Links Page
This page collects together the links to the web sites
that are run by my colleagues from the various periods in my career.
It was originally based on my list of connections on
LinkedIn,
and has been organised in reverse chronological order.
2007-2025
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while working (originally as a consultant) for ITER,
at Cadarache, near St. Paul lez Durance,
and living at La Tour d'Aigues,
the following have web pages:
The following are those of my past supervisors, bosses, lecturers and mentors
who now have Wikipedia biographies:
- Professor Bernard Bigot:
Past Director General at ITER
with whom I liased as a member of the working group
to advise UK members of staff how to apply for French citazenship
- Dr. Paul-Henri Rebut:
Past Director at ITER.
For a time, I shared an office with him
inasmuch that he had only a temporary desk while being a visiting member at ITER.
and more socially:
It has been during this period, of course, that I have become most interested in
nuclear fusion,
but also in understanding the strong interaction
and weak force
sufficiently to serve as themes for technical-biased English lessons.
It is also when we bought L'Outstalet (43.734025N,5.548736E).
It was also at the start of this period that I set up these web pages,
resolutely determined to do it in raw HTML.
Here are some links to resources that might be useful to a contractor in the area:
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2005-2006
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was working for DirectIndustry,
at l'Estaque, near Marseille,
and living at La Tour d'Aigues,
the following has a set of web pages:
Here are some links to resources that might be useful to a worker in the area:
During this period I used my existing interests in electronics
and optics,
but also became interested in
electromagnetic compatibility.
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1999-2005
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was working for STMicroelectronics,
at Rousset, near Aix-en-Provence,
and living at La Tour d'Aigues,
the following have web pages:
It was during this period that I started looking for formal
ways of monitoring technical writing throughput and quality.
The revived interest in statistics
also led to my investigating what information I could extract from
my daily commute times.
In my spare time,
I became interested in quantum computing
and other types of novel computer engineering
I also acquired the first brass instrument I had ever even laid hands on,
and learned to play the tuba
in the local concert band
and l'Echo Forcalquièren.
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1997-1999
During this period,
I was working for PSI-Electronics,
at Gardanne, near Aix-en-Provence,
and living at La Tour d'Aigues.
From here, I was contracted out to SGS-Thompson (who later became STMicroelectronics).
It was during this period that I became interested in
ways of predicting technical writing throughput
(because of the terms of the contract between SGS-Thompson and PSI-Electronics).
How to find us
As you leave Marseille airport car park,
you first follow signs to Aix en Provence (Aix en Pce) or Marseille
(you want Aix en Provence more than Marseille).
We personally prefer to follow the green signs (A roads) rather than the blue ones (Motoway/Autoroute).
To do this, you have to be attentative of the lane that you are in,
and to change out of the one for the autoroute
(but no problem if you fail:
you merely end up going a bit further South than you might have needed to).
This road leads you through a commercial centre (with hypermarkets, fast food and the like)
just after which you are invited to rejoin the autoroute (blue signs).
the first branch is to go south in the direction of Marseille,
but you want the second to go north towards Avignon, Sisteron and Gap.
Follow the signs to Sisteron and Gap
(ignoring the branches off, first to Nice,, and then to Avignon).
You are now on the A51 autoroute to Sisteron.
You come off it at Pertuis, which will cost 1.30 euros.
You then aim for the Centre Ville, and follow any signs that you see for La Tour d'Aigues.
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1995-1997
Finally, I broke with a long line of alternations about the hardware/software boundary:
focussing on computing options
at the department of electrical engineering at UCL;
focussing on a hardware idea for my doctorate
in the department of computer science at WCL;
called on for teaching programming languages
at a department for microelectronics at Middlesex Polytechnic;
called on for teaching digital electronics aspects of computer design
at the department of computer science at the University of Manchester;
called on for teaching programming languages
at the department of electrical engineering at University of Brighton.
With family life, my focus changed, with job-selection became just second priority.
Fortunately,
there are so many exciting projects wherever we chose to settle, this was never a great issue.
However, in order to move to France,
I needed to find a job that demanded my particular mix of talents.
This is how I became a technical writer in English, living in France,
set up as an independent consultant.
During this period,
I worked as a consultant for
Sonovision ITEP (SITE),
working on technical documentation for Hewlett-Packard.
(Both companies had branches at Eybens, near Grenoble, in the Pre-Alpes of the southeast of France).
I was living at Risset, in the commune of "Varces, Allières et Risset".
Among my colleagues and contacts,
the following have web pages:
Throughout this period, and all the subsequent time in France,
having "Ph.D." on my CV has without doubt opened doors,
and kept them open when they were threatening to close.
