16 Oct
2025
16 Oct
'25
8:13 a.m.
On Thu, Oct 16, 2025 at 1:07 PM Johan Helsingius via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Oh, and ARM originally stood for "Acorn RISC Machine", and was
developed by Acorn Computers for their Acorn Archimedes, running
RISC OS.
There's a very good explanation of the history leading to the development
of RISC OS at https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/
There was also RISCiX, a development of BSD 4.3 with some tricks to get
around the large page size of the memory controller and small size of the
hard disc. This was developed for Olivetti (then owner of Acorn) as a
desktop publishing machine (the A680, contemporary with the A500 Paul
mentions) but not released as far as I know. RISCiX appeared as the R140 (a
rebranded A440) and later a RISCiX branding of the A540 (R280 ?) which
ganged up to 4 MEMCs for 16MB of RAM.