Podcast appearances and mentions of sophie wilson

As April 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the Arm architecture, I am re-releasing my episode with Steve Furber. What began as an ambitious project in a small corner of Cambridge, U.K., has grown into the world's most widely adopted computing architecture, now powering billions of devices – from sensors, smartphones and laptops to vehicles, datacenters and beyond.It was at 3pm on 26th April 1985, the chip that led to the world's first commercial RISC processor powered up... and changed the world!Steve Furber is a seminal computer scientist, mathematician and hardware designer whose work includes the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor which can be found in over 100 billion devices today.Steve studied both Maths followed by a PhD in Aerodynamics at Cambridge University before joining Herman Hauser and Chris Curry at Acorn Computers. For the next decade, he would work with a first-class team of engineers and designers to revolutionise the home computer market before he and Sophie Wilson went on to design the ARM processor with a relatively small team and budget and with little inkling of the consequence it might bring to the world.In 1990, Steve left Acorn moved to Manchester where he is now Professor of Computer Engineering at the university there. He was charged with leading research into asynchronous systems, low-power electronics and neural engineering which  led to the SpiNNaker project - a super computer incorporating a million ARM processors which are optimised for computational neuroscience. He is basically trying to reverse engineer the brain – a lofty ambition even by his own admission.In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss Steve's life journey from studying maths with professors such as the famed John Conway and Sir James Lighthill to the highs and lows of building the BBC Micro and the story behind the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor.I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Steve and am overly excited about his SpiNNaker project which we also discuss today.Enjoy!--------------Steve Furber info / SpiNNaker info / Micro Men filmDanielle on Twitter @daniellenewnham and  Instagram @daniellenewnham   / Newsletter Watch Steve and Sophie talk about those early arm days tomorrow - buy your tickets here.

In this week's episode, Elliott is joined once again by his close friend Simon and a second guest Sophie to expand on last week's ideas with a female perspective. Full of cancelable moments and laughter, honest truths and heart-to-hearts, the trio tackles big issues such as online masculinity influencers, domestic violence, womens sports, and relationship dynamics. No topic is off limits and no question is too far-fetched for this team to handle. IG | @mindyourhead.podcast Hit FOLLOW or SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss out on an episode! If you like these episodes, leave us a review, tell your friends about us, or tag us on social media!  This podcast was brought to you by On Track Studio. www.ontrackstudio.com.au @sophie.on.track.studio For advertising opportunities please email hello@ontrackstudio.com.au

In this episode, I am joined by Poddy legend, Sophie Wilson. OG's will remember Sophie from our last episode where we discussed fat loss, but today is all about mindset! Mindset is a huge part of our health and fitness journey, and really the key to smashing our goals. We dive into the importance of being aware of blaming external factors for interfering with our progress and how your success comes from doing and not always achieving. Yes of course we celebrate our achievements but it's crucial to look at the positive habits you have as evidence to remind you that you're a f*cking doer! MORE FROM EAT LIKE RUBY;→ https://www.instagram.com/eat_like_ruby/

Breed is critical to any livestock operation and an active breeding programme helps farmers to develop their herd around particular beneficial traits. In the run up to the British Cattle Breeders Club conference this January, we've been taking an in-depth look at how the traits and characteristics needed for regenerative farming differ from mainstream cattle production. We'll hear from three farmers with active on-farm breeding programmes - Sophie Wilson from Starveall Dairy - Silas Hedley Lawrence from FAI Farms - and Phyllis van Amburgh from Dharma Lea in the USA. We also hear from Rob Havard, who runs the breeding farm, Phepson Angus. From 8point9.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/farmgate/message

In this episode, our host Tori sits down with the brilliant mind behind our latest curated furniture collection The Conscious Collection, Sophie Wilson. Join us as Sophie unveils the thought process and inspirations that brought The Conscious Collection to life. Dive deep into the world of sustainable design and discover how Sophie's passion for eco-conscious living shaped every piece in this remarkable furniture line. Discover the full collection here: https://www.boxnine7.com/the-conscious-collection

In this week's episode of Mind Your Head, Elliott welcomes the incredible Sophie Wilson, a podcast studio owner and marketing wizard. Together, they embark on a heartfelt exploration of Sophie's life, delving into the events that have shaped her into the remarkable person she is today.Through personal anecdotes, Sophie shares her courageous journey, navigating the challenges of her parents' divorce and the devastating loss of her mother. She opens up about a traumatic experience of sexual assault, which tested her strength and resilience in unimaginable ways. Her ability to rise above these hardships is truly inspiring, and it has shaped her into the powerful woman and successful business owner admired by many.Throughout the conversation, they venture into important societal topics such as victim blaming, rape culture, and the lack of education surrounding these sensitive issues. Sophie provides valuable insights into her own healing process and emphasises the significance of not allowing others' perceptions to limit oneself from embracing openness and vulnerability.Tune in to this episode for a thought-provoking discussion that reminds us of the power of resilience, the importance of empathy, and the potential for growth in the face of adversity.Trigger Warning: This podcast episode discusses topics related to mental health, including sexual assault, and suicide. Listener discretion is advised, as this content may be triggering or distressing to some individuals. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please seek professional help or contact a crisis hotline immediately.IG | @mind.your.head.podcastHit FOLLOW or SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss out on an episode!If you like these episodes, leave us a review, tell your friends about us, or tag us on social media! This podcast was brought to you by On Track Studio.www.ontrackstudio.com.au@sophie.on.track.studioFor advertising opportunities please email hello@ontrackstudio.com.au

Thinking about starting a podcast this year but unsure as to whether it's worth it? This ones for you. In this weeks episode, I'm joined by podcast studio owner & marketing/storytelling wiz Sophie Wilson to give you all the info you need to know about creating epic audio content that could be setting your soul on fire & blowing up your business - in the BEST way.Listen in as we discuss:The unspoken inner healing that podcasting facilitates for the the creatorPerception vs reality of running a podcastThe revenue, sales & growth ROI of creating in the audio spaceHow to overcome the fear of vulnerability and leverage it to create impactful episodesInsider knowledge on the future of podcasting and the benefits of starting today.Connect With Sophie:Follow On IGWork With SophieLinks To Mentioned:Join the Waitlist for the Esoteric Entrepreneur ClubApplication for Premium Private Business Coaching with JazCONNECT WITH JAZ:Follow & Connect IG Work With JBSubscribe to YouTube Channel to Watch The Podcast

