back to article 808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

It is 40 years since the first Arm processor was powered up, and the UK's Centre for Computing History (CCH) celebrated in style, with speakers to mark the event, hardware on show, and a countdown to the anniversary. BBC Micro A BBC Micro signed by Arm co-designer Sophie Wilson and her co-boffins at the Centre For Computing …

  1. msknight

    I would like an ARM 1

    I saw one on e-bay go for more money that I could afford, years ago back in the days before people were paying silly money for retro equipment. I have a battered 6502 cheese wedge, and I can play Elite Executive Edition on that, but I'm happy :-) I have three Beebs and they keep me busy. Along with my six ZX81's of course. ;-)

    1. RoboJ1M

      Re: I would like an ARM 1

      I got me a mint restored Master 128.

      Gonna strap a PiTube and the SCSI to SD card to it and design me some cartridges.

      Nobody ever did anything exciting with the carts.

      I will fix this.

      1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: I would like an ARM 1

        Still gutted I had to pass on a new sealed box (One of about 6) BBC Master 128 back in 2007/8 (Pulled up from the bowels of Somerset County Councils basement).

        1. Simon Harris Silver badge

          Re: I would like an ARM 1

          I keep promising myself that one day I'll get my Atom working again.

          Apparently they go for silly money these days, but mine's so hacked about from sticking various bits of electronics in it in the 1980s, or hanging out of the back (just like Acorn encouraged you to do!) that I doubt I can get it back to 'original' condition now, so when I do get it going it will probably be some Frankenstein's monster version of an Atom.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: I would like an ARM 1

            "I keep promising myself that one day I'll get my Atom working again."

            Hah! Just watched this a little while ago. You might want to start with his Part 1 though. What a coincidence :-)

            1. Simon Harris Silver badge

              Re: I would like an ARM 1

              Thanks for that link.

              I feel all warm and fuzzy now!

  2. Roger Greenwood
    Pint

    Beer

    That is all.

  3. BrianMcGee

    On a related topic in the Science Museum they have a room of old tech and it was gratifying or depressing to see how many of the items I still own. I do have an Archimedes original bought second hand of course but not too long after it was new.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Science Museum

      I shed a tear in there last week as so much in the large "communications" room was the history of my life's work.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Science Museum

        Maybe it's my age - and possibly yours - but the progress from chip wrapping to history seems to have speeded up even more than CPU clocks.

      2. Admiral Grace Hopper

        Re: Science Museum

        I do much the same whenever I go the TNMoC at Bletchley. I was only one interview away from working on one of the actual machines still running there.

        1. Howard Long

          Re: Science Museum

          " I was only one interview away from working on one of the actual machines still running there."

          I did work on one of the machines there, the Elliott 803, and, coincidentally, the guy who curates and maintains it happens to be an old school buddy of mine.

          Paper tape. Algol 60. Chad. Manual hole punches to fix typo bugs. The boot loader was just 7 instructions, coded in a diode array. It was a fantastic introduction to the art.

    2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      >depressing to see how many of the items I still own.

      Even more depressing when you see items you still use, and rely on, at work

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        I remember repairing a PC for a customer that had a working and still used Telex card in it. It, and the IBM PC (not AT or anything more advanced) itself, was already ancient in computing terms even then, when new and faster CPUs seemed to be coming out at least every year. And even then, my only previous experience of Telex was as a kid when dad used to what the BBC Saturday sports program when they used to read out the fottie scores as they came in live on the Telex machine (with a camera focussed on it too). I've only every been in the home computer and PC field, never minis or mainframes and am "only" 62, but yeah, it's quite scary to visit any tech museum and see your life unfold before you as exhibits :-)

  4. anthonyhegedus Silver badge

    Such an obvious design, and one that today powers the majority of actual devices in the world.

    I remember learning about RISC in 1985 at uni, and thinking "this is clever" but having absolutely no idea of course of what was to come.

    1. UnknownUnknown Silver badge

      Sounds like an opportunity for a follow-up to the Micro Men Docu-drama with the story this time oriented around the ARM story.

      1. Simon Harris Silver badge

        From a general public point of view, it really wouldn't have the same attraction as the Sinclair/Acorn battles of the original film. Clive Sinclair was (somewhat cruelly) portrayed as the pantomime villain in that one, I'm not sure there would be the same scope for amusing conflict in the ARM story.

  5. K555

    "RISC architecture is going to change everything" - Acid Burn, 1995

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "RISC architecture is going to change everything"

      Considering ARM is likely the dominant architecture in smart phones, TVs etc etc, I guess it did.