I would eagerly pass this on to any other post-graduate students who are waverering as to whether to continue.
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1993-1995
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was working for the University of Brighton,
at Moulescombe, near Brighton,
and living next to the American Express building near the sea front,
the following now have web pages:
It was during this period that I became interested in
hardware implementations of genetic algorithms.
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1990-1993
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was working at the University of Manchester,
and living in Glossop, in the High Peak,
the following now have web pages:
The following are those of my past supervisors, bosses, lecturers and mentors
who now have Wikipedia biographies:
It was during this period that I became interested in
genetic algorithms
and deme networks,
and also in the possibilities for artificial consciousness.
Confessions of a book author
For some time, Amazon was listing a non-existant book by me,
which I had undertaken to write for Prentice-Hall,
but which was never finished due to running out of conviction that it was really saying anything.
In some ways, it was to be a sequel to Fifth Generation Wafer Architecture,
in the light of lecture material for my teaching at the university.
In fact,
a draft of the book does still exist, albeit only on battered and fading paper,
now that all electronic versions have long expired.
One snippet is recreated here,
and was originally written to find the mean path length for data packets
in a distributed grid with ranxomy-placed faulty nodes.
Acknowledgements
The development of the material in two of my webpages
(Towards the Next Industrial Revolution
and Quantum gravity, time and underlying objective reality)
was started in 1992.
Since then, I have worked at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Manchester,
the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Brighton,
STMicroelectronics and ITER Organization, and is indebted to each of these,
and specifically to Chris Garrett, Jim Garside, Hugh Mayo, Peter Morley, Ellis Sareen and John Simms
for their reviews of early drafts of these ideas;
and notably to David Black, Deshinder S. Gill, Dave Lawrence, Richard Lock,
Mark Rosenfelder and Viktor Toth.
Most of all, I must single out Adrian West for particular acknowledgement.
It is he, above all others, who has contributed by reviewing drafts, listening to ideas,
and commenting on them so very constructively over all these years,
from the start of this project right through to present day.
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1983-1989
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was working at Middlesex Polytechnic
(which later became the Middlesex University London),
at Bounds Green, in north London,
and living at Turnpike Lane, and then near Colney Hatch Lane,
the following now have web pages:
The following are those of my past supervisors, bosses, lecturers and mentors
who now have Wikipedia biographies:
This period gave me my first experiences of teaching,
and of student supervision.
It was during this period that I developed
a simple compiler project for students on a conversion MSc,
an automatic back-of-the-envelope calculator for hardware design,
a plagiarism detector for helping mark student coursework,
and in my spare time,
a family tree processor.
It is also during this period (Jan-1986) that I had the experience of
walking behind the NE minerette of the Taj Mahal,
and it suddenly blocking out the sound of all the tourists,
and letting the songs of boatmen on the River Yamuna drift up to me.
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1979-1983
During this period, I became interested in wafer scale integration.
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was sponsored by Inmos
(which was later amalgamated into STMicroelectronics),
at White Friars, in Bristol,
and living at Hotwells, and then at Cotham,
the following now have web pages:
The following are those of my past supervisors, bosses, lecturers and mentors
who now have Wikipedia biographies:
I have fond memories of Bristol, my having Brunel as one of my all-time heros, after Michael Faraday,
and also the double involvement of the city in the story of Longitude.
The story started with the 17th/18th century problem
of the inconvenience and cost of losing so many ships to errors of navigation.
It then continued with the 19th century problem of getting the trains to run to a consistent timetable.
The story finally culminated with invention claims being filed in the patent offcie in Switzerland,
on how to address the problem of the synchronisation of clocks and watches.
The two flies in the ointement of this otherwise nice story
is what those 17th/18th century ships were trading,
and the way that Brunel did not go in for traverse sleepers
laid laterally under the track.
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1979-1983
Westfield College (WCL) was part of
the University of London.
When it was finally amalgamated with Queen Mary College,
the Department of Computer Science was instead moved to Kings College.
The college was located at Finchley Road, in West Hampstead, in north London.
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was studying there,
and living nearby
(first at Connaught Hall,
then in Twford Crescent in Acton,
and finally at Carus-Wilson postgraduate hall of residence),
the following now have web pages:
The following are those of my past supervisors, bosses, lecturers and mentors
who now have Wikipedia biographies:
- Professor Ted Newman:
Visiting Professor at Westfield College London
(mentioned as a red-link as Edward "Ted" Newman)
I started using the internet in 1982,
and contributing to, and reading,
the Usenet.
At the very beginning, I actually managed to read every group that came in,
but rapidly had to become more selective in the groups to which I subscribed.