Do you want to learn the secrets of creating a successful podcast and building a lasting brand? In this episode, I sit down with Sophie from On Track Studio, and we dive deep into her journey of navigating a new identity and building a thriving podcast studio business. Join us as we discuss the power of creating big brand energy through content, the importance of an audience-centric mindset, and the keys to building a cult-like following through branding, consistency, and sustainability. We also share tips for expanding your brand exposure through YouTube and SEO tools and the importance of honing your skills and believing in your potential for limitless success.Plus, Sophie shares her personal journey of overcoming grief and failure to achieve success and the role that vulnerability and resilience play in building meaningful connections through podcasting. Don't miss this inspiring and insightful conversation!Learn more about Sophie:Sophie is a marketer who started a podcast studio to give purpose-built brands and creators the means to bring more to their audience than what a two-dimensional social media feed can allow. Now, she services creators at all levels to bring depth to their content through 1:1 coaching, programs and done-for-you podcast and YouTube production packages.CONNECT WITH SOPHIE:@sophie.on.track.studio@on.track.studioCONNECT WITH HAYLEY:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hayleyjunelloyd/Pathway to 6 Mastermind: http://hayleylloyd.com/pathway-to-six/Authority Mastermind: https://forms.clickup.com/6918926/f/6k4re-7661/Q83JU3LSIY8D3TYHG4

In this episode, Riley is joined by her Podcast Manager and owner of On Track Studio, Sophie Wilson, to unpack Riley's life over the month - from hosting and attending retreats to reflections about Riley's relationships. By listening you will hear  valuable advice on topics such as perception, living authentically, and understanding the power of the ego.Join the FB community here. Join Riley's new master class here. Link to Riley's new offer Evolution hehe can you please provide the link here

Today's episode is a BONUS episode, brought to you from an interview Jessie did with past client and host of the Big Brand Energy Podcast, Sophie Wilson. For this episode, Sophie has Jessie Williams on her pod to chat about the ins and outs of building a successful business and embodying big brand energy. They discuss what it takes to have success by doing inner work, comparison, being misunderstood in business, embodying powerful obnoxious energy and shadow work. Jessie shares her opinions on success, failure & her views on selling.   www.jessiewilliams.com.au @jessiewilliams    Want to find Sophie? @sophie.on.track.studio Want to work with Sophie? @on.track.studio.au Want to listen to the Big Brand Energy Podcast? Spotify or Apple Podcasts Or checkout the BBE website: www.ontrackstudio.com.au

Steve Furber is a seminal computer scientist, mathematician and hardware designer whose work includes the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor which can be found in over 100 billion devices today.Steve studied both Maths followed by a PhD in Aerodynamics at Cambridge University before joining Herman Hauser and Chris Curry at Acorn Computers. For the next decade, he would work with a first-class team of engineers and designers to revolutionise the home computer market before he and Sophie Wilson went on to design the ARM processor with a relatively small team and budget and with little inkling of the consequence it might bring to the world.In 1990, Steve left Acorn moved to Manchester where he is now Professor of Computer Engineering at the university there. He was charged with leading research into asynchronous systems, low-power electronics and neural engineering which  led to the SpiNNaker project - a super computer incorporating a million ARM processors which are optimised for computational neuroscience. He is basically trying to reverse engineer the brain – a lofty ambition even by his own admission.In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss Steve's life journey from studying maths with professors such as the famed John Conway and Sir James Lighthill to the highs and lows of building the BBC Micro and the story behind the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor.I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Steve and am overly excited about his SpiNNaker project which we also discuss today.Enjoy!--------------Steve Furber info / SpiNNaker info / Micro Men filmDanielle on Twitter @daniellenewnham and  Instagram @daniellenewnham   / Newsletter 

Episode: 2865 Computer Divide: The Future of Microprocessors.  Today, two roads.

In this week's episode, Rod is joined by Sophie, Founder of On Track Studio. Having known each other for many years, these two have navigated so many versions of themselves and can speak to letting go of projections on one another and forming countless new versions of their relationship. Sophie is prompted to reflect on how she started On Track Studio and shares what internal work she has done to achieve business and personal success. This episode speaks to why committing to finding stillness everyday is the catalyst to feeling fulfilled and living the life you desire.To keep up to date with Sophie follow her here or visit his website here. Follow our meditation page and check out our Stillness Everyday Journal here!Also check out our studio here or visit our website here.Make sure you hit SUBSCRIBE and FOLLOW to make sure you don't miss out on more STILLNESS EVERYDAY episodes. This podcast was brought to you by On Track Studio.www.ontrackstudio.com.au@sophie.on.track.studioFor advertising opportunities please email hello@ontrackstudio.com.au

Today the government launches its much awaited Women's Health Strategy for England. For generations women have lived with a healthcare system that is designed by men, for men. Despite making up 50 percent of the population and living longer than men, women have been under-represented in research, with little known about some female-specific issues, spending a greater proportion of their lives in ill health and disability, with growing geographic inequalities in women's life expectancy. Having spoken to nearly 100,000 women the government say this will reset the dial on women's health. Krupa Padhy speaks to Women's Health Minister Maria Caulfield and Dame Professor Lesley Regan the newly appointed Women's Health Ambassador. Tonight England's Lionesses will take on Spain in the quarter finals. The two teams will go head to head in Brighton, in what will be the first knockout game of the tournament. Although both are strong teams, England and Spain have previously competed against each other 15 times resulting in the Lionesses winning twice as many games as their opponents. England have also been scoring more goals than any team has ever done in the group stage. BBC Women's Sport Reporter, Jo Currie gives us an overview of the brilliant Lionesses taking to the pitch this year. Tim Berners Lee is often credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web. But who are some of the women who played an instrumental role in building the internet and the technology that surrounds it? We hear about Karen Spärck Jones, Sophie Wilson and Hedy Lamarr. And with a fifth of women in the UK experiencing online harassment and abuse, how can the internet be made more friendly to women? Krupa Padhy speaks to Charlotte Webb, who teaches internet equality at University of the Arts London and is the co-founder of the Feminist Internet and to Dame Stephanie Shirley who founded an all-women software company in the 1960s. Presenter: Krupa Padhy Producer: Kirsty Starkey Interviewed Guest: Marie Caulfield Interviewed Guest: Dame Professor Lesley Regan Interviewed Guest: Catherine Burns Interviewed Guest: Jo Currie Interviewed Guest: Dame Stephanie Shirley Interviewed Guest: Charlotte Webb

Some of our Hub leaders talk on "The Body of Christ" from 1 Corinthians 12. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/burnyouth/message

Part 3 of our "Talking To Jesus" series focuses on prayer. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/burnyouth/message

This week we discuss Apple's all-in-one keyboard computer patent. Apple launches inaugural Entrepreneur Camp for Latin founders. Apple to rolls out iOS 15.4. We also cover Apple's Peek Performance Event introducing M1 Ultra, Mac Studio, Studio Display, iPhone SE 5G, iPad Air with M1, and Friday Night Football on Apple TV+. Picks: Hello Mac OSX Tiger, Sophie Wilson creator of the ARM Instruction Set.