      All considered I should think more of a curse than a blessing.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: "RISC architecture is going to change everything"

        It depends whether you give ARM credit for still being RISC, and if you don't, where you draw the line. The Cortex A-range chip in your phone likely supports a couple thousand instructions. True, they have several subsets of that, the smallest of which (Cortex M0) has only about 55), but you don't run a phone or computer with one of those as the CPU. I don't think I can call that RISC, even if it still has load/store and comes from ARM.

        1. RichardRussell

          Re: "RISC architecture is going to change everything"

          "you don't run a phone or computer with one of those as the CPU". Not a phone, no, but the Raspberry Pi Pico is surprisingly powerful - enough to run the full version of BBC BASIC with all the extensions including 64-bit variables, structures and so on - and that has a Cortex M0 CPU.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: "RISC architecture is going to change everything"

            The chip is Turing complete, so it can run anything you choose to compile for it. It can run IOS if you give it enough RAM. The point is that it doesn't because it would be slow because it doesn't support those thousands of operations. When people want performance, they go to a chip that has thousands of operations. Does that make it non-RISC? Does it mean that RISC was abandoned by ARM in the quest for performance? Since RISC isn't well-defined, there isn't a clear answer to this.

        2. Simon Harris Silver badge

          Re: "RISC architecture is going to change everything"

          You can do a lot with 55 instructions - as millions of 6502 programmers can testify!

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: "RISC architecture is going to change everything"

            You can do equally as much with three instructions and one register. We don't all do that because sometimes we're worried about more than what it is possible for our computer to do, but what it is efficient or feasible for our computers to do.

          2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: "RISC architecture is going to change everything"

            You call THAT RISC? This is RISC!!

            16 instruction CPU, 1 bit-wide data bus, 8 bits of RAM :-)

            It even follows the modern trend of mounting the "display" on the wall :-)

    2. RoboJ1M

      I mean, he wasn't wrong.

      1. cleminan

        *she.

        Crash Override was the he.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        You transitioned Angeline Jolie?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    1985

    I didn't realise ARM went back that far - it's coeval with the first commercial MIPS processor and well before the Sparc et al.

    The Inmos Transputer also surfaced around that time. UK innovation was apparently alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher... hang on that can't be right. :)

    History not infrequently bites preconceptions on the bum.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: 1985

      It was, until the neoliberal policies finally killed them

    2. WowandFlutter

      Re: 1985

      I remember the big selling point of the Neve/AMS Audiofile editing system in the mid 1980s was the fact it was powered by an Inmos Transputer. I went from 78 or 33 rpm gram decks, sticky splicing tape, ¼" magnetic recording and optical film tracks to 8 tracks of PCM audio at 48kHz in a few weeks. Transformed to world of TV and audio post production.

    3. Mage Silver badge

      Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

      No, she killed Inmos. Thomson bought the IP.

      Thatcher only wanted trading, not manufacturing. Sadly many economics books are marketing handbooks: "don't own the mill, outsource".

      The Transputer was brilliant compared to 386. So was ARM.

      1984: Release of 16 bit transputer

      1985: Release of 32 bit T414.

      The 80386 pre-production samples was October 1985. The 80286 was a flawed design compared to 68000 and ARM 16 bit CPUs.

      1. graemep
        WTF?

        Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

        > sadly many economics books are marketing handbooks: "don't own the mill, outsource".

        I have read a good many and cannot recall one that did. Its not even the role of an econ textbok to give business advice. Maybe you can point to an example?

      2. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

        There weren't any ARM 16 bit CPUs. ARM is 32-bit.

        Wellll..... you could call the PDP11 a 16-bit ARM. Transistioning from ARM programming to PDP11 felt like I was just programming a smaller version of the same thing. ::)

        1. Simon Harris Silver badge

          Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

          I think the 68000 architecture is closer to the PDP-11 than anything else.

          1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

            Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

            The assembly language, maybe, but the actual instruction set: no. It has loads of bits of "this is useless, swap it out to do something else" rather than leaving it purely orthogonal. Can the 68000 do a move to an immediate? No, it "escapes" out to do something else.

      3. Michael Strorm Silver badge

        Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

        > "The Transputer was brilliant compared to 386. So was ARM."

        To be fair, wasn't almost everything brilliant compared to the x86?

        1. Simon Harris Silver badge
          Terminator

          Re: alive and well in the 1980s under Maggie Thatcher

          I remember in the early 90s programming the T800 in assembly code for image processing. It sat on an ISA bus card in a 486-33 PC and ran rings around the host processor. It took a while to get used to programming a CPU with an evaluation stack rather than traditional registers though - a bit like working with an HP calculator.

          No, not that T800 ----->

    4. ChrisC Silver badge

      Re: 1985

      Yup, it's been around almost as long as those of us currently filling the roles of wise old greybeards at our respective employers, which doesn't make me suddenly feel old at all...

