The idea behind this was that if a CPU was built to only run a very small set of instructions, it could run faster and more efficiently. The second was a project called the Berkeley RISC project, which stood for Reduced Instruction Set Coding. This showed that you didn’t need a huge team to design a CPU: as long as you had a partner who could create the chip for you, it wasn’t that difficult. One was a visit to the company that made the 6502, where they realized that one person was working on the next version of this CPU. Several factors influenced this decision. So, they decided in 1983 to build their own CPU for future computers. The BBC Micro used the same 6502 processor as their previous computers, but Wilson and others at the company were not satisfied with the amount of computing power this provided. #Sweet16 wozniak tv#The BBC Micro was designed to be rugged enough for educational use, with a full-size keyboard, a BASIC interpreter, a modulator that allowed it to be connected to a standard TV and an interface to save and retrieve programs to a standard audio cassette recorder. It was a huge hit, selling over 40,000 machines a month and appearing in 85 percent of UK schools.īy this time, though, Wilson’s thoughts were shifting elsewhere. From Wikipedia.Īcorn’s big break came with the BBC Micro, a computer that was designed to accompany a computer literacy program run by the UK broadcaster. A Computer in Every School Hermann Hauser, Andy Hopper, Christopher Curry, Sophie Wilson, David Allen, Chris Serle, David Kitson, Chris Turner, Steve Furber at the BBC Micro 30th anniversary in 2012. These were popular among enthusiasts, but none caught the public imagination in the way that the company hoped. Several new versions of this computer were launched in the following years, adding features like expansion cards. It was built around a CPU, with 1152 bytes of RAM. The System One was unusual in that it was cheap: priced at £65 (under $90) the computer was sold as a kit that the user would assemble and solder themselves. Wilson had graduated from the University of Cambridge by this time and had joined Acorn as the lead designer. Wilson created this prototype computer that looked more like a hand-wired calculator than a modern computer, but the design became the basis for the Acorn System 1, the first computer that Hauser’s new company Acorn Computers launched in 1979. Impressed with this innovation, Hauser challenged Wilson to build a computer over the summer holidays, based in part on a design for an automated cow feeder that Wilson had created at university. Wilson quickly figured that if you added a small wideband radio receiver to detect the pulse, you could suppress the false payout, foiling the thief. Electronics designer Hermann Hauser had been tasked with fixing the problem, and he turned to Wilson, a student working at his company. An aspiring thief had figured out that if you sparked an electric lighter next to the machine, the resulting wideband electromagnetic pulse could trigger the payout circuit. It all began for Sophie Wilson with an electric lighter and a slot machine (or fruit machine, as they are called in the UK) in 1978. If you’ve use a Raspberry Pi, or any of the myriad of embedded devices that run on ARM chips, you’ve enjoyed the fruits of their labor. They did this by realizing that you could do more, and quicker, with less. In the 1980s, she and colleague Steve Furber designed the ARM architecture, a new approach to CPU design that made mobile computing possible. Sophie Wilson is one of the leading lights of modern CPU design.
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