In Episode 31 - We talk to Sophie Wilson who is the CEO and founder of PR and Marketing Company Tuesday Media. Sophie relocated back to her home city of Liverpool after suffering from long covid for 17 months after being based in the south for 20 years. She talks about what it's like being back in the city and starting her business afresh. We also speak to Max McDonough who is the proprietor of Raw Hide Custom. Max creates handmade leather goods from his base at Make Liverpool on the North Docks and has had his work featured in magazine such as GQ. https://www.balticbroadband.com/

Life gets busy! And it can be tough to stay on track to achieve your health and fitness goals. Today Emily is running a solo Ep, however the producer and business owner of On Track Studio, Sophie Wilson, will also be chiming in to share her perspective on Emily's healthy hacks and tips for the busy gal that will help you achieve your health and fitness goals. If you're a busy gal struggling to fit time in your day to prioritise your health and fitness, or maybe just need a reminder on how to manage your time effectively, listen to this podcast!+ To keep updated with Emily on Insta follow @the_sweatclub + To follow all things  DON'T SWEAT IT  follow @dontsweatit_podcast+ Hit FOLLOW or SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss out on Don't Sweat It an episode!+ Be sure to share this with a friend and leave a review if you LOVED this episode!This podcast was brought to you by On Track Studio.www.ontrackstudio.com.au@on.track.studioFor advertising opportunities please email hello@ontrackstudio.com.auSUNSHINE COAST GALS AND GUYS! To book a session with Em visit - https://www.thesweatclub.com.au/train-with-me 

En este episodio, grabado con el apoyo de StreamYard, nos visita de nuevo Irene Díaz Valenzuela, una crack en Java que viene a hablarnos en esta ocasión sobre la historia de la informática. Nos ha relatado cómo empezó su interés por conocer la historia, y cómo empezó a leer y a investigar sobre el tema. Durante el episodio hablamos largo y tendido sobre el papel de las mujeres en la informática, Irene nos ha mencionado un montón de referentes con historias fascinantes, en resumen: casi en cada lenguaje de programación hubo una mujer implicada. Coge papel y boli mientras escuchas el podcast porque los vas a necesitar, ¡Irene sabe un montón de curiosidades! Te dejamos aquí algunas de las referencias que hemos nombrado durante el episodio: la serie "Halt and catch fire", las "refrigerator ladies", la película "Hidden figures", Mary Kenneth Keller la primera doctora en informática del mundo, Sophie Wilson una de las creadoras de los procesadores ARM, el cómic de científicas de la universidad de Sevilla: “Científicas: Pasado, Presente y Futuro”, el libro "Uncanny Valley" de Anna Wiener sobre la cultura de las startups, la web del museo de computación del Reino unido: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/ Cuéntanos tu opinión a través de twitter :) ¿Cuáles son tus hitos favoritos de la historia de la informática?

Recorded live at Burn Youth. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/burnyouth/message