      One of my best mates at school got an Archimedes A310 more or less as soon as they became available, and a few years later I also had access to an A3000 via the school where my mum worked, and it was obvious from playing around with them just how special a machine it was. Little did I realise at the time how much of that was down to the ARM at its core, or how utterly indispensable that processor architecture would then become to the modern world. Having then gone on to earn a comfortable living as an embedded systems developer, much of which has been spent working on one or another flavour of ARM-based microcontrollers, I now find myself thinking back to those childhood times with a sense of nostalgia even warmer and fuzzier than usual.

      So a very well deserved hats off to all involved in its development - despite being a Spectrum and Amiga fan back then, I always had a soft spot for Acorn's offerings and consider myself exceedingly fortunate to have been in a position to get so much hands on experience with them at the time.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: 1985

        The RISC-OS was a bit clever aswell.

        File ID types, so you can have .bak files for different apps without stepping on each other.

        Being able to shrink the font cache or screen resolution in the GUI if your program needed a bit more space.

        And it could emulate a DOS PC in software, faster than a real IBM XT

  7. capnkirk

    A game of Zarch anyone?

    For commemorative purposes.

    1. cleminan

      Re: A game of Zarch anyone?

      Afraid I've only got !Lander

      1. ChrisC Silver badge

        Re: A game of Zarch anyone?

        And before (IIRC) that, there was the demo of a rippling Union Jack that basically used the same rendering technique as the landscape in Lander/Zarch - despite it not even being a playable proof of concept like Lander, even that blew my socks off compared against the 3D capabilities of the average home computer at the time.

        Meanwhile, back on the gaming across a rolling landscape theme, honorable mention has to go to Conqueror - beautifully simple concept, nicely implemented, and capable of delivering some truly unforgettable gaming moments.

  8. Tubz Silver badge

    Am I sad in keeping an eye on Ebay for an ICL DRS in that old cream and brown colour, that I used in college, good memories, actually met my future wife on the same computer course.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Maybe you should make an honest woman of her if she's still your future wife?

    2. Admiral Grace Hopper

      Still the best keyboard I used in my career. Not sad at all.

  9. ICL1900-G3 Silver badge
    Pint

    Sophie

    I don't know if you drink beer, but I would happily buy you one. What genius!

    1. hugo tyson
      Pint

      Re: Sophie

      She's completely teetotal and always has been. This is probably why she can remember stuff.... I'll take it on her behalf! :-)

      No need really, CCH bought us lunch, more than happy with that. Cheers!

      1. HuBo Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: Sophie

        Wow! You folks really exist! (always amazes me here at ElReg Saloon) ... 3ʳᵈ usual suspect from the right in that CCH multi-mugshot "police" line-up hey ... I see ... yup, that's the one officer, definitely did it! ... ;)

        Cheers!

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: Sophie

          It looks more like the poster for a "Calendar Girls" remake of The Full Monty

        2. hugo tyson
          Pint

          Re: Sophie

          LOL yes, we really exist, and some of us read ElReg even in retirement.... Cheers!

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: Sophie

            Is it ironic that I just checked your posting history and this is post# 386 :-D

          2. Rob Napier

            Hugo, where are you hiding?

            Hugo

            I have been trying to get in touch with you, but you've been well below the radar.

            I'm writing Acorn's authorised biography. Hermann, Christopher, Andy, Steve, Sophie, CBT, Bruce, Carl, Joe, Paul B. and F., Jez, Jon, Laurence, Peter, Arthur, Alex, Graham (in no particular order) have all contributed. But we have no Hugo. Please get in touch ASAP.

            Rob

  10. heyrick Silver badge

    Anybody know if that 808 line program is available?

    See subject. ;)

    1. The commentard formerly known as Mister_C Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Anybody know if that 808 line program is available?

      or is it 404?

      1. IvyKing

        Re: Anybody know if that 808 line program is available?

        Not 8008???

    2. BartyFartsLast Silver badge

      Re: Anybody know if that 808 line program is available?

      I was wondering the same thing, I'd love to see it

    3. RichardRussell

      Re: Anybody know if that 808 line program is available?

      I was allowed to publish just these twelve lines:

      2950 DEF PROCaregph1

      2960 tareg%=areg% AND 3

      2970 ENDPROC

      2980

      2990 DEF PROCaregph2

      3000 oareg%=tareg%

      3010 achkx%=FALSE

      3020 IF aregs%=0 areg%=aregn%*4

      3030 IF aregs%=1 areg%=alu% AND &3FFFFFF:achkx%=alu% AND &FC000000

      3040 IF aregs%=2 areg%=inc% OR areg% AND 3

      3050 IF aregs%=3 areg%=reg%(15)

      3060 ENDPROC

  11. Dave K

    There is a fantastic multi-part series of articles on Ars Technica covering the creation of ARM, how it came to be built, why its power consumption was so low, and of course what happened over the following years with ARM being spun off from Acorn. It's well worth a read.

