Ultimately, it was a much smaller upstart company that ended up getting the lucrative contract: Acorn Computers. So, the BBC put out a call to the UK's young computer industry, which was then dominated by Sinclair, a company that made its fortune in calculators and tiny televisions. As a result, the computer needed for the show would have to be pretty good-in fact, the producers' demands were initially so high that nothing on the market really satisfied the BBC's aspirations. The concepts included graphics and sound, the ability to connect to teletext networks, speech synthesis, and even some rudimentary AI. Unlike most TV shows, the BBC wanted to feature a computer on the show that would be used to explain fundamental computing concepts and teach a bit of BASIC programming. The show was part of a larger Computer Literacy Project started by the British government and the BBC as a response to fears that the UK was deeply and alarmingly unprepared for the new revolution in personal computing that was happening in America. That state of affairs would make sense and fit in with the world as people understand it the market dominance of some industry stalwart would raise no eyebrows or any other bits of hair on anyone.īut what if, instead, you decided to make those CPUs all hail from a barely-known company from a country usually not the first to come to mind as a global leader in high-tech innovations (well, not since, say, the 1800s)? And what if that CPU owed its existence, at least indirectly, to an educational TV show? Chances are the producers would tell you to dial this script back a bit come on, take this seriously, already.Īnd yet, somehow, that's how reality actually is. If you were writing reality as a screenplay, and, for some baffling reason, you had to specify what the most common central processing unit used in most phones, game consoles, ATMs, and other innumerable devices was, you'd likely pick one from one of the major manufacturers, like Intel. And with Apple's release of a whole new line of Macs based on their new M1 CPU-an ARM-based processor-and with those machines getting fantastic reviews, it's a good time to remind everyone of the strange and unlikely source these world-controlling chips came from. That's because those same phones, and so much of our digital existence, run on the same thing: the ARM family of CPUs. We can all use a feel-good underdog story right now, and luckily our doomscrolling 2020 selves don't have to look very far. At least in America, we still call these by the hilariously reductive name 'phones.'

Yet most of us have kept up, and the way most of us do so is with the small handheld computers we carry with us at all times. So much of this year has been a relentless slog of bad news and miserable events that it's been hard to keep up.

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