Sophie Wilson

Early life and education

Wilson was raised in Leeds, Yorkshire, by parents who were both teachers, her father specialising in English and her mother in physics. Wilson studied computer science and the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge. In an Easter break from university, Wilson designed a microcomputer with a 6502 microprocessor inspired by the earlier MK14, which was used to electronically control feed for cows.

Career

In 1978, Wilson joined Acorn Computers Ltd, after designing a device to prevent cigarette lighter sparks triggering payouts on fruit machines. Wilson's computer design was used by Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser to build the Acorn Micro-Computer, the first of a long line of computers sold by the company.

In July 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. Hauser played a mental game where he told both Wilson and colleague Steve Furber that the other had agreed a prototype could be built within a week. Agreeing to the challenge, Wilson designed the system including the circuit board and components from Monday to Wednesday, which required fast new DRAM integrated circuits to be sourced directly from Hitachi. By Thursday evening, a prototype had been built, but the software had bugs, requiring Wilson to stay up all night and into Friday debugging. Wilson recalled watching the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer on a small portable television while attempting to debug and re-solder the prototype. It was a success with the BBC, who awarded Acorn the contract. Along with Furber, Wilson was present backstage at the machine's first airing on television, in case any software fixes were required. Wilson later described the event as "a unique moment in time when the public wanted to know how this stuff works and could be shown and taught how to program." The Proton became the BBC Micro and its BASIC evolved into BBC BASIC, whose development was led by Wilson for the next 15 years. As well as programming, Wilson wrote the manuals and technical specifications, realising communication was an important part of being successful.

In October 1983, Wilson began designing the instruction set for one of the first RISC processors, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), The ARM1 was delivered on 26 April 1985 and worked first time. This processor type was later to become one of the most successful IP cores (i.e., a licensed CPU core) and by 2012 was being used in 95% of smartphones.

Wilson designed Acorn Replay, the video architecture for Acorn machines. This included the operating system extensions for video access as well as the codecs themselves, optimized to run high frame rate video on ARM CPUs from the ARM 2 onwards.

Wilson was a member of the board of the technology and games company Eidos plc, which bought and created Eidos Interactive, for the years following its flotation in 1990, and was a consultant to ARM Ltd when it was split off from Acorn in 1990.

Since the demise of Acorn Computers, Wilson has made a small number of public appearances to talk about work done there.

Wilson is now the Director of IC Design in Broadcom’s Cambridge, UK office. She was the Chief Architect of Broadcom's Firepath processor. Firepath has its history in Acorn Computers, which, after being renamed to Element 14, was bought by Broadcom in 2000.

She was listed in 2011 in Maximum PC as number 8 in an article entitled The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History. She was awarded the Fellow Award by the Computer History Museum in California in 2012 "for her work, with Steve Furber, on the BBC Micro computer and the ARM processor architecture." In 2013 Sophie was elected as a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society.

Personal life

Wilson is transgender. In her spare time Wilson takes up photography, and is involved in a local theatre group, where she is in charge of costumes, set pieces as well as having acted in a number of productions. Wilson also played a cameo role in the BBC television drama Micro Men as a pub landlady, whilst a younger version of her was played by Stefan Butler.