About us

Yaffs is a product from Aleph One Ltd.

The company was started in 1971.  The name Aleph One was chosen to be non-specific.  We started selling computer products in 1984, when we were using Biofeedback instruments to control video games on Acorn BBC Microcomputers   This led to the development of processor cards for Acorn computers (which had their own unique operating system) which could run the DOS and Windows operating systems. Acorn users ran Windows applications in a window!

When Acorn left the computer market in 1998 we used our knowledge of other operating systems to move into Linux and then into embedded Linux.  We have developed the Yaffs File System specifically to provide a robust journalling file system for NAND Flash chips, and it is now widely used in high-volume products around the world.

Visitors

We are happy to welcome visitors, though our premises are not a shop. Please contact us to make an appointment and let us know what you would like to talk about or look at. 

Staff

Core Staff

  • Managing Director: Mr Laurie van Someren
  • Charles Manning: Chief Yaffs Architect
  • Jenny Hopkins: Tech Support

Our name

Aleph is the name of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

A German mathematician active in the mid-19th century, Georg Cantor (1845-1918), realised that infinities came in different sizes; more precisely he showed that the infinite set of all integers was smaller than the infinite set of all real numbers, and gave the labels Aleph Null to the smaller, and Aleph One to the larger set.

J W Dauben, writing in Scientific American, June 1983, 112-121, said The choice of Aleph as a label for transfinite sets was particularly clever, as Cantor was pleased to admit, because the Hebrew Aleph was also a symbol for the number 1. Since the transfinite cardinals were themselves infinite unities, the Aleph could be taken to represent a new beginning for mathematics.

The concept of Alephs is the subject of a successful book by Amir D Aczel called THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH. Paperback about £10 in the UK, ISBN 0-7434-2299-6 (We do not sell it)

VAT

We are not registered for VAT and so our prices do not include it.