[12] Before going to university, Wilson had designed and built two electronic systems for ICI Fibres Research in Harrogate near her home village.

[13] 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.

[14] 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.

[3] Wilson was at the forefront of creating the prototype that enabled Acorn to win the contract with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for their ambitious computer education project.

[16] The BBC had planned that the centrepiece of their project would be an upcoming tv series that would relate the possibilities that computers were opening up to demonstrations shown running on a standard reference microcomputer, that viewers would then be able to experiment with themselves.

Hauser employed a deception, telling both Wilson and colleague Steve Furber that the other had agreed a prototype could be built within a week.

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.

[17] Along with Furber, Wilson was present backstage at the machine's first studio recordings for television, in case any software fixes were required.

[34] In 2022 the Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering was awarded in Washington D.C. to David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy, Stephen B. Furber, and Sophie M. Wilson for their "invention, development, and implementation" of the RISC chips.

[36][37] She enjoys photography and is involved in a local theatre group, where she is in charge of costumes and set pieces and has acted in a number of productions.