British microcomputer pioneer Professor Andrew Hopper becomes a Commander of the British Empire for services to the computer industry in the British New Year Honours list. Hopper founded the computer company Acorn that produced the Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Archimedes.
The BBC Micro was used in a BBC television series that introduced the emerging personal computer technology in the early 1980’s. The machine became very popular in UK schools, and a lot of educational software for it was developed. Although only based on an 8–bit processor, the 6502, it had many advanced features, such as real, interrupt–driven support for the serial port, built–in that were lacking in much more expensive machines, such as the IBM PC. The optional features included a network interface (“Econet”), a speech synthesiser and a range of second processors, including one that ran a favour of Unix.
The Archimedes was similarly ground–breaking, based around a RISC processor developed in–house by Acorn, the Acorn RISC Machine, later renamed to the Advanced RISC Machine, or ARM. ARM processors are found in many devices today, including PDA’s and mobile phones.