Before going to university, Wilson had designed and built two electronic systems for
ICI Fibres Research in
Harrogate near her home village. The following year, in the 1977 summer vacation after her first year at university, she designed a small system around a
MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, which was used to electronically control feed for cows. Wilson's success with the cow-feeder project and paper designs for a more general system based on it caught the notice of
Hermann Hauser, at the time a Cambridge postgraduate student. Hauser was impressed, and supported Wilson to stay in Cambridge for the 1978 summer vacation to see if she could turn the design into reality. At the same time a small microcomputer kit, the
MK14, was just being launched by
Science of Cambridge, led by
Chris Curry on behalf of Cambridge electronics businessman
Clive Sinclair. Wilson was convinced she could do better, and Hauser encouraged her to do so, using parts from the MK14. In December 1978 Hauser and Curry set up Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd (CPU), initially as a consultancy designing microprocessor-based control systems. Their first customer was Ace Coin Equipment Ltd, who needed controllers for their
fruit machines, with Wilson designing a device to prevent cigarette lighter sparks triggering payouts. Wilson started at the company in 1979. Taking up the challenge, the Acorn team designed the system including the circuit board and components from Monday to Wednesday, which required fast new
DRAM integrated circuits to be sourced directly from
Hitachi. By Thursday evening, a prototype had been built, but it was only on Friday morning that it was actually working, allowing Wilson (who had managed to catch a few hours sleep in the night) to start porting over an operating system, with it falling to Wilson to develop its operating system and its version of BASIC,
BBC BASIC – at 16K and 16K respectively a fourfold increase on the 4K and 4K of the Atom, including a full set of
floating point mathematical routines. Wilson's "Acorn SuperBASIC" development had reached about 10K by the time of the BBC's visit, and she was keen to preserve the improvements she considered she had made with
Acorn System BASIC over previous versions of the language. But the BBC, in particular their external consultant
John Coll and BBC Engineering's
Richard Russell, were adamant that the core established features of the language needed to be present with recognisably standard syntax. On the other hand extensions that Wilson had written to allow more
structured programming in BASIC chimed closely with the BBC team's ambitions, and
long fully-significant variable names,
repeat/until loops, and multi-line
procedures and
functions with variables that could be
declared local all became hallmarks of BBC BASIC. Work on the system design, operating system, and BASIC language (and fitting everything into the memory available) continued through the summer, and Wilson recalled watching the
wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in July 1981 on a small portable television while attempting to debug and re-solder the prototype. She was a non-executive director of the technology and games company Eidos plc, which bought and created
Eidos Interactive, for the years following its
flotation in 1990. She was a consultant to
ARM Ltd when it was split off from Acorn in 1990. development in 2009 Since the demise of Acorn Computers, Wilson has made a small number of public appearances to talk about work done there.
Firepath Wilson was the Chief Architect of
Broadcom's Firepath processor. Firepath has its history in Acorn Computers, which, after being renamed to
Element 14, was broken up in an acquisition, with the Element 14 name being transferred to a new company, this company eventually being bought by Broadcom in 2000. In 2001 she became a research fellow and director at Broadcom. Wilson was listed in 2011 in
Maximum PC as number 8 in an article titled "The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History". ==Honours and awards==