
Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM - benev
http://www.linuxvoice.com/sophie-wilson-acorn-and-the-development-of-arm/
======
batou
I 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.

~~~
keithpeter
_" 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 take your point about Acorn as a business but I used a 'lab' full of RISC-OS
2 bases A310s at College with 20Mb Rodime hard drives. We did scanning, dtp,
Genesis multimedia packages &c and various home grown projects.

What else could we have bought _at that time_ for similar use cases? Not
trolling, my memory of the time is hazy and I recollect being extremely
underwhelmed by DOS based PCs in another 'lab'.

EDIT: flashbacks to Aldus Framemaker on Apricot PCs, Amstrad PCW spreadsheet
applications being used in a theatre box office, and an early 9" screen Mac
being used with some form of DTP software.

~~~
fred2133
My college had an (experimental?) machine they got from Acorn that dual-booted
into a 'nix OS. It got stuck in a corner and forgotten about, but if it had
been a few years later I think it could have been an amazing project for them.

~~~
linker3000
When I was in secondary school, we had a plain grey, all-in-one keyboard and
system desktop case that had a microdrive and was connected to a hacked colour
TV via a massive umbilical cord. It turned out to be a BBC Micro prototype.

------
pjc50
The 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
Micro 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
You 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
The cameo appearance by Sophie is as a barmaid in a pub.

------
gadders
Amazing woman. She needs a knighthood.

~~~
danellis
You mean a damehood.

~~~
gadders
Pedant. But yes. The effect is the same regardless.

------
the-dude
Our 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
Going 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!

------
danellis
This 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
I 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.

~~~
talideon
The 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.

~~~
camperman
That wouldn't surprise me at all. And the really staggering thing is how
little the ARM's design and instruction set has changed since then. The fact
that you can use Peter Cockerell's 1980-something tutorial on ARM ASM even
today shows how well it was designed. I put it up there with such quality-
without-a-name pieces of engineering like the SR-71, the HP-12C and the Leica
M3.

~~~
engi_nerd
The SR-71 was so far ahead of its time, it's a little ridiculous. Look
down/shoot down capability in the mid 1960s. Synthetic aperture radar mapping.
An IMU/astronavigation system almost as capable as the early GPS units of a
few decades later. An airframe that actually becomes stronger the more you fly
it as designed. Thermal management system techniques that weren't used
elsewhere for decades. I can keep going. But basically, for almost every
single system in the aircraft, the next comparable system you can find was
developed at least 1 to 2 decades later.

~~~
camperman
Agreed. One of the finest pieces of engineering ever.

------
mattkevan
I 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.

------
agumonkey
Her WP page got me to this nice page: Which Machines Do Computer Architects
Admire?

[http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html#wils...](http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html#wilson)

------
linker3000
Very 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
I'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
Message sent. Just in case it doesn't make it, my email address is similarly
my username at the same place.

------
to3m
Interview with Ms Wilson:
[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190)
\- interesting throughout.

------
rwmj
Even if you have an Intel-based phone in your pocket, it probably has ARM
cores in it too. They get everywhere :-)

~~~
_yosefk
Are 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.)

~~~
Sanddancer
A 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-...](http://techreport.com/news/27878/atom-x3-chips-target-cheap-phones-
and-tablets-feature-arm-graphics)

------
stefantalpalaru
It'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
What relevance do you see? Certainly seems to have no relationship to the
topic at first glance, but your perspective may enlighten.

~~~
grkvlt
Interesting, 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?

