[gnfargbl]

You're correct, I got the chronology wrong. From a more careful reading of Wikipedia it looks like ~2 yrs writing most of BBC BASIC, then designing the ARM instruction set, whilst at the same time maintaining BASIC (for another 15 years).

Thinking about all this made me remember https://archive.org/details/arm-archimedes-assembly-language..., which as I recall was a pretty decent introduction to how microprocessors work (of the RISC variety, anyway).

[klelatti]

Thanks. I feel really bad about my pedantry now! I didn’t know that she’d carried on maintaining BBC Basic for so long after the BBC Micro era.

Funnily enough I downloaded that ARM assembly language book last week in the course of writing up a couple of blog posts on RISC. (Shameless plug: first one on the IBM 801 should be our over the weekend - link in my bio if of interest.)