Let's oversimplify something in the computing world. Which is what you have to do when writing about history. You have to put your blinders on so you can get to the heart of a given topic without overcomplicating the story being told. And in the evolution of technology we can't mention all of the advances that lead to each subsequent evolution. It's wonderful and frustrating all at the same time. And that value judgement of what goes in and what doesn't can be tough.  Let's start with the fact that there are two main types of processors in our devices. There's the x86 chipset developed by Intel and AMD and then there's the RISC-based processors, which are ARM and for the old school people, also include PowerPC and SPARC. Today we're going to set aside the x86 chipset that was dominant for so long and focus on how the RISC and so ARM family emerged.    First, let's think about what the main difference is between ARM and x86. RISC and so ARM chips have a focus on reducing the number of instructions required to perform a task to as few as possible, and so RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. Intel, other than the Atom series chips, with the x86 chips has focused on high performance and high throughput. Big and fast, no matter how much power and cooling is necessary.  The ARM processor requires simpler instructions which means there's less logic and so more instructions are required to perform certain logical operations. This increases memory and can increase the amount of time to complete an execution, which ARM developers address with techniques like pipelining, or instruction-level parallelism on a processor. Seymour Cray came up with this to split up instructions so each core or processor handles a different one and so Star, Amdahl and then ARM implemented it as well.  The X86 chips are Complex Instruction Set Computing chips, or CISC. Those will do larger, more complicated tasks, like computing floating point integers or memory searches, on the chip. That often requires more consistent and larger amounts of power. ARM chips are built for low power. The reduced complexity of operations is one reason but also it's in the design philosophy. This means less heat syncs and often accounting for less consistent streams of power. This 130 watt x86 vs 5 watt ARM can mean slightly lower clock speeds but the chips can cost more as people will spend less in heat syncs and power supplies. This also makes the ARM excellent for mobile devices.  The inexpensive MOS 6502 chips helped revolutionize the personal computing industry in 1975, finding their way into the Apple II and a number of early computers. They were RISC-like but CISC-like as well. They took some of the instruction set architecture family from the IBM System/360 through to the PDP, General Nova, Intel 8080, Zylog, and so after the emergence of Windows, the Intel finally captured the personal computing market and the x86 flourished.  But the RISC architecture actually goes back to the ACE, developed in 1946 by Alan Turing. It wasn't until the 1970s that Carver Mead from Caltech and Lynn Conway from Xerox PARC saw that the number of transistors was going to plateau on chips while workloads on chips were growing exponentially. ARPA and other agencies needed more and more instructions, so they instigated what we now refer to as the VLSI project, a DARPA program initiated by Bob Kahn to push into the 32-bit world. They would provide funding to different universities, including Stanford and the University of North Carolina.  Out of those projects, we saw the Geometry Engine, which led to a number of computer aided design, or CAD efforts, to aid in chip design. Those workstations, when linked together, evolved into tools used on the Stanford University Network, or SUN, which would effectively spin out of Stanford as Sun Microsystems. And across the bay at Berkeley we got a standardized Unix implementation that could use the tools being developed in Berkely Software Distribution, or BSD, which would eventually become the operating system used by Sun, SGI, and now OpenBSD and other variants.  And the efforts from the VLSI project led to Berkely RISC in 1980 and Stanford MIPS as well as the multi chip wafer.The leader of that Berkeley RISC project was David Patterson who still serves as vice chair of the RISC-V Foundation. The chips would add more and more registers but with less specializations. This led to the need for more memory. But UC Berkeley students shipped a faster ship than was otherwise on the market in 1981. And the RISC II was usually double or triple the speed of the Motorola 68000.  That led to the Sun SPARC and DEC Alpha. There was another company paying attention to what was happening in the RISC project: Acorn Computers. They had been looking into using the 6502 processor until they came across the scholarly works coming out of Berkeley about their RISC project. Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber from Acorn then got to work building an instruction set for the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM for short. They had the first ARM working by 1985, which they used to build the Acorn Archimedes. The ARM2 would be faster than the Intel 80286 and by 1990, Apple was looking for a chip for the Apple Newton. A new company called Advanced RISC Machines or Arm would be founded, and from there they grew, with Apple being a shareholder through the 90s. By 1992, they were up to the ARM6 and the ARM610 was used for the Newton. DEC licensed the ARM architecture to develop the StrongARMSelling chips to other companies. Acorn would be broken up in 1998 and parts sold off, but ARM would live on until acquired by Softbank for $32 billion in 2016. Softbank is  currently in acquisition talks to sell ARM to Nvidia for $40 billion.  Meanwhile, John Cocke at IBM had been working on the RISC concepts since 1975 for embedded systems and by 1982 moved on to start developing their own 32-bit RISC chips. This led to the POWER instruction set which they shipped in 1990 as the RISC System/6000, or as we called them at the time, the RS/6000. They scaled that down to the Power PC and in 1991 forged an alliance with Motorola and Apple. DEC designed the Alpha. It seemed as though the computer industry was Microsoft and Intel vs the rest of the world, using a RISC architecture. But by 2004 the alliance between Apple, Motorola, and IBM began to unravel and by 2006 Apple moved the Mac to an Intel processor. But something was changing in computing. Apple shipped the iPod back in 2001, effectively ushering in the era of mobile devices. By 2007, Apple released the first iPhone, which shipped with a Samsung ARM.  You see, the interesting thing about ARM is they don't fab chips, like Intel - they license technology and designs. Apple licensed the Cortex-A8 from ARM for the iPhone 3GS by 2009 but had an ambitious lineup of tablets and phones in the pipeline. And so in 2010 did something new: they made their own system on a chip, or SoC. Continuing to license some ARM technology, Apple pushed on, getting between 800MHz to 1 GHz out of the chip and using it to power the iPhone 4, the first iPad, and the long overdue second-generation Apple TV. The next year came the A5, used in the iPad 2 and first iPad Mini, then the A6 at 1.3 GHz for the iPhone 5, the A7 for the iPhone 5s, iPad Air. That was the first 64-bit consumer SoC. In 2014, Apple released the A8 processor for the iPhone 6, which came in speeds ranging from 1.1GHz to the 1.5 GHz chip in the 4th generation Apple TV. By 2015, Apple was up to the A9, which clocked in at 1.85 GHz for the iPhone 6s. Then we got the A10 in 2016, the A11 in 2017, the A12 in 2018, A13 in 2019, A14 in 2020 with neural engines, 4 GPUs, and 11.8 billion transistors compared to the 30,000 in the original ARM.  And it's not just Apple. Samsung has been on a similar tear, firing up the Exynos line in 2011 and continuing to license the ARM up to Cortex-A55 with similar features to the Apple chips, namely used on the Samsung Galaxy A21. And the Snapdragon. And the Broadcoms.  In fact, the Broadcom SoC was used in the Raspberry Pi (developed in association with Broadcom) in 2012. The 5 models of the Pi helped bring on a mobile and IoT revolution.  And so nearly every mobile device now ships with an ARM chip as do many a device we place around our homes so our digital assistants can help run our lives. Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced, well over 10 for every human on the planet. And the number is about to grow even more rapidly. Apple surprised many by announcing they were leaving Intel to design their own chips for the Mac.  Given that the PowerPC chips were RISC, the ARM chips in the mobile devices are RISC, and the history Apple has with the platform, it's no surprise that Apple is going back that direction with the M1, Apple's first system on a chip for a Mac. And the new MacBook Pro screams. Even software running in Rosetta 2 on my M1 MacBook is faster than on my Intel MacBook. And at 16 billion transistors, with an 8 core GPU and a 16 core neural engine, I'm sure developers are hard at work developing the M3 on these new devices (since you know, I assume the M2 is done by now). What's crazy is, I haven't felt like Intel had a competitor other than AMD in the CPU space since Apple switched from the PowerPC. Actually, those weren't great days. I haven't felt that way since I realized no one but me had a DEC Alpha or when I took the SPARC off my desk so I could play Civilization finally.  And this revolution has been a constant stream of evolutions, 40 years in the making. It started with an ARPA grant, but various evolutions from there died out. And so really, it all started with Sophie Wilson. She helped give us the BBC Micro and the ARM. She was part of the move to Element 14 from Acorn Computers and then ended up at Broadcom when they bought the company in 2000 and continues to act as the Director of IC Design. We can definitely thank ARPA for sprinkling funds around prominent universities to get us past 10,000 transistors on a chip. Given that chips continue to proceed at such a lightning pace, I can't imagine where we'll be at in another 40 years. But we owe her (and her coworkers at Acorn and the team at VLSI, now NXP Semiconductors) for their hard work and innovations.

Hey guys! Welcome back to Three's Not A Crowd! This week we were joined by the lovely Sophie Wilson, who is the head of wardrobe over on the UK tour of SIX the musical! We talk all things wardrobe and costume, and because it's us we also throw in some questions to spark some very interesting conversations involving sheep, shoes and tv shows! Make sure you follow us over on Instagram @threesnotacrowd_ and our Twitter page @threesnotacrowd for all the updates and we'll see you again next week!! Erin, Melissa and Emily xo

