

Some of the story of ARM, including the visit to the 6502 creators - fidotron
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/

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jacquesm
The first version of the BBC Arm based Archimedes came with a very simple demo
called 'lander' by Braben (of Elite fame).

I got one of the machines through my contacts at the dutch importer of Acorn
(ARM stands for "Acorn Risc Machine") and for days after it arrived I could do
nothing else but fly around in this real time generated 3D scrolling landscape
piloting a flying wedge and shooting up stuff.

It was mesmerizing. Compared to today's game titles it looked very simple but
the responsiveness of the machine to the mouse while moving the craft was just
amazing. People from all over town came around just to play with it. At that
time a typical game that included '3D' would render hidden line removed wire
frames at best. Contrast that with Lander displaying filled and shaded quads
to generated the landscape, small polygons used to depict smoke and fire and
other goodies. There were some short-cuts taken to be able to do the 3D
transformations fast enough (for instance, only two directions to move in with
a fixed camera angle, 'third person' viewpoint) but whatever the details
Lander was a huge step in gaming and worked very well to show off the power of
the ARM, even though the game that eventually got released based on that demo
was disappointing (it was called virus).

~~~
wazoox
Here is a video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=653Ger80ros>

It is absolutely astounding for 1987. I guess that out of an SGI IRIS nothing
could achieve anything similar back then.

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porlw
Best bit:

“The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current
being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually
running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that
the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile
phones, was a complete accident."

~~~
demallien
Worst bit:

Showing a photo of Wilson pre-transition. It added nothing to the story, being
just a mug shot. I doubt she's happy about that...

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grimboy
Nobody can change the past. Pictures of faces are good in articles about
people and events since humans are wired to respond to faces so I don't see
that it didn't add anything. Therefore I'm not sure that it was out of line.
But it's possible that I'm just tone deaf to to the polite/compassionate thing
here.

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demallien
If you just want to show Wilson's face, you use a current mug shot, not one
dating from 20 years ago. If it was a photo of Wilson soldering up a circuit,
or working at a computer during the ARN project, then sure, use the photo as
it is showing something about the development of the ARM processor, the
putative subject of the article. But even then I would hesitate with
annotating the photo as being of Wilson, I'd probably tend towards using a
generic term, like 'an Acorn employee' or 'one of ARM's designers'.

~~~
glhaynes
Why? It doesn't seem at all unusual to use from-that-time photos of the other
people who worked on the project, does it?

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zokier
> ARM has now sold over ten billion processors, ten times more than Intel

I don't think ARM has sold processors for a long time. IP cores and designs,
yes, but processors are actual physical items.

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pasbesoin
Well, that was quite worth the read. Very motivating, what an individual and a
small team can accomplish.

