Hermann Hauser interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 3rd September 2008

0:09:07 Born in Vienna in 1948; great-grandfather born in Brno, Czechia, apparently walked from there to Vienna with all his possessions on his back; on his grave stone described as house proprietor and burgher of Vienna which were obviously the two things he was most proud of; this, my mother's side, has been Viennese ever since; my father's family is Tyrolean and for many generations have been farmers and innkeepers; during the War my mother's family decamped to the Tyrol because Vienna was being bombed and occupied by the Russians; she stayed at a farm near my father's home and that is how they met; I was the first son; I grew up in the Tyrol in a place called Wörgl near Kufstein; its claim to fame is as a railway junction from Germany to Innsbruck and from Innsbruck to Vienna; grew up in a tiny village, part of Wörgl, with two to three hundred inhabitants; my parents had a very strong influence on me; my mother moved back to Vienna after my father's death as she loves the city; my father was in many ways the exact opposite; he was a country boy and an entrepreneur; he built up a wine wholesale business; I suppose a lot of my own entrepreneurial urges come from the fact that he talked about the business issues; he gave us the feeling that the buck stopped with him and that he was ultimately responsible for the business; in my own life I have been pretty successful but even so there is a large amount of risk, and on average about 30% of companies never make it and people lose their jobs; fortunately we now have a wonderful environment in Cambridge that Andy Richards described as a low risk environment to do high risk things in; if people fail in a Cambridge company, because there are so many high tech companies the chance of them getting another job is quite high

6:18:22 My parents were originally religious in the way that all Austrians were and it was part of our social fabric that we go to church on Sundays; later, as was the case in my school, the Gymnasium in Kufstein, there was a dramatic change in ordinary Austrians' attitude to religion which also affected the way my parents lived their religious life; during the eight year period that I was at the Gymnasium there was a change from the dominant position of the Catholic church, where the most important person in the school was the priest, not the Head, but who was an irrelevance by the end of that period; people did not become anti-religious but it just disappeared from their live; we stopped going to church but no one really talked about this change; I recently read both Dawkins 'The God Delusion' and 'The Dawkins Delusion?' which was interesting because it reminded me of my own thoughts in regard to religion; on one hand I found the former quite liberating to say one is an atheist, which I suppose I am, on the other hand I felt he was overdoing it by suggesting one had to fight religion which I could not identify with; I suppose I became a little disillusioned with religion in Austria as it had become social habit rather than something that was thought through; I remember meeting Steve Furber, one of the brightest people who ever worked for me, one of the inventors of the ARM, now Professor at Manchester; he is religious, he is clearly a lot smarter than I am, so if somebody as smart as him believe then it must be valuable to him and I have to respect that

12:10:20 My first school was the primary school in Bruckhäusl, a wonderful village school; we had up to three years in one class; my mother forgot to tell them that she wanted me to go to the Gymnasium which was academically a highbrow thing to do; when she finally told them they were all excited as they hadn't prepared me for the entrance exam; I got private tuition and just made it into the Gymnasium; primary school is from six to ten and Gymnasium from eleven to eighteen; Frau Edelstrasser was a wonderful first teacher; she was beautiful, kind and knowledgeable; I can remember her sitting beside me showing me how to form letters; I developed a love for physics because of my uncle who had studied both physics and maths at university; there few jobs for mathematicians after the War so he became the local jeweller and watch repairer in Wörgl; when we went on mountain walks together he would tell me about physics and maths, that you could turn lead into gold but that no sane person would do it as you needed an atomic reaction; he talked about atomic physics in particular and the discoveries of quantum mechanics; at about fifteen-sixteen I bought myself a book by Zimmer about quantum physics and relativity which we were not taught at school; I was good at both physics and maths; I always participated in games, particularly faustball (fistball) which we played in the courtyard of the Gymnasium; I took up squash here but learnt tennis in Austria; I have skied since I was four; I run once or twice a week around Granchester; music is important; we had a wonderful music teacher called Kurt Neuhauser who was quite a famous organist who was widely broadcast on Austrian radio; he was totally absorbed in music who became exasperated if his pupil could not understand him; Mozart was taught, so was Haydn; I developed a taste for Bruckner and Mahler, then Stravinsky; having lived here for a while, discovered Vaughan Williams; Chris Curry with whom I started Acorn Computers is very patriotic and said that Vaughan Williams did not write music for foreigners; people point out that he is in business with a foreigner but he describes me as an honorary Brit

