ARM Holdings, the company that makes chips for the iPhone and iPad is to be taken over by a Japanese bank. Why am I telling you this?
The sharp-eyed techies amongst you will probably have realised that Markham Microprocessors in Driving into Darkness is modelled on ARM. For Sir Mathew Markham, read Hermann Houser, the founder of Acorn Computer, the company than later became ARM. The story in the book of two software engineers working in a monastic atmosphere where ‘they produced a brilliant piece of computer code, frugal in its use of computer memory and power but devastatingly effective in the way it executed commands’ mirrored the work done in real life by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber. It’s my tribute to a great British success story.
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