In
this article from The Register, we learn about Chris Shelton and his rôle in the Nascom-1 single-board computer - but there's more:
After the Nascom-1, Chris worked with Clive Sinclair on a super-cheap PC clone, to be implemented by emulation on a Transputer. That didn't quite work out, as they needed something to handle the graphics, and that something turned out to replace the Transputer: an asynchronous RISC CPU in just 90k transistors, with a small cache and a small ROM to support emulation of the target CPU. The PgC7000 - just 90k transistors, and running at under one Volt.
If they'd got commercial traction, that could be ARM now.
From the original article:
Quote:
Chris Shelton is not well known today, yet the British microcomputer industry would have been a very much poorer place without him.
Never as famous as Sir Clive Sinclair, with whom he worked in the past; Acorn’s Chris Curry, Herman Hauser, Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson; or even Tangerine and Oric’s Paul Johnson. Nonetheless, Shelton played a major role in the evolution of UK microcomputers.
He not only designed what is arguably Britain’s first home-grown home computer, the Nascom-1, but he also devised and built what may be the first truly modular, multi-user personal computer system, the Sig/Net. He was also the mind behind one of the most innovative microprocessors ever developed.