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English computer scientist

Sophie Mary Wilson

Wilson first designed a microcomputer during a break from studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She subsequently joined Acorn Computers and was instrumental in designing the BBC Microcomputer, including the BBC BASIC programming language. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2019.

Wilson was born in Leeds and brought up in the village of Burn Bridge, North Yorkshire. Her parents were both teachers, with her father specialising in English and her mother in physics. where she studied the Mathematical Tripos for her first two years, and then computer science in her final year,

Before going to university, Wilson had designed and built two electronic systems for ICI Fibres Research in Harrogate near her home village. The following year, in the 1977 summer vacation after her first year at university, she designed a small system around a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, which was used to electronically control feed for cows. Wilson's success with the cow feeder project and paper designs for a more general system based on it caught the notice of Hermann Hauser, at the time a Cambridge postgraduate student. Hauser was impressed, and supported Wilson to stay in Cambridge for the 1978 summer vacation to see if she could turn the design into reality. At the same time a small microcomputer kit, the MK14, was just being launched by Science of Cambridge, led by Chris Curry on behalf of Cambridge electronics businessman Clive Sinclair. Wilson was convinced she could do better, and Hauser encouraged her to do so, using parts from the MK14. In December 1978 Hauser and Curry set up Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd (CPU), initially as a consultancy designing microprocessor based control systems. Their first customer was Ace Coin Equipment Ltd, who needed controllers for their fruit machines, with Wilson designing a device to prevent cigarette lighter sparks triggering payouts. Based on this processor board CPU Ltd developed an increasing number of different interface, display, control, and test add ons for different customers, which in turn led to the Acorn Eurocard rack systems made generally available, and then the Acorn Atom released in March 1980. Wilson, initially moonlighting from the final year of her degree, contributed first the machine code monitor, then an assembler, then a version of BASIC and multiple device drivers for the machines ("an incredible task of bootstrapping things up"), as well as pitching in with everything else in the office. Taking up the challenge, the Acorn team 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 it was only on Friday morning that it was actually working, allowing Wilson (who had managed to catch a few hours sleep in the night) to start porting over an operating system, with it falling to Wilson to develop its operating system and its version of BASIC, BBC BASIC at 16K and 16K respectively a fourfold increase on the 4K and 4K of the Atom, including a full set of floating point mathematical routines. Wilson's "Acorn SuperBASIC" development had reached about 10K by the time of the BBC's visit, and she was keen to preserve the improvements she considered she had made with Acorn System BASIC over previous versions of the language. But the BBC, in particular their external consultant John Coll and BBC Engineering's Richard Russell, were adamant that the core established features of the language needed to be present with recognisably standard syntax. On the other hand extensions that Wilson had written to allow more structured programming in BASIC chimed closely with the BBC team's ambitions, and long fully significant variable names, repeat/until loops, and multi line procedures and functions with variables that could be declared local all became hallmarks of BBC BASIC. Work on the system design, operating system, and BASIC language (and fitting everything into the memory available) continued through the summer, and Wilson recalled watching the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in July 1981 on a small portable television while attempting to debug and re solder the prototype. She was a non executive director of the technology and games company Eidos plc, which bought and created Eidos Interactive, for the years following its flotation in 1990. She 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.

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 broken up in an acquisition, with the Element 14 name being transferred to a new company, this company eventually being bought by Broadcom in 2000. Wilson was listed in 2011 in Maximum PC as number 8 in an article titled "The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History". In 2009, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and, in 2013, as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Wilson received the 2014 Lovie Lifetime Achievement Award in acknowledgement for her invention of the ARM processor. In 2016, she became an honorary fellow of her alma mater, Selwyn College, Cambridge. In 2022 the Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering was awarded in Washington D. C. to David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy, Stephen B. Furber, and Sophie M. Wilson for their "invention, development, and implementation" of the RISC chips.

Wilson underwent gender reassignment surgery and transitioned from male to female in 1994. She enjoys photography and is involved in a local theatre group, where she is in charge of costumes and set pieces and has acted in a number of productions. She has also played a cameo role as a pub landlady in the BBC television drama Micro Men, in which a younger Wilson is played by Stefan Butler.