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Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
- gadders 11y agoAmazing woman. She needs a knighthood.
- jacquesm 11y agoSecond that, especially since David Braben was recognized formally as well and he wouldn't have stood a chance doing what he did without Sophie Wilson doing hers first. If you took her work out of the world a surprising number of items would suddenly stop working.
- danellis 11y agoYou mean a damehood.
- gadders 11y agoPedant. But yes. The effect is the same regardless.
- the-dude 11y agoOur public library had an Acorn Electron for anyone to use : I have spent many free afternoons there until my parents doubled up my savings ( at age 12 ) and I bought my own. Around the same time I entered high school and they had a full classroom full of networked BBC Micros! *whoami As gadders mentioned : she should be knighted.
- keithpeter 11y agoGoing from a BBC Master to an Acorn Archimedes 310 at the College I was working in then was like going from an Apple ][ to a Mac. Archimedes 310s(?) were in use for medical graphics applications (expanded RAM and I think I recall they had floating point units of some kind). There was also a parametric CAD application that was used by Lucas(?) for a bit. The music software Sibelius was released first on this platform having been coded in assembler by the brothers Finn for speed. The subsequent financial and ownership history of the ARM processor design isn't as inspiring I'm afraid. So yes gongs for MS Wilson!
- pjc50 11y agoThe dramatisation "Micro Men" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men covers some of the early history here, including the super-rapid creation of the BBC Micro and a cameo by Sophie Wilson. Risc OS was roughly contemporary with Windows 3.0 and Apple's system 7, offering a cheaper and seemingly faster system (although rather idiosyncratic in its use of the mouse menubutton and drag-and-drop instead of save dialogs). It booted from ROM in something like a second.
- andyjohnson0 11y agoMicro Men is available on youtube [1] and is definitely worth a watch. The scene were one of the characters is eating noodles using multimeter probes as chopsticks made me smile. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM
- 72deluxe 11y agoYou may struggle to find Sophie in that film because at that time she was a man, and was Roger with the long hair (if I recall correctly). Very informative programme, some funny scenes with Sinclair driving past in his C5. I still love my Beeb, great machines. Very well written manuals too!
- rjsw 11y agoThe cameo appearance by Sophie is as a barmaid in a pub.
- batou 11y agoI think there's a lot of fondness for Acorn, at least here in the UK but I'd like to offer a slightly more accurate history. I was the owner of many Acorn machines including BBC B, Master, A410, RiscPC 600. The hardware, clearly designed or at least originated by Sophie Wilson was remarkable. It was robust, well designed and incredibly expandable. To this day there is not a single computer that actually made sense more than anything that Acorn kicked out. A human could learn everything about it in intimate detail without a problem. However the software was a source of constant pain. Firstly nothing was finished initially when the Archimedes came out. The Arthur OS was apparently named as a "A Risc operating system by THURsday" because their internal OS project, apparently Unixlike, went down the crapper during development and they had to hack something up quickly so they had a minimum viable product. What I ended up with was a barely usable OS that consisted of a quick port of Acorn MOS from the BBC Master series and a naff GUI chucked on top for my £1400 investment (a hell of a lot back then and even now) that wasn't fixed properly until RISC OS 2 came out in 1989 so I sat there with a lemon for a year. After that we were stuck with a cooperatively multitasked operating system with a worldview completely different to anything else at the time or in the future. A lot of progress was made but it never had any prospects despite a lot of us clinging onto the initial investment. Now I certainly enjoyed the platform but in retrospect, I'd have invested my money in something else back then if I knew what was going to happen. I full respect the achievements here and more importantly the legacy (I have 12 ARM processors still in various things in my house!) but for us footsoldiers who paid up back then, it wasn't all love and happiness.
- jacquesm 11y agoI too owned a whole bunch of Acorn stuff. Most of the software was excellent. The best basic interpreter around and a very good shot at a DOS. The Acorn 'Unicorn' was excellent but too expensive and this is roughly where the parent comment comes in. So Acorn did a lot of good stuff before they lost the plot, roughly around the time they released the Archimedes, which was an amazing machine for the time but the Amiga had far surpassed anything Acorn could offer software wise and the ST and Commodore were gobbling up the lower end.
- batou 11y ago
- danellis 11y agoThis is ridiculous. An entire article about the creation of ARM, and only a passing reference to Steve Furber, the guy who actually designed the chip itself. Either there was an intentional bias here, or it was very poorly researched. Here's an interview from the Centre for Computing History: https://youtu.be/ZMEBj3FM2aw https://youtu.be/ZMEBj3FM2aw
- camperman 11y agoI interviewed Steve Furber for a magazine feature about the ARM many years ago and he confirmed to me that Sophie pretty much designed and implemented the whole ARM instruction set in her head. It worked first time when switched on.
