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Acorn Computers

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   Acorn Computers
       Type     Formerly public as Acorn Group plc ( LSE:GB0000061167), now
                defunct.
     Founded    Cambridge, England (December, 1978)
   Headquarters Cambridge, England
    Key people  Chris Curry
                Steve Furber
                Hermann Hauser
                Andy Hopper
                Sophie Wilson
     Industry   Computer hardware
     Products   Microcomputer System
                Atom
                BBC Micro (aka Proton)
                Archimedes range
                RiscPC range
                Acorn Network Computer
                Phoebe
     Revenue    N/A
    Employees   Unknown
      Slogan    No slogan
     Website    Formerly www.acorn.com

   Acorn Computers was a British computer company established in
   Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers
   which were especially popular in the UK. These included the Acorn
   Electron, the BBC Micro and the Acorn Archimedes. Acorn's BBC Micro
   computer dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s
   and early 1990s, drawing many comparisons with Apple in the U.S. Though
   the company was broken up into several independent operations in 2000,
   it leaves an impressive legacy, particularly in the development of RISC
   personal computers. A number of Acorn's former subsidiaries, notably
   ARM Holdings, live on today.

   Although a new company licensed the Acorn trademark in 2006 to sell a
   range of branded laptop computers, the company has no staff and only
   one technology associated with the previous incarnation of the company.

Prehistory

   On 25 July 1961, Clive Sinclair founded Sinclair Radionics to develop
   and sell electronic devices such as calculators. The failure of the
   Black Watch wristwatch and the calculator market's move from LEDs to
   LCDs led to financial problems, and Sinclair approached the National
   Enterprise Board (NEB) for help. After losing control of the company to
   the NEB, Sinclair encouraged Chris Curry to leave Radionics and get
   Science of Cambridge (SoC) up and running. In June 1978, SoC launched a
   microcomputer kit that Curry wanted to develop further, but Sinclair
   could not be persuaded. During the development of the MK14, Hermann
   Hauser, a friend of Curry's, had been visiting SoC's offices and had
   grown interested in the product.

CPU Ltd (1978–83)

   Curry and Hauser decided to pursue their joint interest in
   microcomputers and, on 5 December 1978, they set up Cambridge Processor
   Unit Ltd (CPU) as the vehicle with which to do this. CPU soon obtained
   a consultancy contract to develop a microprocessor-based controller for
   a fruit machine for Ace Coin Equipment (ACE) of Wales. The ACE project
   was started at office space obtained at 4a Market Hill in Cambridge.
   Initially, the ACE controller was based on a SC/MP microprocessor, but
   soon the switch to a 6502 was made.

The microcomputer systems

   CPU had financed the development of a 6502-based microcomputer system
   using the income from its design-and-build consultancy. This system was
   launched in January 1979 as the first product of Acorn Computer Ltd, a
   trading name used by CPU to keep the risks of the two different lines
   of business separate. Acorn was chosen because the microcomputer system
   was to be expandable and growth-oriented. It also had the attraction of
   appearing before " Apple" in a telephone directory.

   Around this time, CPU and Andy Hopper set up Orbis Ltd to commercialise
   the Cambridge Ring networking system Hopper had worked on for his PhD,
   but it was soon decided to bring him into CPU as a director because he
   could promote CPU's interests at the University of Cambridge Computer
   Laboratory. CPU purchased Orbis, and Hopper's Orbis shares were
   exchanged for shares in CPU Ltd. CPU's role gradually changed as its
   Acorn brand grew, and soon CPU was simply the holding company and Acorn
   was responsible for development work. At some point Curry had a
   disagreement with Sinclair and formally left Science of Cambridge, but
   did not join the other Acorn employees at Market Hill until a little
   while later.
   The Acorn System 1, upper board; this one shipped on 9 April 1979.
   Enlarge
   The Acorn System 1, upper board; this one shipped on 9 April 1979.

