
Oral History of Sophie Wilson (2012) [pdf] - dcminter
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/06/102746190-05-01-acc.pdf
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codeulike
Context: Sophie was one of the main architects of the original ARM processor

 _Fairbairn: So was there sort of a major insight or breakthrough or whatever
in doing the processor, or was it just sort of you read the papers, you sort
of absorbed things and sort of went through the process? Were there any sort
of major aha moments, or points that--

Wilson: There was nothing aha about it. It was just, "You can do this stuff.
You just get on and do it." As I say, it was more the reverse. We expected to
find a roadblock. We expected to find why National Semiconductor employed all
those people in the building in Israel and why they found it so difficult. And
we just never did. We also-- we thought it was going to be much harder than it
really turned out to be, so we put a lot of effort up front into verification
and modeling._

~~~
dcminter
I particularly enjoyed this anecdote (talking about the prototype 6502 based
BBC Computer, not the ARM here):

 _Wilson: ...Hermann determined that if there was no logical reason why it
didn 't work, then it must be the fault of the in-circuit emulator, and that
what they should do is take the in-circuit emulator out, put a native
processor in it, and surely it would work then, because there was no logical
reason it shouldn't. And annoyingly, he was completely right. It did work._

~~~
bencollier49
There's a sequence in the BBC drama "Micro Men" which appears to dramatise
this, albeit with an external clock wire as the culprit. Worth watching, it's
brilliant.

~~~
dcminter
Thanks, it's been on my to-watch list for a while. Maybe it's time to bump it
up the queue a bit :)

~~~
pja
It’s quite fun & Alexander Armstrong has great fun hamming it up a little as
Sinclair.

~~~
dcminter
The ZX81 and ZX Spectrum were a big part of my childhood, so I had a big case
of Clive-worship as a kid. Watching a clip from this I now feel slightly
attacked :) but I'm settling down with a very British cup of tea to watch it
tonight.

Thanks for the recommendation.

~~~
bencollier49
I get the impression that the Acorn guys had more of a hand in the
consultation process for the film!

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jgrahamc
I interviewed Sophie at Cloudflare's Internet Summit back in 2018. Lots of fun
stories:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrrsCOiMy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrrsCOiMy0)

~~~
RyJones
Nice; thanks for the link. I miss hanging out in your office at Optimal
Networks.

~~~
jgrahamc
That was a really long time ago...

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the-dude
This is a transcript. I have searched but failed to find the recording.

Does anybody know if it is available?

~~~
jecel
The recordings of the oral histories done at the Computer History Museum are
at:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8daKdGi7s85u...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8daKdGi7s85ubzbWdTB36-_q)

There are 318 at the moment and they post several new ones each week. But they
still have quite a back log so it is not surprising that an interview from
2012 hasn't been posted yet.

This list (currently 1337 items) includes videos and the transcripts:

[https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/](https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/)

~~~
dcminter
This is brilliant, thanks so much for posting these links!

~~~
jecel
I have now read the transcript and it has "end of tape 1" and "start of tape
2" which makes me think it might be an audio only interview. In that case it
probably won't show up on Youtube.

Douglas Fairbairn, who did the interview, was the founder of VLSI Technology
Inc which was the first fab to make ARMs and, together with Acorn and Apple,
set up the ARM company.

In an interview I did with Prof Andy Hopper he mentioned that a CAD group was
created for a networking company which got merged with Acorn. That led them to
have a chip design capability that they were trying to figure out what to do
with it. This is a slightly different viewpoint of the same story.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBzHyZrJRSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBzHyZrJRSk)

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tarek_computer
Great link. Thank you for sharing

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musicale
Extraordinary; she puts Woz to shame.

And of course ARM helped to fuel Apple's extraordinary success in the
2000s-2010s with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad ...and non-success in the 1990s
with the Newton and eMate.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It really is an extraordinary record, especially for someone with no academic
background in EE. She literally just sort-of picked up digital logic design
intuitively, more or less all at once. And then wrote a BASIC and helped
design a game-changing super-efficient processor (etc), because why not?

And no one at school noticed she might have unusual talents.

I wish we could have an interview that tries to get some insight into how this
kind of mind operates.

