Here are a couple of questions for Mr Hoon, including some background
incase he has not yet visited Acorn while in Cambridge:
As you may be aware Cambridge is the home to a very special British
company, the Acorn Computer Group plc.
Acorn made the popular BBC micro computer which was widely used in
education, and have continued to excel. They went on to produce the
Archimedes, the first ever RISC based home computer, and now sell the
powerful StrongARM RiscPC.
In the last couple of years they have earned world wide recognition
as the company which made Oracle's Network Computer vision a reality.
It was Acorn, not a large US corporation, who had the low energy/high
power RISC ARM chips; it was Acorn who had the small efficient ROM based OS;
it was Acorn who had the TV and font technology which meant their computers
could be pluged into a normal TV.
As far as I am aware Acorn are the only computer design company in
Europe. They created the world leading ARM RISC processors, and the
OS and hardware which is so useful in Network Computer, Set Top Box, and
desktop applications.
And yet Acorn desktop computers are still looked down on by the British
people. Everyone seems to have fallen for the story that PC means an Intel
processor running Microsoft Windows, when PC of course means simply a
personal computer.
What would Labour do to promote this British technology? I believe that
where we have better technology we should encourage those companies to
grow and once again bring Britain to the leading edge of information
technology.
There are countless possibilities for exploring the future of information
technology with British hardware. Would Labour, for example, expand the
current Acorn Online Media trial in Cambridge to other areas? Perhaps
give each school in the country Acorn Network Computers along with their
leased lines from BT?
And looking even further into the future would Labour fund or simply
encourage research into exciting new technologies? For example a group
at Manchester University are working on the AMULET, a 32 bit asynchronous
(ie no clock like all current standard processors) processor.
British technology could help to lead the world into the 21st century,
but only if we encourage and support it.
-- James Sears
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