   The Acorn Microcomputer, later renamed the Acorn System 1, was designed
   by Sophie Wilson. It was a semi-professional system aimed at
   engineering and laboratory users, but its price was low enough, at
   around £80, to appeal to the more serious enthusiast as well. It was a
   very small machine built on two cards, one with an LED display, keypad,
   and cassette interface (the circuitry to the left of the keypad), and
   the other with the rest of the computer (including the CPU). Almost all
   CPU signals were accessible via a Eurocard connector.

   The System 2 made it easier to expand the system by putting the CPU
   card from the System 1 in a 19-inch Eurocard rack that allowed a number
   of optional additions. The System 2 typically shipped with keyboard
   controller, external keyboard, a text display interface, and a cassette
   operating system with built-in BASIC interpreter.

   The System 3 moved on by adding floppy disk support and the System 4 by
   including a larger case with a second drive. The System 5 was largely
   similar to the System 4, but included a newer 2  MHz version of the
   6502.

The Atom

   Development of the ZX80 started at Science of Cambridge in May 1979.
   Learning of this probably prompted Curry to conceive the Atom project
   to target the consumer market. Curry and another designer, Nick Toop,
   worked from Curry's home in the Fens on the development of this
   machine. It was at this time that Acorn Computers Ltd was incorporated
   and Curry moved to Acorn full-time.

   It was Curry who wanted to target the consumer market – other factions
   within Acorn, including the engineers, were happy to be out of that
   market, considering a home computer to be a rather frivolous product
   for a company operating in the laboratory equipment market. To keep
   costs down and not give the doubters reason to object to the Atom,
   Curry asked industrial designer Allen Boothroyd to design a case that
   could also function as an external keyboard for the microcomputer
   systems. The internals of the System 3 were placed inside the keyboard,
   creating a quite typical set-up for an inexpensive home computer of the
   early '80s – the relatively successful Acorn Atom.

   To facilitate software development, a proprietary local area network
   had been installed at Market Hill. It was decided to include this, the
   Econet, in the Atom, and at its launch at a computer show in March
   1980, eight networked Atoms were demonstrated with functions that
   allowed files to be shared, screens to be remotely viewed and keyboards
   to be remotely slaved.

BBC Micro and the Electron

   With the Atom on the market, Acorn could begin to think about its
   replacement. There were new 16-bit processors coming onto the market –
   should they move in that direction? After a great deal of discussion,
   Hauser suggested a compromise – an improved 6502-based machine with far
   greater expansion capabilities: the Proton. Acorn's technical staff had
   not wanted to do the Atom and they now saw the Proton as their
   opportunity to "do it right".

   One of the developments proposed for the Proton was the Tube, a
   proprietary interface allowing a second processor to be added. This
   compromise would make for an affordable 6502 machine for the mass
   market which could be expanded with more sophisticated and expensive
   processors. The Tube enabled processing to be farmed out to the second
   processor leaving the 6502 to perform data input/output (I/O). In later
   years the Tube would play an important role in the development of
   Acorn's own processor.

   In early 1980, the BBC Further Education department conceived the idea
   of a computer literacy programme, mostly as a follow-up to a BBC
   documentary, The Mighty Micro, in which Dr Christopher Evans from the
   UK National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming microcomputer
   revolution. It was a very influential documentary – so much so that
   questions were asked in parliament. As a result of these questions, the
   Department of Industry (DoI) became interested in the programme, as did
   BBC Enterprises, which saw an opportunity to sell a machine to go with
   the series. BBC Engineering was instructed to draw up an objective
   specification for a computer to accompany the series.

   Eventually, under some pressure from the DoI to choose a British
   system, the BBC chose the NewBrain from Newbury Laboratories. This
   selection revealed the extent of the pressure brought to bear on the
   supposedly independent BBC's computer literacy project – Newbury was
   owned by the National Enterprise Board, a government agency operating
   in close collaboration with the DoI. The choice was also somewhat
   ironic given that the NewBrain started life as a Sinclair Radionics
   project, and it was Sinclair's preference for developing it over
   Science of Cambridge's MK14 that led to Curry leaving SoC to found CPU
   with Hauser. The NEB moved the NewBrain to Newbury after Sinclair left
   Radionics and went to SoC.

