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Hermann Hauser
When Hermann Hauser was 15 he came to the United Kingdom to learn English at a language school in Cambridge.
In March 1979 Hermann Hauser, Chris Curry and Andy Hopper founded Acorn Computers Ltd and launched the Acorn Microcomputer which was later to be called the System 1.
He was voted the UK's 'Computer Personality of the Year' of 1984.
Hermann became a millionaire as a direct result of the huge success of the BBC Micro computer which was backed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and used in schools all across the UK.
Hermann Hauser believes that if he had had just a little more foresight ten years ago, the world would now talk about Acorn compatible rather than IBM compatible computers.
'Looking back, we were so far ahead of anybody else in the industry, including Apple and IBM,' he says. What Acorn missed was the importance of strategic alliances and standards, which is why, when Hauser started his current project, EO's Personal Communicator (reviewed in PCW, February 1993) he went to every major company he could think of.
Born in Vienna, Hauser grew up in the Tyrol. He used to come to Cambridge in the summer, starting when he was 16, to learn English. After his first degree at Vienna University he settled in Cambridge to do a PhD, followed by a year's post-doctoral work at the Cavendish Lab.
Hauser is one of the founders of EO and its predecessor, the Active Book Company. He was involved in founding IXI, maker of graphical interfaces for Unix among others, in addition to setting up Olivetti's research division. He is probably best known, however, for founding Acorn with Chris Curry in 1978. The company started life as a microcomputer consultancy and its first product, a computer kit, was launched in 1979. The timing was fortuitous.
'It was the same time as Apple in the US, and the market was ripe for an Apple type computer,' he says.
The kit had two selling points that Hauser has tried to keep consistent throughout his career: it was technically ahead of the competition and it was easy to use. Easy to use is a relative term (the computer was programmed in hexadecimal code with its hex keyboard) but there were people for whom the kit posed no problems. 'I'll never forget this exhibition we went to,' Hauser says. 'We showed this thing assembled and it was all working. It was beautiful; it had an LED and a seven segment display. It was all dots when it was in the reset state so you knew everything was working, which wasn't very often, but remember in those days people really preferred those computers not to work because it gave them a chance to fix them.'
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