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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The dramatisation "Micro Men" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men</a> covers some of the early history here, including the super-rapid creation of the BBC Micro and a cameo by Sophie Wilson.<p>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.
Our 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.<p>Around the same time I entered high school and they had a full classroom full of networked BBC Micros!<p>*whoami<p>As gadders mentioned : she should be knighted.
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.<p>Here's an interview from the Centre for Computing History: <a href="https://youtu.be/ZMEBj3FM2aw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ZMEBj3FM2aw</a>
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.<p>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.)<p>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...<p>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.<p>It makes me happy that their technical legacy lives on in ARM, and their educational spirit is continued with the Pi.
Her WP page got me to this nice page: Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire?<p><a href="http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html#wilson" rel="nofollow">http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html#wils...</a>
Very timely as I am just about to build a copy of Sophie's design for the Acorn System 1 (1979).<p><a href="http://speleotrove.com/acorn/acornPictures.html" rel="nofollow">http://speleotrove.com/acorn/acornPictures.html</a><p>[Edit: That's not my Web site BTW]<p>Here's a pic of me testing the sophisticated visual output system: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/O8czwKo.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/O8czwKo.jpg</a>
Interview with Ms Wilson: <a href="http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190" rel="nofollow">http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190</a> - interesting throughout.
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?