   In 1980 - 1982 the UK Department of Education and Science (DES) had
   begun the Microelectronics Education Programme to introduce
   microprocessing concepts and educational materials. In 1982 through to
   1986, the DoI allocated funding to assist UK local education
   authorities to supply their schools with a range of computers, the BBC
   Micro being one of the most popular. In parallel the DES continued to
   fund more materials for the computers, such as software and applied
   computing projects, plus teacher training.

   Although the NewBrain was under heavy development by Newbury, it soon
   became clear that they were not going to be able to produce it –
   certainly not in time for the literacy programme nor to the BBC's
   specification. The BBC's programmes, initially scheduled for autumn
   1981, were moved back to spring 1982. After Curry and Sinclair found
   out about the BBC's plans, the BBC allowed other manufacturers to
   submit their proposals. The BBC visited Acorn and were given a
   demonstration of the Proton. Shortly afterwards, the literacy programme
   computer contract was awarded to Acorn, and the Proton was launched
   early in 1982 as the BBC Micro. In April 1984 Acorn won the Queen's
   Award for Technology for the BBC Micro. The award paid special tribute
   to the BBC Micro's advanced design, and it commended Acorn "for the
   development of a microcomputer system with many innovative features".

   In April 1982 Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum. Curry conceived of the
   Electron as Acorn's sub-200-pound competitor. In many ways a cut-down
   BBC Micro, it used one Acorn-designed ULA to reproduce most of the
   functionality. But problems in producing the ULAs led to short supply,
   and the Electron, although launched in August 1983, was not on the
   market in sufficient numbers to capitalise on the 1983 Christmas sales
   period. Acorn resolved to avoid this problem in 1984 and negotiated new
   production contracts.

Acorn Computer Group plc (1983–85)

   The BBC Micro sold spectacularly well – so much so that Acorn's profits
   rose from a mere £3000 in 1979 to £8.6m in July 1983. In September
   1983, CPU shares were liquidated and Acorn was floated on the Unlisted
   Securities Market as Acorn Computer Group plc, with Acorn Computers Ltd
   as the microcomputer division. With a minimum tender price of 120p, the
   group came into existence with a market capitalisation of about £135
   million. CPU founders Herman Hauser and Chris Curry leapt instantly
   into the paper millionaire bracket: Hauser's 53.25 million shares made
   him worth £64m; Curry's 43 million shares translated into £51m.

New RISC architecture

   Even from the time of the Atom, Acorn were considering how to move on
   from the 6502 processor: the 16-bit Acorn Communicator developed in
   1982 using the 65816 being a key example.

   The IBM PC was launched on 12 August 1981. Although a version of that
   machine was aimed at the enthusiast market much like the BBC Micro, its
   real area of success was business. The successor to the PC, the XT
   (EXtended Technology) was introduced in early 1983. The success of
   these machines and the variety of Z80-based CP/M machines in the
   business sector demonstrated that it was a viable market, especially
   given that sector's ability to cope with premium prices. The
   development of a business machine looked like a good idea to Acorn. A
   development programme was started to create a business computer using
   Acorn's existing technology – the BBC Micro mainboard, the Tube and
   second processors to give CP/M, MS-DOS and Unix ( Xenix) workstations.

   This Acorn Business Computer (ABC) plan required a number of second
   processors to be made to work with the BBC Micro platform. In
   developing these, Acorn had to implement the Tube protocols on each
   processor chosen, in the process finding out, during 1983, that there
   were no obvious candidates to replace the 6502. Because of many-cycle
   uninterruptible instructions, for example, the interrupt response times
   of the 68000 were too slow to handle the communication protocol that
   the host 6502-based BBC Micro coped with easily. Development of the
   National Semiconductor 32016-based model of the ABC range, later sold
   as the Cambridge Workstation, had shown Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber
   the value of memory bandwidth. It also showed that an 8 MHz 32016 was
   completely trounced in performance terms by a 4 MHz 6502. Furthermore,
   the Apple Lisa had shown the Acorn engineers that they needed to
   develop a windowing system – and this was not going to be easy with a
   2–4 MHz 6502-based system doing the graphics. Acorn would need a new
   architecture.

