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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

#31

Post by wglb »

keithpeter wrote: post #12
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…

"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 sim…

Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#32

Post by camperman »

danellis wrote: post #27

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

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.

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#33

Post by wglb »

keithpeter wrote: post #12
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…

"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 sim…

Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#34

Post by tonyedgecombe »

linker3000 wrote: post #29

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

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

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#35

Post by linker3000 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #34
linker3000 wrote: post #29

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

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

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

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#36

Post by 72deluxe »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #5
pjc50 wrote: post #4

The dramatisation "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).…

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

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!

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#37

Post by fred2133 »

keithpeter wrote: post #12
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…

"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 sim…

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.

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#38

Post by mavhc »

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…

Windows and Mac OS were both cooperatively multitasking until 1995 and 2001, although they did have more memory protection than RISC OS.

As to the worldview, everyone had their own worldview before the internet, / vs \ vs : vs .

Mac OS Classic had filetypes, same as RISC OS. Bit odd that the web uses them really, considering it has mimetypes.

The RISC OS GUI is still miles ahead of everyone else. Its application packaging was pretty good, easy to edit (although the !boot system should be restricted in what it can do).

But they never went through the transition that Windows did (twice), or Mac did to OS X.

Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

#40

Post by rjsw »

72deluxe wrote: post #36
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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!

The cameo appearance by Sophie is as a barmaid in a pub.
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