A year later they hadn’t sold one unit, not one. We had a big meeting with De Benedetti (Chairman of Olivetti at the time) and he said, why hadn’t we? He called all his staff in and said, why hadn’t we sold any of these products? And nobody answered. He asked again, and he almost banged on the table, and said, why hadn’t we sold any?

And then somebody said, “Please Signore Benedetti, it is because you told us that we were not allowed to sell anything except IBM PC compatible products.”

I asked Chris if Olivetti could have developed the ARM chip, now used extensively in mobile phones; in 2008 ARM produced its 10 billionth processor chip, and last year Microsoft announced that its next generation of Windows operating system would be based on ARM microchips.

Olivetti could have done, but they didn’t know what to do. The thing about ARM, the Acorn RISC Machine is what it stands for, is that it was already in several Acorn products, including the off-shoot that was making set-top boxes, but nobody had really started to sell the chip as a design to other chip makers until Robin Saxby came along. Acorn was part owner of the joint venture with Apple, and what happened in the end was that there was a reverse takeover so that ARM took over Acorn and Acorn shares were converted into ARM shares, so I imagine Olivetti had some shares still by then, they probably got some ARM shares out of it.

A fascinating read. It's easy to imagine what acorn could have been and I wonder how the future would have come out. I need one of Prof Farnsworth's machines!