Would ARM exist without the BBC?

If you're from the UK and of a certain age then you're going to have encountered the BBC micro.

That machine, like the Sinclair Spectrum, is responsible for a lot of Brits getting their first introduction to programming.

Those a bit younger than me might have used Beebs at school. For me it was at an adult education computing course where I used them to learn BASIC and Pascal.

But is good old Auntie Beeb also partly responsible for the existence of the mighty ARM processor architecture?

What? Well...

The BBC funded Acorn Computers to build the BBC micro, along with the later RISC based BBC/Acorn Archimedes. As many people know, Acorn stuck with RISC and eventually spun off ARM, which was, shall we say, quite successful.

Would Acorn have survived long enough to do that without those BBC contracts? I don't know, but if documentaries I've seen are to be believed, they may not have.

So does my my phone only work because of the BBC? 😉🤭🤥.

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