In the end, Commodore hurt itself as much as anyone, and despite selling 10 million Commodore 64s, the company soon went bankrupt.
Texas Instruments was the first casualty of the 1983 Home Computer Price War, and Atari became the second. Commodore’s goal was to drive Texas Instruments out of the home computer market as revenge for TI destroying Commodore’s calculator business.Ĭommodore dropped the price of its entry-level VIC-20 so low that TI could only respond by selling its TI-99/4A at a loss – or give up on selling its entire inventory of home computers. IBM had taken over the business world, and Commodore was dropping the price of the Commodore 64 from US$595 to an eventual US$99 in big steps to flood the market. 19Įspecially in the US, 1983 had been a very trying year for the home computer industry. It turns out that Acorn’s fledgling RISC processor was not only far more powerful than the Motorola 68000 used in Amiga and Atari ST computers, but it was also remarkably energy efficient, which is a big reason later versions of the ARM design became so popular in handheld devices – including most of today’s smartphones.
The 32-bit ARM1 was used as a co-processor in the BBC Micro to run simulations and CAD software so the RISC team could design support chips for the new CPU as well as the ARM2 CPU. ARM1 was produced on April 26, 1985, and it worked perfectly the first time it was powered up.
The Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) project officially began in October 1983, although advance work had already been done on the RISC concept. The RISC concept is a Reduced Instruction Set Computer, where the CPU would be optimized for a limited set of instructions that it could perform very efficiently. Unable to find an existing solution that would match the speed of 6502-based machines, Acorn decided to adopt the Berkeley RISC concept in a processor of its own design. Seeing the end of the 8-bit era approaching, Acorn knew that it was time to move to a new architecture Except for its earliest models (see Acorn 8-bit Computers), Acorn had built its computers around the 6502 microprocessor, which was also used by Apple, Atari, Commodore, and others.