The BBC Micro - Interview with Hermann Hauser Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode 99 for May 2020 of the Floppy Days Podcast, where we look at home computers of the 70’s and 80’s across the globe, not just the U.S. This episode is one in a series of episodes on one of the iconic British machines that was so important to the home computer revolution: The BBC Micro.  In episode 97, I had an interview with one of the key members of the BBC Micro team: Mr. Steve Furber.  In this episode, with Steve’s help, I was able to get an interview with another key member of that team: Mr. Hermann Hauser. Last episode (#98) I summarized the history of the BBC Micro and I don’t want to repeat that here, but I want to give you just a bit of information about Hermann to help set the stage for the interview to follow: Chris Curry and Mr. Hauser set up a company called Acorn Computer Ltd. and in January 1979 they launched their first product: a microcomputer kit named Acorn System 75.  The name Acorn was chosen because the microcomputer system was to be expandable and growth-oriented and appeared before "Apple Computer" in a telephone directory. Their follow-up product was a microcomputer called the Atom.  After it had been released into the market, Acorn (due to an idea proposed by Hermann) decided to build an improved 6502-based machine with far greater expansion capabilities: the Proton. Hauser quickly pulled in Steve Furber (who had been working for Acorn on a voluntary basis) and Sophie Wilson to help complete a revised version of the Proton which met the specifications that the British Broadcasting Corporation was shopping around to find a partner for their planned literacy program.  BBC visited Acorn and were given a demonstration of the Proton. Shortly afterwards, the literacy program computer contract was awarded to Acorn, and the Proton was launched in December 1981 as the BBC Micro. Hermann Hauser believes that if he had had just a little more foresight all those years ago, the world would now talk about Acorn compatible rather than IBM compatible computers.  Wouldn’t that be interesting? Anyway, I’m very excited and proud to have gotten an interview with Hermann and I enjoyed talking with him very much.  I hope you enjoy it as well. I’m still planning, in upcoming episodes, to cover all of the usual topics on the Beeb, such as its history in depth, tech specs, modern upgrades, Web sites and a ton of other information about this machine. Before we jump into the interview, I’ll spend just a moment to let you know about any new acquisitions I’ve managed to get for the hobby and any hobby-related things I’ve been working on. Please enjoy! Links Mentioned in the Show: New Acquisitions Heathkit ET-3400 Microprocessor Trainer - https://www.vintage-computer.com/heathkit3400.shtml  ET-3400 Microprocessors Book 1 - https://archive.org/details/6800-Microprocessors-Book-1and-2-Heathkit-1985  Oh! Pascal by Michael Clancy - https://www.amazon.com/Oh-PASCAL-Doug-Cooper/dp/0393954455  Software Tools in Pascal - Brian Kernighan - https://www.amazon.com/Software-Tools-Pascal-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0201103427/  Personal Pascal for the Atari ST  https://www.amazon.com/Personal-Pascal-Atari-1040-Version/dp/B000Q9VAOU  https://www.atarimagazines.com/v5n1/pascalandmodula2.html Upcoming Shows July 24-25, KansasFest - https://www.kansasfest.org/ (virtual) cost $20 to register August 1-2, VCF West, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA - http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west/ - going virtual Aug. 20 - Aug. 23, 2020, Fujiama, Lengenfeld, Germany - http://abbuc.de/~atarixle/fuji/2020/  September 12-13, VCF Midwest, Elmhurst, IL - http://vcfmw.org/  October 10 - 12, VCF East, InfoAge Science Center, Wall, NJ - http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-east/ NOTE: You can order a t-shirt to support the VCF events at http://vcfed.org/wp/t-shirts/ for $20 + shipping October 24, Chicago TI International World Faire, Evanston Public Library, Evanston, IL - http://chicagotiug.sdf.org/faire/  October 30 - November 1, 2020, Tandy Assembly, Springfield, OH - http://www.tandyassembly.com/  December ?, World of Commodore, Mississauga (Toronto), Ontario, Canada - https://www.tpug.ca/ 

