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We also realized the price point
was quite good for schools and professional users, but it was too high
for hobbyist and most home users,
so we developed the Electron, which
was a cost-reduced BBC Micro - not
an entirely happy story. There wasn’t
much wrong with the machine, but
for Christmas 1983 when there would
have been a huge market we couldn’t
get the electronics reliable enough.
By 1984 when we cracked it and could
make lots of them, the market had
gone. We ended up with a quarter of a
million of them in the warehouse that
were eventually sold below cost.
But yes, the company went from a
small, experimental start-up to big, es-tablished...well, is 400 big—
medium-sized maybe?
What was the atmosphere like with
the people that worked there? or was
the excitement lost in the numbers of
people?
No, there was a core group who did
the really ambitious technical stuff.
We did begin to get the idea that we
could take on anything. We knew
there was competition. We were a bit
over- focused on Sinclair as the competition. Standard problem: seeing
the parochial competition and missing the real competition from much
further away. Technically we felt very
much on top of what we were trying to
do, and we kept taking on bigger and
bigger challenges. We felt we’d developed the Midas touch when it came
to advanced technology; that’s a lot of
the background to the development
of the ARM microprocessor. This was
a very short period of time when you
look back. The first sale of the BBC Micro was January 1982. The ARM design
started in October 1983 and the first
ARM chips were in our hands in April
1985. It was only four years from beginning to sell BBC Micros to having
ARM chips in our hands.
Going on to the arM chip, how did that
come about? What started you guys
working on a new type of processor?
The advanced R&D group, which I
was in with Sophie and several other
folk, was responsible for looking fur-
thest out in terms of what the company
was going to do for product. Hermann
was very hands-on—he was always
very involved in this. We were already
thinking the BBC Micro has been a big
success; we need to build on this. We
could put second processors on, which
tided us over for a bit. But really we
needed to be thinking about the next
big machine. It was clear that we were
going to step up from 8 bits. 16-bit pro-
cessors were already around and going
into some competing products.
