Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Computer hardware |
Founded | December 1978 |
Founder | |
Defunct | 15 January 1999 9 December 2015 (Cabot 2) |
Fate | Bought by MSDW Investment Holdings Limited |
Successor | Element 14 Ltd. |
Headquarters | Cambridge, England, United Kingdom |
Key people | |
Products |
Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England in 1978 by Hermann Hauser, Chris Curry and Andy Hopper.[1] The company produced a number of computers during the 1980s with associated software that were highly popular in the domestic market, and they have been historically influential in the development of computer technology like processors.
The company's Acorn Electron, released in 1983, and the later Acorn Archimedes, were highly popular in Britain, while Acorn's BBC Micro computer dominated the educational computer market during the 1980s.[2] Acorn also developed the reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture set in 1985 and an operating system, RISC OS, for the hardware. The company also designed the ARM architecture; this part of the business was spun-off as Advanced RISC Machines under a joint venture with Apple and VLSI in 1990, now known as Arm Holdings, which is dominant in the mobile phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) microprocessor market today.[3]
Acorn in the 1990s released the Risc PC line and the Acorn Network Computer, and also had a stint in the set-top box and educational markets. However, financial troubles led to the company closing down its workstation division in September 1998, effectively halting its home computer business and cancelling development of RISC OS and the Phoebe computer.[4] The company was acquired and largely dismantled in early 1999.[5][6] In retrospect, Acorn is sometimes referred to as the "British Apple"[7][8] and has been compared to Fairchild Semiconductor for being a catalyst for start-ups.[9][10]
Acorn Computers, once regarded as the UK's equivalent of Apple Computer ...
Originally, Acorn planned to use Intel's 286 chip in its Archi-medes computer. But because Intel would not let it license the 286 core and adapt it, Acorn decided to design its own.