The Microchip Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of the microchip, or microprocessor. This was a hard episode, because it was the culmination of so many technologies. You don't know where to stop telling the story - and you find yourself writing a chronological story in reverse chronological order. But few advancements have impacted humanity the way the introduction of the microprocessor has. Given that most technological advances are a convergence of otherwise disparate technologies, we'll start the story of the microchip with the obvious choice: the light bulb. Thomas Edison first demonstrated the carbon filament light bulb in 1879. William Joseph Hammer, an inventor working with Edison, then noted that if he added another electrode to a heated filament bulb that it would glow around the positive pole in the vacuum of the bulb and blacken the wire and the bulb around the negative pole. 25 years later, John Ambrose Fleming demonstrated that if that extra electrode is made more positive than the filament the current flows through the vacuum and that the current could only flow from the filament to the electrode and not the other direction. This converted AC signals to DC and represented a boolean gate. In the 1904 Fleming was granted Great Britain's patent number 24850 for the vacuum tube, ushering in the era of electronics. Over the next few decades, researchers continued to work with these tubes. Eccles and Jordan invented the flip-flop circuit at London's City and Guilds Technical College in 1918, receiving a patent for what they called the Eccles-Jordan Trigger Circuit in 1920. Now, English mathematician George Boole back in the earlier part of the 1800s had developed Boolean algebra. Here he created a system where logical statements could be made in mathematical terms. Those could then be performed using math on the symbols. Only a 0 or a 1 could be used. It took awhile, John Vincent Atanasoff and grad student Clifford Berry harnessed the circuits in the Atanasoff-Berry computer in 1938 at Iowa State University and using Boolean algebra, successfully solved linear equations but never finished the device due to World War II, when a number of other technological advancements happened, including the development of the ENIAC by John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert from the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the US Army Ordinance Corps, starting in 1943. By the time it was taken out of operation, the ENIAC had 20,000 of these tubes. Each digit in an algorithm required 36 tubes. Ten digit numbers could be multiplied at 357 per second, showing the first true use of a computer. John Von Neumann was the first to actually use the ENIAC when they used one million punch cards to run the computations that helped propel the development of the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The creators would leave the University and found the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Out of that later would come the Univac and the ancestor of todays Unisys Corporation. These early computers used vacuum tubes to replace gears that were in previous counting machines and represented the First Generation. But the tubes for the flip-flop circuits were expensive and had to be replaced way too often. The second generation of computers used transistors instead of vacuum tubes for logic circuits. The integrated circuit is basically a wire set into silicon or germanium that can be set to on or off based on the properties of the material. These replaced vacuum tubes in computers to provide the foundation of the boolean logic. You know, the zeros and ones that computers are famous for. As with most modern technologies the integrated circuit owes its origin to a number of different technologies that came before it was able to be useful in computers. This includes the three primary components of the circuit: the transistor, resistor, and capacitor. The silicon that chips are so famous for was actually discovered by Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1824. He heated potassium chips in a silica container and washed away the residue and viola - an element! The transistor is a semiconducting device that has three connections that amplify data. One is the source, which is connected to the negative terminal on a battery. The second is the drain, and is a positive terminal that, when touched to the gate (the third connection), the transistor allows electricity through. Transistors then acts as an on/off switch. The fact they can be on or off is the foundation for Boolean logic in modern computing. The resistor controls the flow of electricity and is used to control the levels and terminate lines. An integrated circuit is also built using silicon but you print the pattern into the circuit using lithography rather than painstakingly putting little wires where they need to go like radio operators did with the Cats Whisker all those years ago. The idea of the transistor goes back to the mid-30s when William Shockley took the idea of a cat's wicker, or fine wire touching a galena crystal. The radio operator moved the wire to different parts of the crystal to pick up different radio signals. Solid state physics was born when Shockley, who first studied at Cal Tech and then got his PhD in Physics, started working on a way to make these useable in every day electronics. After a decade in the trenches, Bell gave him John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who successfully finished the invention in 1947. Shockley went on to design a new and better transistor, known as a bipolar transistor and helped move us from vacuum tubes, which were bulky and needed a lot of power, to first gernanium, which they used initially and then to silicon. Shockley got a Nobel Prize in physics for his work and was able to recruit a team of extremely talented young PhDs to help work on new semiconductor devices. He became increasingly frustrated with Bell and took a leave of absence. Shockley moved back to his hometown of Palo Alto, California and started a new company called the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He had some ideas that were way before his time and wasn't exactly easy to work with. He pushed the chip industry forward but in the process spawned a mass exodus of employees that went to Fairchild in 1957. He called them the “Traitorous 8” to create what would be Fairchild Semiconductors. The alumni of Shockley Labs ended up spawning 65 companies over the next 20 years that laid foundation of the microchip industry to this day, including Intel. . If he were easier to work with, we might not have had the innovation that we've seen if not for Shockley's abbrasiveness! All of these silicon chip makers being in a small area of California then led to that area getting the Silicon Valley moniker, given all the chip makers located there. At this point, people were starting to experiment with computers using transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The University of Manchester created the Transistor Computer in 1953. The first fully transistorized computer came in 1955 with the Harwell CADET, MIT started work on the TX-0 in 1956, and the THOR guidance computer for ICBMs came in 1957. But the IBM 608 was the first commercial all-transistor solid-state computer. The RCA 501, Philco Transac S-1000, and IBM 7070 took us through the age of transistors which continued to get smaller and more compact. At this point, we were really just replacing tubes with transistors. But the integrated circuit would bring us into the third generation of computers. The integrated circuit is an electronic device that has all of the functional blocks put on the same piece of silicon. So the transistor, or multiple transistors, is printed into one block. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments patented the first miniaturized electronic circuit in 1959, which used germanium and external wires and was really more of a hybrid integrated Circuit. Later in 1959, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invented the first truly monolithic integrated circuit, which he received a patent for. While doing so independently, they are considered the creators of the integrated circuit. The third generation of computers was from 1964 to 1971, and saw the introduction of metal-oxide-silicon and printing circuits with photolithography. In 1965 Gordon Moore, also of Fairchild at the time, observed that the number of transistors, resistors, diodes, capacitors, and other components that could be shoved into a chip was doubling about every year and published an article with this observation in Electronics Magazine, forecasting what's now known as Moore's Law. The integrated circuit gave us the DEC PDP and later the IBM S/360 series of computers, making computers smaller, and brought us into a world where we could write code in COBOL and FORTRAN. A microprocessor is one type of integrated circuit. They're also used in audio amplifiers, analog integrated circuits, clocks, interfaces, etc. But in the early 60s, the Minuteman missal program and the US Navy contracts were practically the only ones using these chips, at this point numbering in the hundreds, bringing us into the world of the MSI, or medium-scale integration chip. Moore and Noyce left Fairchild and founded NM Electronics in 1968, later renaming the company to Intel, short for Integrated Electronics. Federico Faggin came over in 1970 to lead the MCS-4 family of chips. These along with other chips that were economical to produce started to result in chips finding their way into various consumer products. In fact, the MCS-4 chips, which split RAM , ROM, CPU, and I/O, were designed for the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation and Intel bought the rights back, announcing the chip in Electronic News with an article called “Announcing A New Era In Integrated Electronics.” Together, they built the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor that fit on a single chip. They buried the contacts in multiple layers and introduced 2-phase clocks. Silicon oxide was used to layer integrated circuits onto a single chip. Here, the microprocessor, or CPU, splits the arithmetic and logic unit, or ALU, the bus, the clock, the control unit, and registers up so each can do what they're good at, but live on the same chip. The 1st generation of the microprocessor was from 1971, when these 4-bit chips were mostly used in guidance systems. This boosted the speed by five times. The forming of Intel and the introduction of the 4004 chip can be seen as one of the primary events that propelled us into the evolution of the microprocessor and the fourth generation of computers, which lasted from 1972 to 2010. The Intel 4004 had 2,300 transistors. The Intel 4040 came in 1974, giving us 3,000 transistors. It was still a 4-bit data bus but jumped to 12-bit ROM. The architecture was also from Faggin but the design was carried out by Tom Innes. We were firmly in the era of LSI, or Large Scale Integration chips. These chips were also used in the Busicom calculator, and even in the first pinball game controlled by a microprocessor. But getting a true computer to fit on a chip, or a modern CPU, remained an elusive goal. Texas Instruments ran an ad in Electronics with a caption that the 8008 was a “CPU on a Chip” and attempted to patent the chip, but couldn't make it work. Faggin went to Intel and they did actually make it work, giving us the first 8-bit microprocessor. It was then redesigned in 1972 as the 8080. A year later, the chip was fabricated and then put on the market in 1972. Intel made the R&D money back in 5 months and sparked the idea for Ed Roberts to build The Altair 8800. Motorola and Zilog brought competition in the 6900 and Z-80, which was used in the Tandy TRS-80, one of the first mass produced computers. N-MOSs transistors on chips allowed for new and faster paths and MOS Technology soon joined the fray with the 6501 and 6502 chips in 1975. The 6502 ended up being the chip used in the Apple I, Apple II, NES, Atari 2600, BBC Micro, Commodore PET and Commodore VIC-20. The MOS 6510 variant was then used in the Commodore 64. The 8086 was released in 1978 with 3,000 transistors and marked the transition to Intel's x86 line of chips, setting what would become the standard in future chips. But the IBM wasn't the only place you could find chips. The Motorola 68000 was used in the Sun-1 from Sun Microsystems, the HP 9000, the DEC VAXstation, the Comodore Amiga, the Apple Lisa, the Sinclair QL, the Sega Genesis, and the Mac. The chips were also used in the first HP LaserJet and the Apple LaserWriter and used in a number of embedded systems for years to come. As we rounded the corner into the 80s it was clear that the computer revolution was upon us. A number of computer companies were looking to do more than what they could do with he existing Intel, MOS, and Motorola chips. And ARPA was pushing the boundaries yet again. Carver Mead of Caltech and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC saw the density of transistors in chips starting to plateau. So with DARPA funding they went out looking for ways to push the world into the VLSI era, or Very Large Scale Integration. The VLSI project resulted in the concept of fabless design houses, such as Broadcom, 32-bit graphics, BSD Unix, and RISC processors, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer Processor. Out of the RISC work done at UC Berkely came a number of new options for chips as well. One of these designers, Acorn Computers evaluated a number of chips and decided to develop their own, using VLSI Technology, a company founded by more Fairchild Semiconductor alumni) to manufacture the chip in their foundry. Sophie Wilson, then Roger, worked on an instruction set for the RISC. Out of this came the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM chip. Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced, well over 10 for every human on the planet. You know that fancy new A13 that Apple announced. It uses a licensed ARM core. Another chip that came out of the RISC family was the SUN Sparc. Sun being short for Stanford University Network, co-founder Andy Bchtolsheim, they were close to the action and released the SPARC in 1986. I still have a SPARC 20 I use for this and that at home. Not that SPARC has gone anywhere. They're just made by Oracle now. The Intel 80386 chip was a 32 bit microprocessor released in 1985. The first chip had 275,000 transistors, taking plenty of pages from the lessons learned in the VLSI projects. Compaq built a machine on it, but really the IBM PC/AT made it an accepted standard, although this was the beginning of the end of IBMs hold on the burgeoning computer industry. And AMD, yet another company founded by Fairchild defectors, created the Am386 in 1991, ending Intel's nearly 5 year monopoly on the PC clone industry and ending an era where AMD was a second source of Intel parts but instead was competing with Intel directly. We can thank AMD's aggressive competition with Intel for helping to keep the CPU industry going along Moore's law! At this point transistors were only 1.5 microns in size. Much, much smaller than a cats whisker. The Intel 80486 came in 1989 and again tracking against Moore's Law we hit the first 1 million transistor chip. Remember how Compaq helped end IBM's hold on the PC market? When the Intel 486 came along they went with AMD. This chip was also important because we got L1 caches, meaning that chips didn't need to send instructions to other parts of the motherboard but could do caching internally. From then on, the L1 and later L2 caches would be listed on all chips. We'd finally broken 100MHz! Motorola released the 68050 in 1990, hitting 1.2 Million transistors, and giving Apple the chip that would define the Quadra and also that L1 cache. The DEC Alpha came along in 1992, also a RISC chip, but really kicking off the 64-bit era. While the most technically advanced chip of the day, it never took off and after DEC was acquired by Compaq and Compaq by HP, the IP for the Alpha was sold to Intel in 2001, with the PC industry having just decided they could have all their money. But back to the 90s, ‘cause life was better back when grunge was new. At this point, hobbyists knew what the CPU was but most normal people didn't. The concept that there was a whole Univac on one of these never occurred to most people. But then came the Pentium. Turns out that giving a chip a name and some marketing dollars not only made Intel a household name but solidified their hold on the chip market for decades to come. While the Intel Inside campaign started in 1991, after the Pentium was released in 1993, the case of most computers would have a sticker that said Intel Inside. Intel really one upped everyone. The first Pentium, the P5 or 586 or 80501 had 3.1 million transistors that were 16.7 micrometers. Computers kept getting smaller and cheaper and faster. Apple answered by moving to the PowerPC chip from IBM, which owed much of its design to the RISC. Exactly 10 years after the famous 1984 Super Bowl Commercial, Apple was using a CPU from IBM. Another advance came in 1996 when IBM developed the Power4 chip and gave the world multi-core processors, or a CPU that had multiple CPU cores inside the CPU. Once parallel processing caught up to being able to have processes that consumed the resources on all those cores, we saw Intel's Pentium D, and AMD's Athlon 64 x2 released in May 2005 bringing multi-core architecture to the consumer. This led to even more parallel processing and an explosion in the number of cores helped us continue on with Moore's Law. There are now custom chips that reach into the thousands of cores today, although most laptops have maybe 4 cores in them. Setting multi-core architectures aside for a moment, back to Y2K when Justin Timberlake was still a part of NSYNC. Then came the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, Pentium III, Xeon, Pentium M, Xeon LV, Pentium 4. On the IBM/Apple side, we got the G3 with 6.3 million transistors, G4 with 10.5 million transistors, and the G5 with 58 million transistors and 1,131 feet of copper interconnects, running at 3GHz in 2002 - so much copper that NSYNC broke up that year. The Pentium 4 that year ran at 2.4 GHz and sported 50 million transistors. This is about 1 transistor per dollar made off Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002. I guess Attack of the Clones was better because it grossed over 300 Million that year. Remember how we broke the million transistor mark in 1989? In 2005, Intel started testing Montecito with certain customers. The Titanium-2 64-bit CPU with 1.72 billion transistors, shattering the billion mark and hitting a billion two years earlier than projected. Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Apple would be moving to the Intel processor that year. NeXTSTEP had been happy as a clam on Intel, SPARC or HP RISC so given the rapid advancements from Intel, this seemed like a safe bet and allowed Apple to tell directors in IT departments “see, we play nice now.” And the innovations kept flowing for the next decade and a half. We packed more transistors in, more cache, cleaner clean rooms, faster bus speeds, with Intel owning the computer CPU market and AMD slowly growing from the ashes of Acorn computer into the power-house that AMD cores are today, when embedded in other chips designs. I'd say not much interesting has happened, but it's ALL interesting, except the numbers just sound stupid they're so big. And we had more advances along the way of course, but it started to feel like we were just miniaturizing more and more, allowing us to do much more advanced computing in general. The fifth generation of computing is all about technologies that we today consider advanced. Artificial Intelligence, Parallel Computing, Very High Level Computer Languages, the migration away from desktops to laptops and even smaller devices like smartphones. ULSI, or Ultra Large Scale Integration chips not only tells us that chip designers really have no creativity outside of chip architecture, but also means millions up to tens of billions of transistors on silicon. At the time of this recording, the AMD Epic Rome is the single chip package with the most transistors, at 32 billion. Silicon is the seventh most abundant element in the universe and the second most in the crust of the planet earth. Given that there's more chips than people by a huge percentage, we're lucky we don't have to worry about running out any time soon! We skipped RAM in this episode. But it kinda' deserves its own, since RAM is still following Moore's Law, while the CPU is kinda' lagging again. Maybe it's time for our friends at DARPA to get the kids from Berkley working at VERYUltra Large Scale chips or VULSIs! Or they could sign on to sponsor this podcast! And now I'm going to go take a VERYUltra Large Scale nap. Gentle listeners I hope you can do that as well. Unless you're driving while listening to this. Don't nap while driving. But do have a lovely day. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you!

