Mk14
I think you will find Ian Williamson was the original inspiration behind the MK14, but this part of the story tends to get brushed under the carpet. Even the BBC`s "Micro Men" missed this part of the story out.
Back in the late 1970s you wouldn't have guessed that this shy young Cambridge maths student named Wilson would be the seed for what has now become the hottest-selling microprocessor in the world. Ninety-five per cent of today's smartphones are built around an ARM processor. The ARM began with Wilson. Sophie Wilson. Sourc: …
If you put a Beeb OS ROM into one of the sideways ROM slots (you'll need another OS ROM to get the machine to boot of course) and have a look at the area which is mapped out to the I/O ports when it is in it's usual memory location, you'll see a huge block of ASCII crediting all those involved.
I wonder what would have happened if Acorn hadn't won the BBC gig. The development of the ARM processor was partly as a result of the success of the BBC micro, although by the time it came out Acorn had been bailed out by Olivetti. It's possible that ARM might have been developed anyway, but the tiny foothold it got in the market with the Acorn Archimedes range demonstrated exactly what could be done with the fast little processor..
..and of course, ARM processors are everywhere now.
I agree - if you don't know the story, the first two sentences don't really explain that the two names are the same person. On the other hand, I can see why the author is (rightly) trying to concentrate on her work, rather than the details of her personal life.
But as for it being retrospective, I would suspect that Roger was always Sophie, long before she used the name. You don't go to the trouble and pain of a sex-change just because you fancy paying a few quid a year less for your car insurance...
@Kristian,
Yeah, she was always the same person, so it's quite reasonable to refer to her as Sophie, whatever time in her life she did something.
Part of me feels I'm being slightly disrespectful by focussing on her personal life, though I do find her to be very inspirational in that regard too.
Good article! Back in the 1970s I worked for a PCB manufacturer in Norwich and we built a few of the early prototype System One PCBs for Acorn (we didn't assemble the chips, just drilled, etched and screen printed the boards themselves). We didn't get the job for the full production run, though. I kept one of the memory boards with the intention of using it as expansion for my 8K PET - never did get around to doing that though. I seem to remember the board could take 2114 (1K x 4-bit) chips so it needed 16 to make the full 8K-byte.
Slightly later on I built a few Atoms from kits for a local shop that wanted to sell them ready made at cheaper than normal ready-built price of £150 (so he was obviously paying me less than the £30 difference). There weren't that many chips on it and there were sockets for all of them. But the most difficult bit was aligning the 120 stiff wires from the keyboard (2 per key) into the corresponding holes in the PCB all at once!
Erm... first names are only used in the first paragraph (and then, only once for each). After that, it's "Wilson" all the way, with no pronouns. But as far as the introductory blurb goes, even for genetic women it's standard practice to use their current name, even if they weren't married at the time and had a different surname.
Besides which, it's linking her current reputation with the work she did back then; so it makes more sense to use her current name than use different names in each context.
Presumably until tomorrow's Part 2, when their recent Fellowship awards from San Jose's Computer History Museum will be noted!
http://tinyurl.com/dxpb8gt
The ceremony was last Saturday
http://tinyurl.com/c3rs8cc
which coincided with the annual Wakefield RISC OS Show - perhaps the time difference precluded any sort of live streaming from the event!
If the The Register has one habit that bugs me, it's that their prime articles, and the accompanying banner images, stick around on the right-side bar forever!
I swear we've been staring at those two guys holding that PARIS plane for MONTHS now.
Please, don't tell me I'm still going to be looking at this article's banner pic when Christmas comes around!
:) :)