   Acorn had tested all of the available processors and found them
   wanting. Having ruled out existing CPUs, it was clear to the developers
   that Acorn should seriously consider designing its own processor.
   Acorn’s engineers came across papers on the Berkeley RISC project. They
   could now handle the truth: if a class of graduate students could
   create a competitive 32-bit processor, then Acorn would have no
   problem. A trip to the Western Design Centre in Phoenix showed Furber
   and Wilson that they did not need massive resources and
   state-of-the-art R&D facilities.

   Sophie Wilson set about developing the instruction set, writing a
   simulation of the processor in BBC Basic that ran on a BBC Micro with a
   6502 second processor. It convinced the Acorn engineers that they were
   on the right track. Before they could go any further, however, they
   would need more resources. It was time for Wilson to approach Hauser
   and explain what was afoot. Once the go-ahead had been given, a small
   team was put together to implement Wilson's model in hardware.

   The official Acorn RISC Machine project started in October 1983. VLSI
   Technology, Inc were chosen as silicon partner, since they already
   supplied Acorn with ROMs and some custom chips. VLSI produced the first
   ARM silicon on 26 April 1985 – it worked first time and came to be
   known as ARM1. Its first practical application was as a second
   processor to the BBC Micro, where it was used to develop the simulation
   software to finish work on the support chips (VIDC, IOC, MEMC) and to
   speed up the operation of the CAD software used in developing ARM2.
   Wilson subsequently coded BBC Basic in ARM assembly language, and the
   in-depth knowledge obtained from designing the instruction set allowed
   the code to be very dense, making ARM BBC Basic an extremely good test
   for any ARM emulator.

   Such was the secrecy surrounding the ARM CPU project that when Olivetti
   were negotiating to take a controlling share of Acorn in 1985, they
   were not told about the development team until after the negotiations
   had been finalised. In 1992 Acorn once more won the Queen's Award for
   Technology for the ARM.

Financial problems

   Acorn's watershed year was 1984 – it had gone public just as the home
   computer market collapsed. It was the year when Atari was sold, Apple
   nearly went bust, and Acorn had solved the one problem it had had
   throughout its history: production volumes.

   The Electron had been launched in 1983, but problems with the supply of
   its ULAs meant that Acorn was not able to capitalise on the 1983
   Christmas selling period – a successful advertising campaign, including
   TV advertisements, had led to 300,000 orders, but the Malaysian
   suppliers were only able to supply 30,000 machines. The apparently
   strong demand for Electrons proved to be illusory: rather than wait,
   parents bought Commodore 64s or ZX Spectrums for their children's
   presents. Ferranti solved the production problem and in 1984 production
   reached its anticipated volumes, but the contracts Acorn had negotiated
   with its suppliers were not flexible enough to allow volumes to be
   reduced quickly in this unanticipated situation – supplies of the
   Electron built up. Acorn was in real trouble: by the end of the year it
   had 250,000 unsold Electrons on its hands, which had all been paid for
   and needed to be stored – at additional expense.

   Acorn was also spending a large portion of its reserves on development:
   the BBC Master was being developed; the ARM project was underway; the
   Acorn Business Computer entailed a lot of development work but
   ultimately proved to be something of a flop, with only the 32016-based
   version ever being sold (as the Cambridge Workstation); and obtaining
   Federal approval for the BBC Micro in order to expand into the United
   States proved to a drawn-out and expensive process that proved futile –
   all of the expansion devices that were intended to be sold with the BBC
   Micro had to be tested and radiation emissions had to be reduced.
   Around $20m was sunk into the U.S. operation but the NTSC modified BBC
   Micros sold barely at all. They did, however, make an appearance in the
   school of Supergirl in the 1984 film Supergirl: The Movie.