22:57:21 We have our thirtieth anniversary of Acorn Computers on 13th September, and while looking for some pictures, I discovered that I must have come here first in 1964 when I was only fifteen; I came to the Studio School in Cambridge on a language course; my father had come back from Innsbruck thinking that I should learn English as it was the most important language in the world; now I tell my children to learn Chinese which they are doing; I first did my military service which was still compulsory in Austria and did my first physics degree at Vienna University; important person for me there was a man called Roman Sexl, a gravitational expert who also wrote text books for Austrian schools; I specialized in gravitational theory for my first degree; Walter Thirring had just returned from CERN as the head of theoretical physics there; his lectures were wonderful for their clarity; one was on electromagnetism where he generalized Maxwell's equation in a concise manner; during the summers, because I had been to Studio School I returned to Cambridge because it had impressed me so much at fifteen; looking back I just can't believe that my parents put me on a train at Wörgl to go to Ostend, by ferry to Dover and train to London, then another to Cambridge; I arrived and had found my lodgings then two days later wrote a postcard to my parents to tell them; this would reach them a week later; when my kids arrive in Beijing and don't phone immediately I get very worried; apart from one summer in Paris, learning French, I came back to England every summer, always to Studio School; after the third year I asked John Morgan, a teacher there, what I should do and he suggested taking a Russian course at the Sidgwick site, which I did

28:52:20 During my time at Vienna I became a research assistant during the summer at the Cavendish Laboratory; a wonderful experience as they treated me very well and I could do some interesting experiments; since the results were encouraging, when I finished at Vienna, they suggested that I do a Ph.D. here; I was with John Field's group in physics and chemistry of solids, in David Tabor's department; we were near the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre in the Old Cavendish (where social anthropology is now); my father had been keen for me to do economics and take over his business but he was always very kind and realized I wanted to do physics; he was not an academic and didn't know how to make the decision for me; he went to see an acquaintance, Klaus Draxler, who was an assistant lecturer in physics at Vienna University; Draxler said that my school results were good enough to do physics but warned me I would never be rich, and that I would be much better off doing economics and going into my father's business; at eighteen I accepted that I would never have any money but I would do physics

32:31:04 My Ph.D. was on laser induced reactions; we would fire a laser at a surface and see how plasma would form and whether or not this could trigger an explosion; we were using high speed cameras which were taking picture at the rate of 1,000,000 per second which at that time was by far the most advanced high speed photography possible; I went from quite a theoretical background in gravitational theory, via my research assistant work to something that was applied; I ended up by applying a new computer analysis method for thermal balance and differential scanning calorimetric data that I got for chemical reactions; there is a thing called the 'Hauser Method' which is a lazy way of getting all three reaction parameters out of a single experiment; my supervisor was John Field who was very helpful, particularly when writing up the thesis, but he was a practical rather than theoretical person; David Tabor was a great linguist and would always stop on the way to his office and speak to me in German; Brian Pippard's lectures were clarity itself, but the person I probably learnt more physics from was a Ph.D. student who finished a few years before me, Jacob Israelachvili, who became a professor at Santa Barbara; he was the first person to measure van der Waal's forces right down to microscopic distances; these are forces that are very important, particularly in biology

36:45:22 Andy Hopper was doing computer science at about that time; we had met socially and played tennis together; I did the Fortran courses that many physicists did at that time, I used the IBM 360 mainframe and before that the old Phoenix system; even used the Titan system before the IBM came with a teletype interface which we had in the lab; I think I was one of the first people in Cambridge to bind in computer output directly into my thesis as part of the trick of doing the three reaction parameters in one experiment was to do a graphic output and use the graph to find the reaction order; knew Maurice Wilkes well; had the pleasure of offering him a position at the Olivetti Research Lab when I had become Vice President of Research at Olivetti after Acorn Computers; Maurice had returned from DEC after five years and was interested in a position in Olivetti which Andy Hopper headed up; he has been seminal for Cambridge computing; he was one of the first computer scientists in the world; his work on microcodes in particular forms the basis for all the microprocessors that Intel produces right now; it wasn't until the early 1980's that there was a new and different approach to microprocessors, used by ARM, the  RISC approach - reduced instruction set computer; until then all microprocessors used microcoding which was his invention; he started the first Diploma in Computing; at that time the computer laboratory was called the maths lab; it changed its name to computer lab under Roger Needham; I had great respect for Needham and really appreciated the way he interacted with local businesses; at that time we had just started Acorn Computers at 4A Market Hill, about 200 yards from the Computer Lab; one of the best investments I ever made there was Fitzbillies' buns in the afternoon for anybody who wanted to come, which meant that half the computer lab was at Acorn at four o'clock in the afternoon; they normally stayed and one of the traditions at that time was that whenever I got hungry they would get a meal off me if they were still there; a lot of the breakthroughs - and there were lots of them, Acorn was a very innovative company - were made in the Italian Kitchen a few doors down; one of them was the Econet - one evening we invented networking; thought that computers should talk to each other and got terribly excited in linking them all up in a local area network and we designed it; then Andy Hopper walked in and we showed him the design on a serviette; he looked at it and said it would never work and redesigned it; it was this change that led to the most successful area network in Britain at the time; we had 10,000 installed Econets in British schools in 1980-1981

