Communications of the ACM
The Birth of a .k. Tech Giant
Acorn made the iconic BBC Micro that gave many their first taste of computing.
During the 1980s I worked at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, helping to develop the in-house engineering systems that were used by designers to create computers like the Archimedes, the popular successor to the BBC Microcomputer that had made Acorn's name during the BBC Computer Literacy project.
The computer on my desk was a BBC Model "B" microcomputer with a whopping 32 kilobytes of memory and, I believe, a 10 megabyte hard drive.
When I had to write a program to calculate hours worked for my team I didn't use the BASIC language shipped with every BBC Computer, but wrote it instead using PostScript, the special programming language used to lay out documents on the very expensive Apple LaserWriter printer that we had on our floor, and got the printer to do the calculations I needed.
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