Of these, net.comp.arch (as it was originally called) was one of the earliest ones,
but here is a list that also includes much later interests:
Confessions of a thesis writer
As post-graduate students, we found ourselves in the tail end of the first generation
to have access to text formatting on super-minicomputers,
so as to be able to type up our own theses,
rather than to have to pay a typist
(and used the time to become touch-typists ourselves).
The software we used was nroff,
and this goes a long way to explaining why I am still persisting with implementing these web pages
in raw HTML):
the text formatting process is nostalgically familiar,
despite the differences between nroff and HTML.
Also tied up in this process is advice of my supervisor, Peter Osmon,
to let the final report writing drive the process.
Although I was writing my thesis
on computer hardware description languages
forr a variety of instruction sets,
I ended up straying quite widely.
The title that I was given
was, "The rôle of simulation in the study of multiprocessor control flow,
and data flow systems".
In hindsight,
it should have ended up more along the lines
of Hennessy and Patterson (1990)
and the design of the instruction set of the MAL1 processor
should have made a nicely stripped-down starting point.
In the end, Chapters 1 to 4, and 6 to 9 did little more than tinker with the subject.
Back in the first year, though, my supervisor passed me a paper from Brunel University,
and asked me what I thought about it.
It was a paper on a multiprocessor design using wafer scale integration,
to perform some SIMD string-replacement operations.
Not immediately understanding it properly,
I tried to get my mind round it based on what I had recently been learning
from my colleagues on dataflow
(notably, through their links with the University of Manchester).
So, my report back to my supervisor ended up
as a way of using the content-addressable memory mechansim of the Brunel University SIMD processor
to implement a multiprocessor MIMD dataflow machine.
The resulting Necklace machine would have had performance problems,
as pointed out to me by Hugh Glaser.
The result of the redesign ended up as the Cobweb machine in Chapter 5 of my thesis
(with very little to do with the role of simulation in design)
and is what warranted my doctorate, more than the other chapters of my thesis.
This chapter described a way of implementating
a combinator-based multiprocessor computer
(and a lambda calculus, reduction machine, at that, rather than a dataflow machine)
directly in the hardware with logic gates,
and without a program counter.
I have Mary Sheeran to thank for having recognised and promoted the full significance of this,
and in hindsight I should have followed this lead;
at the time, I simply saw it as the natural way to implement combinators,
and felt disappointment each time I read about other people's combinator reduction machines,
and found that they were implemented using conventional CPUs or microcode.
In hindsight, too, I should also have included the material
of Shute (1992)
as a middle chapter
of Shute (1988).
The original reports on the Necklace and Cobweb machines
appear in an appendix document to the main thesis containing eight research papers,
but unfortunately with a major typographical glitch running through the whole document.
Arguably, one of the most powerful commands in Unix shell-script is "make".
When used in a document-writing context,
it can be used in combination with the "sed" command to perform global edits
in a document that is split across many files.
Unfortunately, the admirable consistency of "sed" with "em" meant that it was all too easy
instinctively to terminate a "substitute" command by a 'p', out of habit,
as in "s/old text/new text/p".
This error was made at the last step in the preparation of the thesis annex document,
duplicating every line in the nroff files that happened to contain a date,
but with no opportunity to correct the error
since my supervisor insisted that
my doctorate was only conditional on the publication of the annex, not on its format,
and that I had already out-stayed my welcome with the college authorities.
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1978-
Among my colleagues and contacts,
since becoming a member of the
Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)
(formerly the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE)),
the following has a set of web pages:
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1974-1978
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was working studying at
the Department of Electrical Engineering of the
University College (UCL)
(which is part of the University of London),
at Gower Street, in central London,
and living nearby (first at Connaught Hall,
then in Acton, and finally at
Ifor Evans Hall),
the following now have web pages:
The following are those of my past supervisors, bosses, lecturers and mentors
who now have Wikipedia biographies:
- Sir Eric Ash:
Professor in Electronics
at University College London,
where he was my group tutor in my first year, lecturer on physical electronics in my second year,
and project tutor in my third year
- Sir David (DEN) Davies:
Professor Electronics
at University College London
- Professor Alexander Lamb Cullen:
Professor in Microwave Communications
at University College London
- Professor Peter Kirstein:
Professor in Computer Science
at University College London, though I only sat in on his lectures in my third year
- Dr. Alan Wilson:
Director of Music at Christ the King church,
and later at Queen Mary College London and resident organist at St.Mary-le-Bow
The (real) Acton Parties were held roughly monthly, at the house in Twyford Crescent
(part way between Acton Town and Ealing Common tube stations).