Olivetti subsidiary (1985–98)

   The dire financial situation was brought to a head in February 1985,
   when one of Acorn's creditors issued a winding-up petition. After a
   short period of negotiations, Curry and Hauser signed an agreement with
   Olivetti on 20 February. The Italian computer company took a 49.3%
   stake in Acorn for £12 million, which went some way to covering Acorn's
   £11 million losses in the previous six months. This valuation fell some
   £165m below Acorn's peak valuation of £190m. In September 1985,
   Olivetti took a controlling share of Acorn with 79% of shares.

BBC Master and Archimedes

   The BBC Master was launched in February 1986 and met with great
   success. From 1986 to 1989, about 200,000 systems were sold, each
   costing £499, mainly to UK schools and universities. A number of
   enhanced versions were launched – for example, the Master 512, which
   had 512 KB of RAM and an internal 80186 processor for MS-DOS
   compatibility, and the Master Turbo, which had a 65C02 second
   processor.

   The first commercial use of the ARM architecture was in the ARM
   Development System, a Tube-linked second processor for the BBC Master
   which allowed one to write programs for the new system. It sold for
   around £4,000 and included the ARM processor and three support chips, 4
   MB of RAM and a set of development tools with an enhanced version of
   BBC BASIC.

   The second ARM-based product was the Acorn Archimedes desktop-computer,
   released in mid-1987. The Archimedes was popular in the United Kingdom,
   Australasia and Ireland, and was considerably more powerful and
   advanced than most offerings of the day, but the market was already
   stratifying into the PC-dominated world. Acorn continued to produce
   updated models of the Archimedes including a laptop (the A4) and in
   1994 launched the Risc PC, where the top specification included a
   200 MHz+ StrongARM processor. These were sold mainly into education,
   specialist and enthusiast markets.

ARM Ltd

   Acorn's silicon partner, VLSI, had been tasked with finding new
   applications for the ARM CPU and support chips. Hauser's Active Book
   company had been developing a handheld device and for this the ARM CPU
   developers had created a static version of their processor, the ARM2aS.

   Apple was developing an entirely new computing platform, the Newton.
   Various requirements had been set for the processor in terms of power
   consumption, cost and performance, and there was also a need for fully
   static operation in which the clock could be stopped at any time. Only
   the Acorn RISC Machine came close to meeting all these demands, but
   there were still deficiencies. The ARM did not, for example, have an
   integral memory management unit as this function was being provided by
   the MEMC support chip and Acorn did not have the resources to develop
   one.

   Apple and Acorn began to collaborate on developing the ARM, and it was
   decided that this would be best achieved by a separate company. The
   bulk of the Advanced Research and Development section of Acorn that had
   developed the ARM CPU formed the basis of ARM Ltd when that company was
   spun off in November 1990. Acorn Group and Apple Computer Inc each had
   a 43% shareholding in ARM, while VLSI were an investor and first ARM
   licensee.

Set-Top boxes

   In 1994, Acorn Online Media was founded to exploit the projected
   video-on-demand (VOD) boom, an interactive television system which
   would allow users to select and watch video content over a network. In
   September 1994 the Cambridge Trial of video-on-demand services was set
   up by Acorn Online Media, Anglia Television, Cambridge Cable and
   Advanced Telecommunication Modules Ltd (ATML) – the trial involved
   creating a wide area ATM network linking TV-company to subscribers'
   homes and delivering services such as home shopping, online education,
   software downloaded on-demand and the World Wide Web. The wide area
   network used a combination of fibre and coaxial cable, and the switches
   were housed in the roadside cabinets of Cambridge Cable's existing
   network. Olivetti Research Laboratory developed the technology used by
   the trial. An ICL video server provided the service via ATM switches
   manufactured by ATML, another company set up by Hauser and Hopper. The
   trial commenced at a speed of 2 Mbit/s to the home, subsequently
   increased to 25 Mbit/s.

   Subscribers used Acorn Online Media set-top boxes. For the first six
   months the trial involved 10 VOD terminals; the second phase was
   expanded to cover 100 homes and 8 schools with a further 150 terminals
   in test labs. A number of other organisations gradually joined in,
   including NatWest Bank, the BBC, the Post Office, Tesco and the local
   education authority.

