Sophie Wilson - Life and Career

Life and Career

Wilson was educated at Cambridge University. In 1978, she designed the Acorn Micro-Computer, the first of a long line of computers sold by Acorn Computers Ltd.

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, whereupon 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 (i.e., a licenced CPU core) of the 1990s and 2000s.

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, optimised 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 her time there.

Wilson is now the Director of IC Design in Broadcom’s Cambridge, U.K. 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.

Wilson is transgender. In the BBC television drama Micro Men a young version of her is played by Stefan Butler and Wilson herself makes a cameo appearance as a pub landlady.