[TriEmbed] you read it here first: ARM being bought by Japanese Bank

[Pete Soper]

I didn't mean to hit "send" last night. My pre-spellchecked, truncated 
text was just meant to wonder if Microsoft would be cannibalizing their 
cushy Intel relationships by getting too close to ARM Holdings (the biz) 
with a hypothetical acquisition. ARM's licensees have been eating 
Intel's lunch for years and I'm sure Intel would like nothing better 
than a repeat of what they did to Alpha (an extremely high quality RISC 
architecture and set of killer implementations Intel bought from DEC and 
promptly buried under a rock in the bushes in Santa Clara).

Thanks to Scott for making it clear there is no "bank" in SoftBank. :-) 
The article I hadn't yet found that properly covers this story is from 
yesterday's Bloomberg News 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-18/softbank-to-buy-britain-s-arm-for-32-billion-in-record-deal>. 
And a Bloomberg headline today reports the announcement drove SoftBank's 
stock down over 10%. SoftBank is the outfit behind the scenes when 
Sprint unsuccessfully tried to buy T Mobile. The Japanese honcho of 
SoftBank responded by declaring Sprint would be OK without the merger 
and part of the market's judgment of this latest acquisition plan is to 
do with the delta between what SoftBank asserts and that pesky factor 
called reality.

Two other interesting points I found this morning are that SoftBank's 
head honcho promised Teresa May (new UK PM) he would double the head 
count at ARM in the UK, and that ARM is the 800 pound gorilla of the UK 
IT industry, accounting for a third of total capitalization. In other 
words, the UK's total IT industry equates to Apple's cash on hand. This 
is a sad result for the country that can honestly lay claim to an 
important chunk of the earliest computing IP.

Coincidentally I spent a half a day in Manchester admiring "Baby", the 
first stored program computer. Actually, the museum has a replica built 
from one of the designer's notebooks. So this 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Small-Scale_Experimental_Machine> 
is a late 1990's take on a 1947 vacuum tube computer that had a 1024 bit 
electrostatic memory inside what looked like an oscilloscope CRT. This 
was Manchester University's experimental system, with a practical 
follow-on in the form of the Manchester Mark I coming the following 
year. That was commercially produced by Ferranti and beat Univac I to 
customer delivery by almost two years. I'll finish by sharing a picture 
of a poster pinned behind the Baby replica at the museum.



-Pete

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