson is a great programming language by the way.

@hanniffydinn6019

8 ай бұрын

@@tortysoft technically ARM was so successful it was spin off into its own company, with apple ownership. So ARM is technically acorn still, especially when you remember ARM meant Acorn RISC Machine….they changed the acorn to advanced, but it’s acorn RISC machines really!! 🤯🤯🤯

@tortysoft

8 ай бұрын

As you may see, I said that too.@@hanniffydinn6019

What a fascinating journey through the history of tech! I'm genuinely amazed by the way this video revealed the remarkable evolution of the tech industry and the pivotal role that ARM played in shaping it. The story of ARM's innovative processor designs and their impact on various devices, including Apple's, is truly remarkable. One key takeaway for me is how ARM's business model, which focuses on designing and licensing its processor designs rather than manufacturing, has allowed it to become a powerhouse in the industry. It's incredible to think that ARM's technology is at the heart of so many of the devices we use every day.

Thanks so much for your research

Another one John you are on another level ❤❤ keep it up

Always a quality content.

great video, hopefully one on RISC-V is next

The ARM1 was never released, it was the initial development prototype, and lacked a number of mathematical functions and lacked some commands, it was the ARM2 that appeared in the Archimedes in 1987 and continued to power the archimedes until the early 1990’s.

@paul_boddie

9 ай бұрын

The ARM1 was released as part of the ARM Evaluation System: a second processor expansion for the BBC Micro.

@tortysoft

8 ай бұрын

That was the one product for which I did not write a review@@paul_boddie

Roger Wilson designed the instruction set and the Basic interpreter. Steve Furber led the ARM hardware design team. They passed the cpu block design to the in-house VLSI team. Also we designed video controller (VIDC) and memory controller (MEMC) chips. There were about six of us. VLSI technology provided the design tools and manufacture. They did not design the chip.

Great video just want to mention that the sound in recent videos is really bass heavy compared to videos a year ago.

@p0llenp0ny

7 ай бұрын

Glad I'm not the only one who thought so.

Thats incredible. ARM just took over one of the most important pieces of any kind of computer. Great video as always, John. I keep coming back.

Great video. I think it just forgot to mention the big participation ARM is getting in the cloud. The advantages are huge. For the same performance clients are getting almost half the price because of energy savings. I am really enthusiastic about this trend. I’m also curious about how Intel will react since the x86 architecture is fundamentally less efficient than ARM.

so the UK had world class company playing a massive part in the mobile phone industry and then the government came up with the fantastic idea of allowing it to be asset stripped.

Excellent video! You had me glued to the screen :)

Anyone in secondary school in the 90’s remembers IT lessons on a BBC micro!

GREAT VID BRO

Great job John!! Thanks!

Brings back memories. I had an A5000 and A340s in the lab and the unix one (A540?) in the lab. Then I got a special A5000 for home to go with my A3010 . The A5000 was STDs and originally Gareth from Simtecs. Then a RiccPC strong ARM with an Aleph1 pentium coprocessor in slot 2. I remember the news pad (like an iPad but before its time) What killed RiscOS as mainstream was the cost of Software. You even had to pay for a decent browser etc etc.

One of the best video games ever - Elite, was originally released on BBC Micro.

@Archimedes75009

9 ай бұрын

And the best version is on the Archimedes.

Interesting, I always wondered what the printed ARM script was on STM32F chips on drone flight control boards. Cool video.

Great explanation, good job on this topic.

Wow, what a fascinating post. John, your enthusiam and knowledge brought this important tech history to life.

THIS WAS GREAT. THANKS.

A note as well. Apple owns a perpetual license for the ARM architecture. Which essentially let them hard fork the architecture. So Apple chips are designed by Apple in house using essentially their own version of ARM. So a company like Qualcomm or Samsung can’t just buy the cores Apple uses for their chips as arm holdings didn’t design them, Apple did.

So basically Japanese company now own ARM via Softbank so it's a Japanese company now.

Ive worked in Robin saxbys apartment in Liverpool. Cool place 3 floors. For some reason we called him Mr Microchip. Now i know why 😀 cool video ✌🏼

Ahhh the Archimedes. I loved that computer.

One of the most underrated channels on KZread

Fantastic video and storytelling

Fantastic video, thank you learnt a lot

Thank you so much!!

Awesome video

"On a per line basis [those 808 lines of code] that might be the most valuable code ever written." is crazy. My new goal for the next *checks notes* 122 work days, is to watch a John Coogan video every day. Let's see how far I get in this challenge lol.