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the History of chip-maker Broadcom. This is actually two stories. The first starts with a movement called fabless semiconductors. LSI had been part of Control Data Corporation and spun off to make chips. Kickstarted by LSI in the late sixties and early seventies, fabless companies started popping up. These would have what are known as foundries make their chips. The foundries didn't compete with the organizations they were making chips for. This allowed the chip designers to patent, design, and sell chips without having to wield large manufacturing operations. Such was the state of the semiconductor industry when Henry Nicholas met Dr Henry Samueli while working at TRW in the 1980s. Samueli had picked up an interest in electronics early on, while building an AM/FM radio in school. By the 80s he was a professor at UCLA and teamed up with Nicholas, who was a student as well, to form Broadcom in 1991. They began designing integrated circuit (also referred to as a microchip). These are electronic circuits on a small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce had been pioneers in the field in the late 50s and early 60s and by the 80s, there were lots and lots of little transistors in there and people like our two Henry's were fascinated with how to shove as many transistors into as small a chip as possible. So the two decided to leave academia and go for it. They founded Broadcom Corporation, Henry Nicholas' wife made them a logo and they started selling their chips. They made chips for power management, memory controllers, control units, and early mobile devices. But most importantly, they made chips for wi-fi. Today, their chips provide the chips for most every Apple device sold. They also make chips for use in network switches, are responsible for the raspberry pi and more. Samueli holds over 70 patents on his own, although in-all Broadcom has over 20,000, many in mobile, internet of things, and data center! By 1998 sales were good and Broadcom went public. In 2000, UCLA renamed the school of engineering to the Henry Samueli School of Engineering. Nicholas retired from Broadcom in 2003, Samueli bought the Anaheim Ducks in 2005. They continued to grow, make chips, and by 2009 they hit the Fortune 500 list. They were purchased by Avago Technologies in 2016. Samueli became the Chief Technology officer of the new combined company. Wait, who's Avago?!?! Avago started in 1961 as the semiconductor division of Hewlett-Packard. In the 60s they were pioneers in using LEDs in displays. They moved into fiber in the 70s and semiconductors by the 90s, giving the world the optical mouse and cable modems along the way. They spun out of HP in 99 as part of Agilent and then were acquired from there to become Avago in 2005, naming Hock Tan as CEO. The numbers were staggering. Not only did they ship over a billion optical mouse chips, but they also pushed the boudoirs of radio frequency chips, enabling industries like ATMs and cash registers but also gave us IR on computers as a common pre-bluetooth way of wirelessly connecting peripherals. They were also key in innovations giving us wifi+bluetooth+fm combo chips for phones, pushing past the 100Gbps transfer speeds for optical and doing innovative work with touch screens. Their 20,000 patents combined with the Broadcom patents give them over 40,000 patents in just those companies. They went public in 2009 and got pretty good at increasing revenue and margins concurrently. By 2016 they went out and purchased Broadcom for $37 Billion. They helped Broadcom diversify the business and kept the name. They bought Brocade for $5.9B in 2017 and CA for $18.9 billion in 2018. Buying Symantec in 2019 bumps the revenue of Broadcom up from $2.5 billion to 24.6 billion and EBITDA margins from 33 percent to 56 percent. The aggressive acquisitions caught the eyes of Donald Trump who shut down a $117 billion dollar attempted takeover of Qualcomm, a rival of both the old Broadcom and the new Broadcom. Broadcom makes the Trident+ chips, the network interface controllers used in Dell PowerEdge blade servers, the systems on a chip used in the raspberry pi, the wifi chipsets used in the Nexus, the wifi + bluethooth chips used in every iPhone since the iPhone 3GS, the Jericho chip, the tomahawk chip. They employ some of the best chip designers of the day, including Sophie Wilson who designed the instruction set for an early RISC processor and designed the ARM chip in the 80s when she was at Acorn. Ultimately cash is cheap these days. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has proven he can raise and deploy capital quickly. Mostly building on past successes in go-to-market infrastructure. But, if you remember from our previous episode on the history of Symantec, that's exactly what Symantec had been doing when they became a portfolio company! But here's the thing. If you acquire companies and your EBITDA drops, you're stuck. You have to increase revenues and reduce EBITDA. If you can do that in Mergers and Acquisitions, investors are likely to allow you to build as big a company as you want! With or without a unified strategy. But the recent woes of GE should be a warning. As you grow, you have to retool your approach. Otherwise, the layers upon layers of management begin to eat away at those profits. But you dig too far into that and quality suffers, as Symantec learned with their merger and then demerger with Veritas. Think about this. CA is strong in Identity and Access Management, with 1,500 patents. Symantec is strong in endpoint, web, and DLP security, with 3,600 patents. Brocade has over 900 in switching and fiber in the data center. The full device trust and reporting could, if done properly go from the user to the agent on a device to the data center and then down to the chip in a full zero trust model. Or Broadcom could just be a holding company, sitting on around 50,000 patents and eeking out profit where they can. Only time will tell. But the lesson to learn from the history of both of these companies is that if you're innovating, increasing revenues and reducing EBITDA, you too can have tens of billions of dollars, because you've proven to be a great investment.

