The guest speaker at the next RISC OS User Group of London (ROUGOL) meeting will be Hugo Tyson, who will be talking about what he did during the time he worked at Acorn.
Having worked for the company from June 1980 (becoming a full time staffer in September 1982) all the way up until 1990, Hugo worked on many projects, such as Acorn’s disc filing systems (both DFS and ADFS), the Unix-based operating system RISC iX, and more – including Acorn’s most ambitious project, the development of the ARM CPU, regarding which you can expect to hear details about tests he wrote for the processor even before it existed, and how those tests (and their creative error messages) caused red faces at ARM, even though he has never worked for them!
With an apparently impressive number of slides to show the audience, Hugo’s talk will cover:
- What it was like in the early days of Acorn.
- DFS and ADFS development and bug fixing.
- Tube co-processor bugs.
- Project A, the ARM CPU development.
- How to test a chip that doesn’t exist yet!
- Many emulators.
- The first ARM silicon.
- Shifting issues.
- StrongARM.
- Plus the FPU, RISCiX, and what might have been if Acorn hadn’t wasted time on ARX.
As usual, the meeting will be a hybrid one with some people attending in person, and others joining from home via Zoom.
You can attend the meeting in person – and this time around, the guest speaker will be appearing in person, so if you have the choice heading to the physical meeting will provide the best experience – at:
The Duke of Sussex
(Upstairs in the Chichester Room)
23 Baylis Road,
London,
SE1 7AY.
And you can attend online from wherever you are (as long as you have an internet connection and a suitable device) by using Zoom.
There will be ROUGOL members lurking in the pub from around 6:30pm, and the Zoom meeting will open from 7:30pm to give people time to join – the meeting proper will commence from around 7:45pm.
There are directions on the ROUGOL website for people joining in person, and if you’re joining online you’ll need the meeting credentials – these remain the same as usual, but if you haven’t previously joined a meeting you can get these by contacting the group in plenty of time.
