Steve Furber

Steve Furber was born in Manchester in 1953. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, receiving his BA in 1974, and completed a PhD in aerodynamics in 1980. His involvement with Acorn Computers began while he was still at Cambridge, before he joined the company's hardware development group full time in 1981.

Furber became a principal hardware designer of the BBC Micro. Working with Sophie Wilson and a small Acorn team, he helped turn the Proton concept into a working prototype in time for Acorn's demonstration to the BBC. The production machine combined strong performance with an unusually broad range of interfaces, and its success made it a mainstay of British computer education.

When Acorn needed a more powerful processor for future systems, Furber and Wilson led the development of the Acorn RISC Machine. Wilson developed the instruction set while Furber concentrated on the hardware design and created a behavioural model in BBC BASIC. First silicon for ARM1 arrived in 1985, and the architecture subsequently powered the Acorn Archimedes before becoming the foundation of a global processor-licensing business.

Furber moved to the University of Manchester in 1990. There he established research into asynchronous processor design, including the AMULET family, and later led SpiNNaker, a massively parallel system built to model large-scale neural activity in real time. His honours include election to the Royal Society, the IET Faraday Medal, recognition as a Computer History Museum Fellow, the BCS Lovelace Medal and major awards shared with Sophie Wilson for their work on ARM.