    And Happy Birthday ARM!

  12. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "It would take bigger companies many years to start seeing things the same way as that early team."

    Maybe not bigger companies but MIPS was launched about the same time and SPARC a year or so later.

  13. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    Interesting

    This is similar to a chip design system developed at the WRL of DEC. Where they linked all the elements together as segments of code in C.

    Sounded like a clever plan.

  14. Torben Mogensen

    Archimedes

    I got an A310 in '87, fairly soon after its release (I live in Denmark, but a group of friends ordered a bunch from the UK). I later upgraded to A5000, but I could not afford a RISC PC.

    ARM was borderline RISC, as it had some fairly complex instructions, in particular the addressing modes. But a load/store architecture and fixed instruction size did make it sufficiently RISCy to earn the name. The addition of Thumb and other extensions made it less RISC over time, but I believe the 64-bit ARM is a much cleaner RISC architecture.

    In my opinion, ARM made a few bad design decisions in later processor versions. One was when they moved the status register to a separate register. This was needed, but they should (IMO) have moved the PC also to an unnumbered register. That you could use almost any instruction to read and modify the PC created complications down the line, e.g., with deep pipelines and out-of-order execution, and you really used only moves to and from PC and storing and loading the PC with load/store multiple instructions. The other was the Thumb design. I thought at the time that it would have been simpler to exploit the NV (never) condition code and put two 14-bit instructions after the 4-bit NV condition code. I believe Sophie Wilson had a similar idea. This would have avoided having two different processor modes. It might not have shrunk the code quite as much as Thumb, but it would be easier to mix 16-bit (well, 14-bit) and 32-bit instructions, which only arrived with Thumb2, which was compatible with neither Thumb nor the original 32-bit instructions. And I think they waited too long before making a 64-bit version.

  15. TooManysecretsx

    Btw it was never called the "Arm 1"

    Sophie confirmed this on saturday (Yes i was there also) Was a very good day

  16. Simon Harris Silver badge

    the whole Arm description in 808 lines of [BBC BASIC] tells you how simple it was

    I remember the Archimedes had a BBC Micro emulator to run 6502 code.

    The icing on the cake would have been using the Arm emulator on the BBC Micro to then run the BBC emulator!

    1. f4ff5e1881
      Trollface

      Re: the whole Arm description in 808 lines of [BBC BASIC] tells you how simple it was

      Error: Circular reference

  17. f4ff5e1881
    Angel

    Reverie: 1987

    I remember going to the Electron & BBC Micro User Show, in November 1987, at Westminster. I was 17 years old, and went on my own (the Tube from deepest, darkest Essex. No, not that sort of ‘tube’ – the underground train). I was mostly interested in Electron stuff, which was the micro I had at home.

    And in this great big hall, amongst all this amazing Electron and BBC Micro paraphernalia, was a demonstration Acorn Archimedes. And I swear, in my memory, it now has a halo above it. It was running the Lander demo, and there was a line of people waiting to have a go. So I joined the queue, and eventually had my go. I was rubbish, of course – the little ship was whizzing around everywhere… but the graphics (and speed) absolutely took my breath away.

    I decided there and then, I had to get an Archimedes. I’d just started work a couple of months previously, so I saved my pennies, and eventually splashed out for an Archimedes A310 the following year. Some time later, I got an ARM3 and hard disk upgrade, curtesy of the good people at AtomWide.

    And that fantastic computer kept me entertained for quite a few years. Alas, I no longer have it (the hard disk eventually packed up), but, fast forward to the present day, and I use Arculator (an Acorn Archimedes emulator, par excellence), to keep my Archie stuff alive in modern hardware (I had the foresight to keep backup disk images of everything from back then).

    As it happens, I’d say that nowadays, even though I’m in my fifties, I’m having just as much fun with my Acorn-related stuff, as I did when I was a fresh-faced teenager, travelling into the Big City on his own.

    1. druck Silver badge

      Re: Reverie: 1987

      I was there too, a little bit older as I was in my second year at university, and an A310 is what my grant cheque got spent on - who needs books or food - I'd just got enough left for a few sub pound a pint student union beers. I'm still using RISC OS on a Raspberry Pi 4.

  18. RichardRussell

    Signature

    I spy my signature on that BBC Micro!

    1. dharmOS

      Re: Signature

      Thank you for your work on the BBC 6502 and the later ports to the Z80. I still play around with BBC Basic on a Raspberry Pi and an Agon Light 2.

    2. HuBo Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: Signature

      Hmmmm ... fashionable floral motif shirt, 5ᵗʰ usual suspect from the left in the CCH line-up? ... Officer, quick! A co-culprit! Conspicuously hiding his name tag ... but he signed his deeds at the scene, as a confession! (eh-eh-eh!)

      Cheers!

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