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Comment by gnfargbl | Hacker News Reader

Someone who is quite well-known, but maybe doesn't get all the credit they really deserve, is Sophie Wilson. Not only did she design the ARM instruction set, but before that she spent fifteen years working on BBC BASIC, the language that so many of us in the UK first learnt to program in. Not sure I would have had a career in the tech sector without her.

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Agreed on the sentiment but 'fifteen years' on BBC Basic can't be right. More like a couple of years.

Great presentation from Sophie here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOnpQgn-9s

According to wikipedia:

>She subsequently joined Acorn Computers and was instrumental in designing the BBC Micro, including the BBC BASIC programming language whose development she led for the next 15 years.

Maybe, but not before she designed the Arm instruction set which is what the parent comment says (possibly I'm being pedantic but it does make a mess of the whole chronology).

You're correct, I got the chronology wrong. From a more careful reading of Wikipedia it looks like ~2 yrs writing most of BBC BASIC, then designing the ARM instruction set, whilst at the same time maintaining BASIC (for another 15 years).

Thinking about all this made me remember https://archive.org/details/arm-archimedes-assembly-language..., which as I recall was a pretty decent introduction to how microprocessors work (of the RISC variety, anyway).

Thanks. I feel really bad about my pedantry now! I didn’t know that she’d carried on maintaining BBC Basic for so long after the BBC Micro era.

Funnily enough I downloaded that ARM assembly language book last week in the course of writing up a couple of blog posts on RISC. (Shameless plug: first one on the IBM 801 should be our over the weekend - link in my bio if of interest.)

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