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Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

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Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#22

Post by batou »

dasmoth wrote: post #13
batou wrote: post #6

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 mo…

Is there a good source of information about ARX (the originally-planned OS for the Acorn ARM machines) out there? I did search around a bit a few years back and found very, very little.

Absolutely noting unfortunately. I assume they burned it all and hoped people had forgotten about it!

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#25

Post by Donch »

batou wrote: post #24
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://rayharper.co.uk/acorn/bbc_images/fn_key_strips.pdf

Thanks - about 25 years too late. Plus I didn't have the Internet then! :)

Much more authentic:

https://twitter.com/bbc_micro_/status/572313372345016321

The plastic which held them in place was always broken on the school computers :-)

In all seriousness though, I personally owe a great debt to Sophie Wilson et al for building computers and software that made it very easy to start programming the second after turning a computer on; A BASIC interpreter and an Assembler available instantly from ROM. I had endless hours of fun building parallax scrolling star fields by poking directly to video RAM and slowly rendering 3d scenes in Render Bender. It was just a shame that the computers were so expensive.

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#26

Post by jacquesm »

Donch wrote: post #25
batou wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - about 25 years too late. Plus I didn't have the Internet then! :)

Much more authentic: https://twitter.com/bbc_micro_/status/572313372345016321 The plastic which held them in place was always broken on the school computers :-) In all seriousness though, I personally owe a great debt to Sophie Wilson et al for building computers and software that made it very easy to start programming the second after turning a computer on; A BASIC interpreter and an Assembler available instantly fr…

I spent about a year of savings on my 'beeb' and it was the best money I ever spent. All tricked out it cost as much as a very decent second hand car, a very large amount of money for me back then, I very much recall that I bought the drive enclosure long before I could afford the drives (I basically bought the whole thing piece-by-piece as money became available). Because I couldn't afford the drives I hacked my Sony cassette deck to function as a sort of poor-mans disk drive by connecting the buttons to the user port and the end-of-tape detector to an input pin so I could tell roughly where the head was on the tape. Really slow, especially during on-tape sorting but it worked.

A friend of mine who had rich parents got his + 2 HD drives for his birthday, I had to take the long way around but eventually got there.

Without that machine I'm pretty sure my career would have started 5 years later.

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#27

Post by 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

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#29

Post by 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

[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

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#30

Post by 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.

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