   BBC Education tested delivery of radio-on-demand programmes to primary
   schools, and a new educational service, Education Online, was
   established to deliver material such as Open University television
   programmes and educational software. Netherhall secondary school was
   provided with an inexpensive video server and operated as a provider of
   Trial services, with Anglia Polytechnic University taking up a similar
   role some time later. It was hoped that Online Media could be floated
   as a separate company, but the predicted video-on-demand boom never
   really materialised.

Network Computers

   When BBC2's The Money Programme screened an interview with Larry
   Ellison in October 1995, Acorn Online Media Managing Director Malcolm
   Bird realised that Ellison's network computer was, basically, an Acorn
   set-top box. After initial discussions between Oracle Corporation and
   Olivetti, Hauser and Acorn a few weeks later, Bird was dispatched to
   San Francisco with Acorn's latest Set Top Box. Oracle had already
   talked seriously with computer manufacturers including Sun and Apple
   about the contract for putting together the NC blueprint machine; there
   were also rumours in the industry that said Oracle itself was working
   on the reference design. After Bird's visit to Oracle, Ellison visited
   Acorn and a deal was reached: Acorn would define the NC Reference
   Standard.

   Ellison was expecting to announce the NC in February 1996. Sophie
   Wilson was put in charge of the NC project, and by mid-November a draft
   NC specification was ready. By January 1996 the formal details of the
   contract between Acorn and Oracle had been worked out, and the PCB was
   designed and ready to be put into production. In February 1996 Acorn
   Network Computing was founded. In August 1996 it launched the Acorn
   Network Computer.

   It was hoped that the Network Computer would create a significant new
   sector in which Acorn Network Computing would be a major player, either
   selling its own products or earning money from licence fees paid by
   other manufacturers for the right to produce their own NCs. To that
   end, two of Acorn Network Computing's major projects were the creation
   of a new 'consumer device' operating system, Galileo and, in
   conjunction with Digital Semiconductor and ARM, a new StrongARM
   chipset, the SA1500 / SA1501. Galileo's main feature was a guarantee of
   a certain quality of service to each process in which the resources
   (CPU, memory, etc.) required to ensure reliable operation would be kept
   available regardless of the behaviour of other processes. The SA1500
   sported higher clock rates than existing StrongARM CPUs and, more
   importantly, a media-focussed coprocessor (the Attached Media Processor
   or AMP). The SA1500 was to be the first release target for Galileo.

   Having incorporated its STB and NC business areas as separate
   companies, Acorn reorganised its PC manufacturing into a further wholly
   owned subsidiary, Acorn RISC Technologies (ART).

Final break up of Acorn (1998–2000) and on-going developments of their
technology

   Acorn's last real hopes of becoming a major player in the computer
   industry had fizzled out: set-top boxes were not taking off as
   expected, and the Network Computer, too, had been a bit of a flop –
   traditional PCs were reaching the types of prices thought to justify
   such a design, and increases in bandwidth to the home were slow to come
   about, making a web connection something of a luxury for the late '90s.
   Between 1996 and 1998 Olivetti disposed of its interest in Acorn Group
   through a series of structured transactions, raising £54m. Acorn
   restructured its operations, bringing its subsidiary companies back
   together as divisions within Acorn. Acorn Risc Technologies became the
   Workstation Division, which was closed in late 1998 when Acorn finally
   stopped producing desktop-computers in favour of set-top boxes. The
   last machine, code-named Phoebe or RiscPC 2, was nearly fully developed
   at the time of the project's abandonment, and therefore was never
   produced in volume nor sold to the public. Notably, numbers of its
   distinctive yellow case were produced and sold off cheaply.

   ARM, however, had gone from strength to strength. In 1998, the Company
   underwent an initial public offering (IPO) and reregistered as a public
   company under the name ARM Holdings plc when it completed its IPO and
   listed its shares for trading on the London Stock Exchange and for
   quotation on the Nasdaq National Market. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
   acted as global co-ordinator and book-runner for the Offering as well
   as sponsor and broker for the listing on the London exchange.