@uku4171

9 ай бұрын

easier binge it in like 2 weekends lol

I still have my BBC Micro model B working in my office :)

"They never made a single chip". I think they used to make chips in the Acorn era. Being fabless is also kind of normal in this sector.

It's a good vedio which renew my knowledge related with CPU . thanks

@RWL2012

9 ай бұрын

*video*

AAAHHHH! THE Acorn A3000 was the bane of my high school life.

I actually had a ZX-80. I bought it in 1979 as I remember it. Had Z80 processor and 1k RAM, persistent storage: interface to a home tape recorder, screen: TV antenna outlet Language: Basic If you wrote a large enough program, the code interfered with the screen buffer effectively erasing what was shown on the screen. 😂😂😂😂 But it sure worked There was two options: assemble it by yourself, or pre-assembled.

@GodmanchesterGoblin

8 ай бұрын

ZX80 launched 29th Jan 1980, but close. I ordered my kit at a computer show in the February. It was an amazing time in the UK computer revolution.

@tortysoft

8 ай бұрын

My first UK101, 6502 invaders game shot bullets in to the code if I missed ...

@GodmanchesterGoblin

8 ай бұрын

@tortysoft Aah, the UK101... Never had one, but they seemed to be in many of the hobby magazines back in the day.

I never knew this. Thanks for the video.

Great video, well researched. I work at arm and it’s nice to see all the new technology we create out in the world.

In the UK, Android continues to gain share over competitors. This year, 28.9 million people in the UK will use an Android smartphone, representing 59.4% of total UK smartphone users (48.7million). Currently, the iPhone is the second most popular device, representing 40.4% of users (19.7million)

Micro men is an excellent docudrama about this amazing era! 🤯🤯🤯😎😎😎👍👍👍

Thank you so much for your content. it helps me as student of software engineer. understand how arm invented

Kinda crazy to think about the direct lineage between the computers of my youth in the 1980s and early 1990s to the iPhone I’m watching this on now. Both the Acorn BBC Model B and Archimedes saw some success in Australia within the education system. I first used a mouse, GUI and inkjet printer on an A3000. Ironically it was also the first system I used for CAD drafting too (still doing it 25 years later 😂).

Could you use less low frequencies for the V-O?

Excellent Information !

Love you man. Regular viewer from Nepal ❤

Yes 1979 in the UK was very important, I was born in that year in Cambridge.

17:36 lets go pioneers lmao

I still have an old Acorn Archimedes A440 in my loft, using the first Arm silicone (or as it was originally know Acorn Risk Machine) … and risc OS was stunning for the time

@tortysoft

8 ай бұрын

RISC OS is still alive and well. I can and do run it and the old software that I wrote on my Mac M1.

@AndrewRoberts11

7 ай бұрын

Make sure you remove the CMOS battery, before it leaks

@grahameida7163

7 ай бұрын

@@AndrewRoberts11 has the 440 got a cmos, I thought it was a battery pack

@AndrewRoberts11

7 ай бұрын

CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) is a chip fabrication technique that results in circuits that hold their state (excluding a bit of seepage) when there is no power. Historically used for small memory chips that hold a computers settings (CMOS / BIOS settings). A battery of SOME type compensates for the seepage, to preserve the CMOS values when there is no mains power. The battery being known as the CMOS battery. CMOS has nothing to do with the batteries composition.

@grahameida7163

7 ай бұрын

@@AndrewRoberts11 I know, but I think for the cmos backup in the 440 was not an on board cell but a couple of AA batteries off the motherboard

We were the proud owners of a Acorn Computer at our Primary/Elementary school in the mid 90s this was one of the first experiences with a computer for us, everyone in our class loved it.

Ummm but does everyone forget Apple helped start ARM Holdings when they made the Newton and helped save Apple and ARM.

What a great history lesson. Well done!

Jonathan 'Jonny' Ive, the guy who designed and developed the iPod and iPhone (both powered by ARM) is also a Brit.

@Teluric2

7 ай бұрын

He designed the skin or looks not the inner working

I still have a zx spectrum and BBC micro at home ❤

13:47 the Simpsons part 😂😂

Great story. Thanks!!!

Anyone notice the Lindström pliers on the desk ? Everyone needs a pair

If you ask anyone who was a school kid in Britain in the 80s, they all saw or used a BBC Micro. It had a profound impact. Great documentary

My first computer was a Sinclair Zx80 then the Spectrum great learning machines 🇦🇺

I had the zx81 loved it

good quality video, should have more than just 43k views

STM32 is ARM and is STM32 is everywhere, the king of IoT