Born: 1957

Sophie Wilson is one of Britain’s most influential computer scientists. As a Cambridge undergraduate, she designed her first embedded system - a cow‑feeding controller for a Harrogate company - which led directly to the creation of the hardware for the Acorn System 1, one of the earliest British home‑build microcomputers.

Acorn’s early success with the System 1 led to the Acorn Atom, and in 1981 Wilson extended its BASIC interpreter for the Acorn Proton project. The Proton was selected for the BBC Computer Literacy Project and became the BBC Micro, whose BBC BASIC—written by Wilson—is widely regarded as one of the best BASIC implementations ever produced. More than one million BBC Micros were eventually sold.

In 1983, Wilson designed the instruction set for the ARM1, one of the world’s first RISC processors. Together with hardware designer Steve Furber, she built a chip so efficient that Acorn’s CEO Hermann Hauser recalled, “while IBM spent months simulating their instruction sets on large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her brain.” The first computer to use ARM was the Acorn Archimedes, but the architecture went on to transform global computing. Today, ARM processors power billions of devices including smartphones, tablets, wearables, household electronics, cars, and even supercomputers. 

Wilson also created influential multimedia technologies for Acorn, including ChangeFSI and Acorn Replay, enabling full‑speed video playback on very low‑powered hardware, such as a 25 MHz ARM3 with no floating‑point unit. 

She later served on the board of Eidos plc and acted as a consultant to ARM Ltd after it was spun out from Acorn in 1990. Wilson now works as Chief Architect at Broadcom in Cambridge.

In recognition of her groundbreaking contributions to computing, Sophie Wilson was awarded a CBE on 8 June 2019 for services to computer science.