- tempodox 11y ago...designed and implemented the whole ARM instruction set in her head... Wow! With today's CPUs you probably wouldn't stand a chance, no matter how good you are.
- kjs3 11y agoOn the contrary. Just because x86 is a baroque monstrosity doesn't mean simple, powerful ISAs are unpossible.
- talideon 11y agoThe way I hear it[1], she did the instruction packing on a pub napkin, while IBM were devoting quite a bit of computing horsepower to do the same thing. [1] Vague recollections of an article in Acorn User. I'd really have to dig out those old magazines to be sure.
- rwmj 11y agoEven if you have an Intel-based phone in your pocket, it probably has ARM cores in it too. They get everywhere :-)
- _yosefk 11y agoAre you sure about that? (I hear they use low-end x86 cores and ARC cores but I haven't heard about ARM. ARC in general is very hackable while ARM is not hackable at all, so those rumors made sense to me.)
- kristoffer 11y agoWell there are many places where you might find an ARM e.g. baseband chip, power management chip, GPS chip and so on.
- Sanddancer 11y agoA lot of flash media controllers use an arm core, for example. Also, Intel uses ARM's graphics in some of their low power consumption chips [2]. Because ARM chips sip power so well, you find them in some really surprising places. [1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 [2] http://techreport.com/news/27878/atom-x3-chips-target-cheap-phones-and-tablets-feature-arm-graphics http://techreport.com/news/27878/atom-x3-chips-target-cheap-...
- linker3000 11y agoVery timely as I am just about to build a copy of Sophie's design for the Acorn System 1 (1979). http://speleotrove.com/acorn/acornPictures.html http://speleotrove.com/acorn/acornPictures.html [Edit: That's not my Web site BTW] Here's a pic of me testing the sophisticated visual output system: http://i.imgur.com/O8czwKo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/O8czwKo.jpg
- tonyedgecombe 11y agoI've got an Acorn System One under my desk (faulty), if you need it for parts let me know, my email address is my username at gmail.com
- linker3000 11y agoMessage sent. Just in case it doesn't make it, my email address is similarly my username at the same place.
- mattkevan 11y agoI had a series of Acorn machines over the years - I used a trusty A/410 with 200mb hard drive as my main machine right up to the early 2000s and taught myself both design and programming with it. I knew that thing inside and out. At the time - and I still sort of do - I thought that, despite its idiosyncrasies, RiscOS was way ahead of Windows and the Mac. For example the Mac only got scaling scrollbar widgets with System 9, and the boot time was amazing. (Upgrading from RiscOS 3 to RiscOS 4 by carefully prising out and replacing a bunch of ROM chips was fun.) In hindsight they made the right choice, but I was bitterly disappointed when the parents bought a Mac over a RiscPC. Teenaged me didn't let them forget how unhappy I was for quite a while... Getting RiscOS ported to the Raspberry Pi was a great move, a real blast of nostalgia, but I'd love to see what a modern-day version would be like – 64 bit, great graphics, lightning fast, weird extra mouse button. It makes me happy that their technical legacy lives on in ARM, and their educational spirit is continued with the Pi.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoIt's historically relevant that at the time of those remarkable accomplishments Sophie was named "Roger". And this is an article about history, isn't it?
- oldmanjay 11y agoWhat relevance do you see? Certainly seems to have no relationship to the topic at first glance, but your perspective may enlighten.
- grkvlt 11y agoInteresting, certainly, to find out that a technically accomplished womaan is actually transgendered. It is also interesting (and perhaps relevant) to know that she accomplished these things in an environment where she was percieved as male, and therefore had none of the friction and other problems or issues that might be encountered by women in such a male dominated field. It's great that she was able to keep her role, and was accepted as a woman afterwards, as well. It also seems to be more likely (than in other fields) to find trans woman in IT, but I worry that this is simply confirmation bias at work? I wonder if there is any research on the relative statistics of trans folk in the IT industry? EDIT: Thinking about it, perhaps it is just that, as with the GP comment, people are more likely to bring the fact up in a field like IT, where 'facts' are held as more important, and in other areas it would simply be ignored or not mentioned?
- stefantalpalaru 11y agoIt's an important clarification, just like we call the artist that insists on using a new graphic symbol for his stage name "the artist formerly known as Prince". How else are we going to keep track of one person's name changes over the years? It's just common sense, really.
- danellis 11y agoThe relevance is that Roger Wilson was a notable figure in the 80s and 90s -- he and Steve Furber were a powerhouse team. As far as I know, she transitioned to Sophie after her rise to notability, and she's quite a private person, so it's likely that many people who are very familiar with Roger's work will never have heard of Sophie.
- to3m 11y agoInterview with Ms Wilson: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190 http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190 - interesting throughout.
- agumonkey 11y agoHer WP page got me to this nice page: Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire? http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html#wilson http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html#wils...