43:12:42 Although Acorn doesn't exist any more, one of the reasons for the Cambridge phenomenon is the Acorn philosophy; we were really a systems company; we designed our own chips, hardware, computer, operating system, application software; we were the only computer company at the time to have a local area network; Bill Gates saw it and our BBC computer and he wanted to sell us MS Dos; told him that it would be a retrograde step as our operating system was way ahead at the time; one could get files off a server that was far away using the same method as to get files on and off a floppy disc; Bill's response to that was "What's a network?"; manipulating images came later; people often forget that in those days the BBC computer came in two varieties, Model A and Model B; A had 16kb of RAM and B had 32kb; now just the caches of microprocessors are typically 1mb; we had word processors running; lots of books in Cambridge were written on BBC micros; we had spreadsheets, graphics - typically line graphics - but there was no way you could do video or high resolution pictures; Ethernet is a local area network, invented by Bob Metcalfe, typically 100 metres of cable; internet is global; World Wide Web invented by Berners-Lee while working at CERN in order to share results between researchers all over the world; in a way we are witnessing a repeat performance with the Large Hadron Collider where the amount of data is so vast that they have built a much higher speed network called the Grid to get the data out to lots of research groups all over the world

48:19:24 After my Ph.D. I had two serious options, one was to apply for lectureships in physics, the other was to go back into my father's business; although I had done physics he had never given up the hope that I would finally return; my younger brother later did take over the family firm after graduating in economics; at that time I met Chris Curry socially; he was working for Clive Sinclair at the time and was getting a bit fed up; Clive invented the business model, among other things, that Chris introduced at Acorn, to sell computers through mail order; that was how we could finance Acorn without venture capital or any large sum from the founders; Acorn was an unusual company in many dimensions; one of them was that the total amount of investment that it had was £200, £100 from Chris and £100 from me; therefore it is the only company that I know of that had a capital gain of a million-fold; when we went public at £200,000,000 every pound we had put in was worth £1,000,000; Andy came in later; he and I had a company called Orbis Computers which we merged with Acorn which is how he became the third director; after my Ph.D. I had a research fellowship at the Cavendish for a year; I must have absorbed some of my father's business skills because it felt very natural when we set up Acorn Computers; I did not feel apprehensive about starting a company; we started the Cambridge Processor Unit (CPU) first in 1977, and a year later, Acorn Computers; to begin with we were living hand to mouth; CPU was a consultancy and our business plan was that it was all happening in microprocessors; we were very excited by the possibilities as were the Cambridge microprocessor group where we hired the best and brightest; the true skill which I brought was my ability to find out who the really bright people were that could produce a really good computer and then convince them that they should join Acorn Computers; the excitement at that time was similar to the excitement about the internet twenty years later; I recognised the same sort of people, same attitude to life, and belief that it was going to change the world; we knew that microprocessors would change the world and the idea of bringing microprocessors to the people, of letting them have access to a personal computer - at that time called a home computer and our customers called ‘enthuserasts’; our first product had a key feature, that it must not work; if the kit they received did not work, then the customer would have the  satisfaction of making it work

56:37:20 Acorn was the first company in Britain to go from zero to £100,000,000 in revenue in just five years so it was a phenomenal success; everybody thought we were walking on water, articles suggested we had the Midas touch, and if this goes on you start to believe it; none of it was true it was just that the market was exploding at that time; then came 1984, the year that the home computer market collapsed, just at the time we had solved the only problem Acorn Computers had in its whole five year history, which was to produce enough; we finally had them coming in by the lorry load but they were not going out any more; we got into very serious financial trouble and Olivetti finally took us over; Acorn was restructured and they offered me to become their vice president of research, which I did; I moved to Italy, to Ivrea, and had the first boss I have ever had in my life Elserino Piol, the vice chairman of Olivetti, which was a wonderful experience; he taught me about venture capital, business, a great strategic thinker; he was the person who turned Olivetti from a seven billion dollar computer company to a zero billion dollar company at the same time that he created Omnitel and made it leap from a zero billion dollar mobile phone company to a twenty billion dollar company; it was the most dramatic change in a corporate strategy of any Italian company; he also had a corporate venture arm which invested in American companies, and I would always travel with him and we would do these deals together, so it was an apprenticeship for becoming a venture capitalist; he was also a very clear thinker, almost at a strategic level; we communicated in English although it took time to realize that he was speaking English