Several successful companies, including ARM, Element 14 and Virata, spun out of Acorn Computers which developed the BBC Micro in the 1970s.
Less well known is Acorn's pioneering of a new consumer product type - the set top box.
"Acorn had the first digital set-top box in the world, but the management team didn't have the vision, or the natural genes which we had, to bet the company on it.," recalls Hermann Hauser, founder and CEO of Acorn, now boss of VC firm Amadeus Capital Partners, "they simply didn't have the balls to do it. They didn't have the belief that it was going to work out and they didn't understand the importance of it. Although I was on the board, I could not convince them this was the right way to go."
Thirty years on, Pace remains one of the world's leading set top box manufacturers.
Mike Bryant comments:
I think you've gained up to a decade David :-) The BBC Micro was developed at the beginning of the 80s. The Online Media digital set top box developed out of this quite some time later and was used for some of the BT video on demand ADSL trials. However neither the DSL nor the STB technology was really up to delivering high quality video back then and eventually the BT ADSL rollout was justified on delivering 512kbps Internet. Oddly there were those who didn't think this would be popular and wanted to wait and see what other countries did. Of course those other countries were waiting to see what BT did as BT was the pioneer in comms back then but fortunately the project was approved and the rest is history.
Anyway thanks to Moore's Law the DSP power now available for a couple of dollars means we can have better DSL and better video de-compression algorithms so boxes like Apple TV are the true descendents of the Online Media box - and use an ARM processor of course.
However although Pace bought AOM, their digital technology mostly originates in 'on-air' digital satellite and then terrestrial TV rather than by a 'on-demand' data connection, and this was always going to be a much larger market.
Mike Bryant
Mike Bryant
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