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?
Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
They sold a BSD port called RISCiX.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#43This 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.
...designed and implemented the whole ARM instruction set in her head...
Wow!
With today's CPUs you probably wouldn't stand a chance, no matter how good you are.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#44This 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.
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.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#45I 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 pack…
The GUI was amazing, and is still one of the easiest-to-use GUIs I've ever encountered, even though there were some major omissions, the main one being total lack of accessibility --- you couldn't drive it from the keyboard at all. (Win 3.1, OTOH, had amazingly good accessibility and still beats a lot of modern software.)
The underlying OS was not amazing. There were some good parts; the relocatable module system was very elegant, if rather alien by modern standards; the ability to resize nearly all memory areas on the fly (by dragging bars in the GUI!) was great; proper pluggable filesystem modules in the 1980s were a revelation; the built-in BASIC was super fast and reasonably comfortable to program in, even though it didn't have structured types (some of the built-in ROM software was written in Basic!)...
But the bad parts are bad. The underlying technology is really primitive, being a non-preemptive OS with no memory protection that's worth anything, and then it's suffered from many years of ad-hoc organic growth... e.g. a lot of the core APIs pass flags in the top 8 bits of addresses, because back then the ARM had a 24 bit address bus. Running on a modern machine with more than 16MB of RAM? Good luck with that. APIs are duplicated everywhere with slight changes. There are lots of undeclared dependencies between modules (including recursively, which isn't really supported). Platform independence isn't really a thing, except when it was crudely bolted on for some platforms.
Plus there are some... questionable... design decisions. My favourite is the big chunk of myserious code in the main system allocator which gropes up the call stack every time you try to allocate memory. Why? It's looking for stack frames belonging to the system allocator, so that it can tell whether it's being called reentrantly. Why is it doing this? So it can detect whether it's being called from an interrupt, at which point it goes through an alternative call path and return memory from a different pool!
If anyone's interested, a few years back I wrote a proof-of-concept RISC OS kernel reimplementation called R2: http://cowlark.com/r2/index.html
Unlike the real thing, it runs everything in user mode except for a tiny stub to handle SWIs. (There's a built in ARM emulator.) It's complete enough to run Basic. While reverse engineering the operating system I found out way, way too much about how RISC OS worked inside. shudder
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
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.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Thanks, yes I remember the package now.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#49Even if you have an Intel-based phone in your pocket, it probably has ARM cores in it too. They get everywhere :-)
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.)
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
*sheet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViewSheet
Yes, sheet was pretty good. (As was word!), but Excel really had the edge there, even when it first came out. It's the one product by MS that stood out as being best-in-class straight from day one.
Excel was so nice I wrote my documents in it. I wonder how much of Microsoft was built on its fame.