Sophie Wilson
Sophie Wilson (born Roger Wilson) designed one of the first British home-build microcomputers, the Acorn System 1 and was the genius behind much of Acorn's software. As a young student at Cambridge, her first embedded system was used by farmers to regulate cow feed. The cow-feeder project led on to the development of the hardware for the Acorn System 1. In 1981, Wilson extended the Acorn Atom's BASIC programming language dialect into an improved version for the Acorn Proton, a microcomputer that enabled Acorn to win the contract with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for their ambitious computer education project. The Proton became the BBC Micro and its BASIC was developed into BBC BASIC. In 1983, she designed the instruction set for one of the first RISC processors, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), later to become one of the most successful IP cores of the 1990s and 2000s.The ARM processor core is now used in thousands of different products, from mobile phones and tablets to digital televisions and video games. The number of ARM processor cores now shipped exceeds 30 billion, or more than four ARM microprocessors for every person on earth. |
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