Acorn Computers

» see acorn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The company was registered on 5 December 1978 as Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd, by Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry, working out of office space at 4a Market Hill. Its first paying job was a controller for a fruit machine, built for Ace Coin Equipment in Wales. The controller started on a National Semiconductor part and was switched to a MOS Technology 6502, which is the chip the next ten years of the company would be built on.

The BBC contract in April 1981 changed the scale of everything. Acorn's profits went from around three thousand pounds in 1979 to 8.6 million by July 1983, and that September the business was floated on the Unlisted Securities Market as Acorn Computer Group plc with a market value of roughly 135 million pounds. Hauser's stake was worth 64 million on paper and Curry's 51 million. Ten percent of the equity went on the market and the money was pointed at subsidiaries in the United States and Germany.

Eighteen months later a creditor filed a winding-up petition. February 1985: Acorn owed 31.1 million pounds, mostly to the people who built its machines, and the founders signed with Olivetti on the 20th. The Italians took 49.3 percent for 10.39 million, which valued the whole company at about a tenth of what it had been worth the previous year. By July they were at 79.8 percent and the founders were under fifteen percent between them. Headcount went from 480 to around 270.

The last act took four months. On Thursday 17 September 1998 the workstation division was closed and two staff in five went with it. The finished Risc PC successor was cancelled on the bench, two days after the first boards with real silicon in them had been powered up. By January 1999 Acorn Computers Limited had been renamed Element 14 Limited, after the atomic number of silicon, because the board wanted distance from the schools business the name was famous for.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what olivetti bought ~

Olivetti owned Acorn for eleven of its twenty years and never really knew what to do with it. It assessed the machines as too expensive with an operating system offering limited flexibility, and pushed its own M19 at European schools instead. Meanwhile the Cambridge engineers got on with a processor that nobody in Ivrea had been told about during the takeover talks.

Olivetti reached Turkey, and it reached it as a typewriter. The name here belonged to office machines in bank branches and ministry corridors, the thing a clerk rolled paper into, and nobody in this country would have described it as a computer company. So the parent of the most widely manufactured processor design in history sat, in Turkish memory, next to a ribbon spool. That is roughly how much of Acorn crossed a border: none of the hardware, and the owner only in a form that had nothing to do with it.

~ the arithmetic at the end ~

The processor got out in 1990. Acorn put the ARM design into a joint venture with Apple and VLSI Technology and kept a shareholding in the result. That company went public in 1998, in a flotation which handed Acorn 18 million pounds during the same year it lost nine.

Then the numbers inverted. ARM shares kept climbing until Acorn Group's 24 percent holding was worth around 300 million pounds while the group's own market capitalization sat below that, which is the market saying the computer business had negative value. Shareholders wanted the stake released and the tax bill on selling it was enormous.

In May 1999 MSDW Investment Holdings Limited, a subsidiary incorporated by Morgan Stanley for the purpose, offered Acorn holders two ARM shares for every five Acorn shares. The bank bought a computer company to use as a container and booked the purchase as a loss. It came out of the exercise holding an estimated 40 million pounds of ARM.

~ what was left to sell ~

The pieces went cheap. Pace Micro Technology took the set-top box division for about 200,000 pounds, along with Acorn's rights and obligations in RISC OS. Castle Technology had already been handed the distribution rights to the existing machines in October 1998 so the dealer network had something to sell, and RISCOS Ltd licensed the operating system in March 1999 to finish the version Acorn had abandoned.

Stan Boland and a group of senior managers were offered the silicon and software design activity and paid 620,539 pounds for it, taking the Element 14 name out of the shell with them in October 1999. Broadcom bought that company in November 2000 for 366 million pounds. What remained of Acorn Computers Limited was renamed Cabot 2 Limited and spent its last years honoring warranty claims; the parent became Cabot 1 Limited and was taken private in February 2000. The registration was finally dissolved in December 2015, sixteen years after anybody was working there.

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