Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
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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
#2Amazing woman. She needs a knighthood.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#3Our 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.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#4The 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). It booted from ROM in something like a second.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#5The 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.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#6I 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.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#7I 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…
I too owned a whole bunch of Acorn stuff. Most of the software was excellent. The best basic interpreter around and a very good shot at a DOS.
The Acorn 'Unicorn' was excellent but too expensive and this is roughly where the parent comment comes in. So Acorn did a lot of good stuff before they lost the plot, roughly around the time they released the Archimedes, which was an amazing machine for the time but the Amiga had far surpassed anything Acorn could offer software wise and the ST and Commodore were gobbling up the lower end.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#8Amazing woman. She needs a knighthood.
Second that, especially since David Braben was recognized formally as well and he wouldn't have stood a chance doing what he did without Sophie Wilson doing hers first.
If you took her work out of the world a surprising number of items would suddenly stop working.
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#9Our 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.
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!
Re: Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM
#10I 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…
I too owned a whole bunch of Acorn stuff. Most of the software was excellent. The best basic interpreter around and a very good shot at a DOS. The Acorn 'Unicorn' was excellent but too expensive and this is roughly where the parent comment comes in. So Acorn did a lot of good stuff before they lost the plot, roughly around the time they released the Archimedes, which was an amazing machine for the time but the Amiga…
Yes the BASIC interpreter was the best thing there was on the platform. Mainly for me at least because it was heavily structured, didn't require line numbering like earlier versions and had a stupidly powerful inline assembler.
I had a 1040ST and an Amiga 500 at the time as well (spot the geek) and the software wasn't that great on those platforms either IMHO. Even PDS on DOS was nicer to program in with the 2kg pile of manuals.
The killer was the rise of the PC and you know what; I'm glad it killed everything. Perhaps controversially, a couple of years down the line and as someone who wanted to get shit done back then, things like Windows 3, VB, Word, Excel, OLE appearing were clearly the future.