ah, yes. Missed out on that one! I actually had one of the first ARM based machines straight out of 'Acorn' (before they went on general sale) through a deal with the dutch importer (lvl rocom).

The only software that it came with was a game called 'lander', it didn't do much other than display this amazing 3D landscape that you could fly across to shoot at stuff.

We'd be mesmerized for hours by how smooth the animation was.

It was pretty sad to see the ARM to go down the way it did only to be resurrected as an embedded platform. What a missed chance!

Just about everything coming out of Acorn (except maybe the atom) was engineered so well it was quite amazing.

The bbc micro had a dual processor option (in those days pretty much unheard of, the only thing that would come close would be a float coprocessor in an ibm, but that would not be a secondary general purpose processor) through a flatcable connector on the bottom of the machine called 'the tube'. The ARM was originally designed to be one of several coprocessors available for the bbc.

I heard an interesting anecdote about the ARM at the time, that it was the only processor designed that worked on first silicon. They'd built a simulator for it and used that to verify the design.

I didn't get much assembly time on it though, this was just about when Acorn went under as a manufacturer of general purpose computers (the 'master series' bbc were also pretty good). So I moved on to the Atari ST and the IBM pc (a homebrew machine that I built on top of a filing trolley, a buddy of mine welded a steel sheet to an empty folder hanger trolley and that became the basis for my pc, motherboard bolted on top, powersupply to the bottem. It looked pretty scary :) ).