Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM (opens in new tab)

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

Not until 2k/xp finally retired the 9x/DOS line did Windows "work".

9x was just so finicky that you didn't really want to push the multitasking.

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.

I found it fairly easy to port stuff to the Atari ST. My local university used them in labs too.

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.

Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.

Aldus did Pagemaker; Adobe bought Framemaker.

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

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!

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

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.

...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.

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

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

[2] http://techreport.com/news/27878/atom-x3-chips-target-cheap-...

Well there are many places where you might find an ARM e.g. baseband chip, power management chip, GPS chip and so on.

Well, it is pretty common to see the married woman case handled as "Sophie Wilson (née MaidenName)" in biographical material.

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?

The relevance is that Roger Wilson was a notable figure in the 80s and 90s -- he and Steve Furber were a powerhouse team. As far as I know, she transitioned to Sophie after her rise to notability, and she's quite a private person, so it's likely that many people who are very familiar with Roger's work will never have heard of Sophie.

It's an important clarification, just like we call the artist that insists on using a new graphic symbol for his stage name "the artist formerly known as Prince".

How else are we going to keep track of one person's name changes over the years? It's just common sense, really.