James Munns is an embedded developer. This episode is sponsored by Smartsheet. Show Notes: ARM (aka Advanced RISC Machine, Acorn RISC Machine) is a RISC architecture for processors. You probably have dozens of them in your house right now. Check out episode 12 of the podcast where I talked to Sophie Wilson, the designer of ARM James Munns’s blog Blog Post: CI for Embedded Systems, which covers some of the testing that was discussed Podcast: Embedded.fm hosted by Elecia and Christopher White. Podcast: New Rustacean hosted by Chris Krycho The Rust Embedded Working Group James Munns is on Twitter. Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical. Music is by Joe Ferg, check out more music on JoeFerg.com!

It's forty five years since the commercial introduction of the first microcomputer chip set which evolved into the modern microprocessor, changing computers from tools for scientists into the engines which power today's electronic consumer appliances. So how did the silicon chip evolve and where might this revolution be heading next? Bridget Kendal is joined by four distinguished computer and internet pioneers who helped spearhead some of the most important inventions of the computer age. Vinod Dham invented the first Pentium micro-processor and went on to become Vice-President at the world's largest chip maker-Intel. His early work in this field earned him the nickname “The Father of the Pentium chip.” Sophie Wilson's computer design was used to build the Acorn Micro-Computer. She also led the development of the ARM microprocessor, found in over half of the world's consumer electronics. David Laws is a technology historian and a curator of the Computer History Museum in California. Dame Wendy Hall is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the UK. She worked alongside Sir Tim Berners Lee on an early version of the World Wide Web. Photo: A silicon chip (Getty Images)

Sophie Wilson designed the Acorn Micro-Computer, the BBC BASIC programming language, and the ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) processor instruction set. Her engineering literally surrounds us every day. This is an extra-special edition of the Cross Cutting Concerns podcast! Once I got Sophie on the line, I didn't want to hang up, so the episode is a bit longer than my normal episode length. Also, the recording was done over a regular phone line instead of a VoIP line, so you will notice that in Sophie's audio. Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical. Theme music is "Crosscutting Concerns" by The Dirty Truckers, check out their music on Amazon or iTunes.

Este é o episódio 31 do Retrocomputaria. Neste episódio, (finalmente!) falamos de mulheres na computação, já que dia 8 de março é o Dia Internacional da Mulher. Falamos de mulheres de importância para a retrocomputação: Carol Shaw (a programadora do jogo aí do lado), Sophie Wilson (nascida Roger Wilson), Jeri Ellsworth, a “Cammy”, a Quinn … Continue lendo Episódio 31 – Mulheres na Computação: Parte B →