Some of the story of ARM, including the visit to the 6502 creators | Hacker News Reader

Some of the story of ARM, including the visit to the 6502 creators

reghardware.com

78 pointsfidotron15 comments

The first version of the BBC Arm based Archimedes came with a very simple demo called 'lander' by Braben (of Elite fame).

I got one of the machines through my contacts at the dutch importer of Acorn (ARM stands for "Acorn Risc Machine") and for days after it arrived I could do nothing else but fly around in this real time generated 3D scrolling landscape piloting a flying wedge and shooting up stuff.

It was mesmerizing. Compared to today's game titles it looked very simple but the responsiveness of the machine to the mouse while moving the craft was just amazing. People from all over town came around just to play with it. At that time a typical game that included '3D' would render hidden line removed wire frames at best. Contrast that with Lander displaying filled and shaded quads to generated the landscape, small polygons used to depict smoke and fire and other goodies. There were some short-cuts taken to be able to do the 3D transformations fast enough (for instance, only two directions to move in with a fixed camera angle, 'third person' viewpoint) but whatever the details Lander was a huge step in gaming and worked very well to show off the power of the ARM, even though the game that eventually got released based on that demo was disappointing (it was called virus).

The Acorn version was called Zarch. It was later ported to some other platforms (Amiga, in particular) and renamed Virus.

Lander was awesome.

Here is a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=653Ger80ros

It is absolutely astounding for 1987. I guess that out of an SGI IRIS nothing could achieve anything similar back then.

Best bit:

“The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."

Worst bit:

Showing a photo of Wilson pre-transition. It added nothing to the story, being just a mug shot. I doubt she's happy about that...

Nobody can change the past. Pictures of faces are good in articles about people and events since humans are wired to respond to faces so I don't see that it didn't add anything. Therefore I'm not sure that it was out of line. But it's possible that I'm just tone deaf to to the polite/compassionate thing here.

If you just want to show Wilson's face, you use a current mug shot, not one dating from 20 years ago. If it was a photo of Wilson soldering up a circuit, or working at a computer during the ARN project, then sure, use the photo as it is showing something about the development of the ARM processor, the putative subject of the article. But even then I would hesitate with annotating the photo as being of Wilson, I'd probably tend towards using a generic term, like 'an Acorn employee' or 'one of ARM's designers'.

I actually had no idea about the whole thing. When I read the picture's subtext on the second page with the name Wilson, but was reading about someone I thought to be a woman, I became confused. The next couple paragraphs completely threw me out of the water with the quote "Sophie did it all in her brain", when Sophie is very clearly shown to be male. I had to come here to get some context, or at least make a remark on how the author clearly published the wrong photo.

Not knowing what she cares about in this context, I would agree the picture, while accurate for what it represents, is entirely unnecessary and detracts from the article. Especially for someone like myself, a total stranger, who just didn't know and frankly doesn't care about her personal life that deeply.

That said, the article on ARM is pretty fascinating.

Why? It doesn't seem at all unusual to use from-that-time photos of the other people who worked on the project, does it?

Her Wikipedia article says "In the BBC television drama Micro Men a young Roger Wilson is played by Stefan Butler and Wilson herself makes a cameo appearance as a pub landlady.", I wouldn't think she has that much of a problem with it if she appeared in a movie with herself portrayed pre-transition.

I thought that a little off, too. But, I know nothing about her except for (a) her work (which I've long admired), and (b) that she used to be a man. Perhaps she is generally known just not to care what people might think about (b).

That said, I would have left the photo out myself...

In that part of the article, they were talking about developments from the mid 80s, when that picture was taken. If you were writing an article about, say, the song "Thriller", would you include a picture of Michael Jackson in the iconic red suit, or would you pick one from his days in the Jackson Five, or from the late 2000s?

Wilson underwent a sex change at some point, yes. But is it really useful or right to pretend that at no time did she ever look like a brown-haired man? I will not pretend that I can read her thoughts on the matter, but in my own opinion it would be rather petty and stupid to demand that all pre-transition pictures of oneself be destroyed or never shown again.

I think the preceding sentences provide a bit more context. They were aiming for low power, in order to fit into inexpensive but low tolerance plastic packaging.

However, it was a surprise to find they'd exceeded their target by an order of magnitude.

> ARM has now sold over ten billion processors, ten times more than Intel

I don't think ARM has sold processors for a long time. IP cores and designs, yes, but processors are actual physical items.

Well, that was quite worth the read. Very motivating, what an individual and a small team can accomplish.

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