   In January 1999, Acorn Group changed the name of Acorn Computers Ltd to
   Element 14 Ltd as it recast itself in the image of ARM – that is as a
   developer of intellectual property (IP), in this case in the digital
   signal processing (DSP) market. Around this time, ARM's share value had
   increased to a point where the capital value of Acorn Group plc was
   worth less than the value of its 24% holding in ARM. This situation led
   shareholders to press Acorn to sell its stake in ARM to provide a
   return on their investment. The situation also led ARM to consider
   taking action itself, since a financially weak shareholder such as
   Acorn was putting ARM in a vulnerable position. Acorn Computers Group
   plc was purchased on 1 June 1999 by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
   Investments Limited. The transaction involved the de-listing of Acorn
   Group plc, as a result of which its shareholding in ARM was distributed
   to Acorn's shareholders.

   Morgan Stanley sold the set-top-box division to Pace for £200,000, and
   Pace thereby acquired control of RISC OS. On 26 July 1999, an Acorn
   management team led by Stan Boland bought the DSP business, Element 14,
   from MSDW for £1.5 million – its net asset value. Element 14
   subsequently secured £8.25 ($13) million in first-round funding from
   Bessemer Venture Partners, Atlas Ventures and Hauser's Amadeus Capital
   Partners. It had its headquarters in Cambridge and an engineering
   facility in Bristol, UK. It headhunted Alcatel's top digital subscriber
   line (DSL) engineers, including designers of analogue front-end and
   digital ICs, xDSL modem software and specialists in asymmetric DSL
   (ADSL) and very high rate DSL (VDSL) systems, and thereby acquired an
   engineering centre in Mechelen, Belgium. Element 14 continued to
   develop its DSP products until it was purchased by Broadcom in November
   2000 for £366 million ($594 million).

   The operating system developed for Phoebe, RISC OS 4 – codename Ursula,
   was made available to RiscPC users by RISCOS Ltd, which licensed the
   operating system, and continues to develop, support and sell RISC OS
   today. However, the market is still competitive with two strands of the
   OS currently being developed. RISC OS 4 is available in 26-bit and
   32-bit versions for the Acorn RiscPC and A7000+, as well as
   MicroDigital's and RiscStation's computers (Mico, Alpha, Omega, R7500s)
   plus the newly developed A9 range from AdvantageSix. It also works on
   the VirtualAcorn range of emulators. The 32-bit-only RISC OS 5 from
   Castle is used for their Iyonix computers and set-top boxes. Castle is
   currently considering to open-source their branch of the OS, hoping to
   achieve a re-unification of the two OS branches.

New company licenses Acorn trademark (2006-)

   In early 2006, the dormant Acorn trademark was licensed from French
   company Aristide & Co Antiquaire De Marques by a new company based in
   Nottingham. In April, internet news portals claimed that the company
   was to relaunch. The new company exhibited its computers at the CTS
   2006 show at the Birmingham NEC in early May where the company
   distributed leaflets inviting people to "be part of one of the most
   exciting brand re-launches in UK history" by joining its reseller
   program.

   It transpired that the new company, which sells a range of laptop
   computers, employs no staff from any previous incarnation of Acorn
   Computers . The systems use Microsoft Windows rather than the RISC OS
   operating system used by some of Acorn's previous systems and the
   company does not support any older Acorn technologies. The company
   launched on 18 September 2006 and employs 25 members of staff.

   On 24 July 2006, Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) ruled that
   the domain name acorncomputers.co.uk should be transferred to the new
   Acorn from computer enthusiast Roy Johnson. The company made a
   complaint to DRS contending that the "use of [Acorn Computers'] company
   name is illegal and has caused much confusion and continues to do so
   which is detrimental to [Acorn] and extremely misleading". Despite the
   fact that Johnson appeared to have been operating the website since at
   least 2001, five years before the new Acorn was registered as a
   company, mail to Johnson's registered address was returned by Royal
   Mail marked addressee has gone away.

   The reuse of the Acorn Computers Ltd name has caused an amount of
   confusion and controversy, particularly amongst the users of Acorn's
   previous products.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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