Sophie Wilson

Sophie Wilson was born in Leeds in 1957 and began studying computer science at the University of Cambridge in 1975. During a university vacation she designed an automated cow-feeding system. That work led to the hardware design for the Acorn System 1, an early 8-bit microcomputer sold from 1979.

At Acorn, Wilson became one of the central engineers behind the company's early computers. In 1981 she extended Acorn's BASIC and, working with Steve Furber, helped turn the Proton prototype into the BBC Micro. She designed its operating system and wrote BBC BASIC, combining a fast interpreter with structured-programming features. The BBC Micro went on to introduce computing and programming to a generation of British schoolchildren.

Wilson later designed the instruction set for Acorn's new 32-bit reduced-instruction-set processor. With Furber and the wider Acorn team, she developed the ARM1, whose first silicon arrived in 1985. The efficient design became the basis of the Acorn Archimedes and, after ARM was established as a separate company, of processor families used throughout mobile and embedded computing.

Her later Acorn work included multimedia technologies such as Acorn Replay and ChangeFSI. Wilson also designed the FirePath processor architecture and helped found a company to develop it; the business was acquired by Broadcom in 2000, where the technology supported broadband infrastructure. She was elected a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2012 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013, and shared the Royal Society's Mullard Award with Steve Furber.