They were well known throughout the departments of Electrical Engineering
at University College and Imperial College as involving:
comfortable quantities of London Pride beer, fairly good music,
lots of male electrical engineers talking together,
and not much else.
In many ways,
the Virtual Acton Party, now held by communal emailing,
is a lot better.
It is thanks to George Fegan that my eventual 1982 .signature "The AM Mollusc" was invented,
to which I usually added "v_@_"
Most of our computing involved
batch programming,
and punching our own cards.
However, with our course in Assembler Programming,
we ended up in such close contact with the PDP-11 computers in the basement
of the Department of Computer Science,
that these became a significant part of our evening social activity:
instead of watching television, or spending the night at the pub,
we would spend the evenings
playing Lunar Lander
("Boy, are you inept!")
and SpaceWar1
(the forerunner of the video game that was later released in the pubs as Asteroid),
and sometimes even doing our coursework.
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1974-1979
The Applied Electronics Laboratories (also known, for historical reasons, as Browns Lane)
of Marconi Space and Defence Systems Ltd. (MSDS)
was part of the General Electric Company (GEC),
but has since been divided up.
It was located at The Airport, at the Hilsea site of the old airport in Portsmouth.
Among my colleagues and contacts,
while I was working there,
and living at Copnor,
the following now maintains a set of web pages:
- Roger Abbett:
Principal Systems Engineer and Cricketer
For the period, 1974-1978, I was a thick-sandwich student, and classed as an apprentice.
For the last year, Aug-1978 to Sep-1979,
I was working as a graduate electronics engineer, in an environment similar to
the one portrayed by Kidder (1981),
albeit not for such an aggressive and high profile company,
but with the excitement of my first encounters with
programming a mini-computer.
Looking back, the atmosphere in which the engineering was done
certainly owed most to the legacy of the American Apollo programme.
Further, when I watch retrospective documenaries of the period,
for me the pivotal, mind-changing mission was that of Apollo 8, moreso even than Apollo 11.
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1967-1974
During this period,
I was studying at
Totton College
(and before that named Totton Grammar School),
near Southampton.
I also had part time jobs
at the National Motor Museum,
at Beaulieu, Hampshire,
and at the Maritime Museum,
at Buckler's Hard (both on Lord Montague's estate).
School work gave me interests in
electricity and magnetism,
electronics,
nuclear physics,
physical chemistry,
organic chemistry,
and music.
When considering what to put on my UCCA application, though,
I almost pursued my interests in astronomy.
However, my maths teacher had managed to introduce me to
computer programming
and I had become absolutely hooked on computer engineering,
and so that is what I ended up studying.
One of the first exercises in the Science class
was to draw pie charts for the make up of town gas (used for the Bunsen burners)
and of the atmospheric air;
for the latter, I distinctly remember that the slice for carbon dioxide was 0.03%.
Meanwhile, in Geography, the world population was listed as 3.5 billion.
It is certainly sobering that both figures have changed within my lifetime
(along with the wake-up realisations of the global impact of the hole in the ozone layer,
the imminence of last oil, depleting marine fish stocks, acid rain,
land-fill and pollution, the greenhouse effect, plastic waste,
all of which were predated by society's MAD mentality of the Cold War into which I was born).
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1961-1967
During this period,
I was at school at
Wildground Primary School
(where, rather bizarrely, I was known to my colleagues as Talcum Tush,
and also at one point as Shuto Pluto)
and living in Dibden Purlieu, just on the eastern edge of the New Forest.
During this time, my best friend was Kevin Cole.
He was a surprisingly mature thinker,
and introduced me to all sorts of ideas, such as:
the concept of a perpetual motion machine, and the flaws in the idea;
the way of remembering the order of the first two planets after Saturn,
as forming the same initials as the United Nations.;
playing the game of Monopoly;
experiments with chemistry-set and siphons.
We tried to get our heads round the concept of the universe being infinite,
unable to think of it without boundary,
so imagining a symbolic brick wall around its perimeter,
but realising that climbing over the wall to the other side made it all part of the universe.
He also proposed the conjecture that the world might be just a simulation
(for example, a computer program to work out what would happen next
if the simulation were initialised to a world war and atomic bomb just having happened);
although flawed by its turtles-all-the-way-down lack of explanatory power,
it did set me up for receiving Douglas Adams' proposal
of the earth having been purposely constructed as a computer
to compute the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
I owe Kevin much for my subsequent academic journey.
We spent a disproporionate amount of talking to conclude that zero is an even number,
compared to how quickly we worked out how to compute
the value of the triangle numbers.
Later, too, I also noticed the pattern in the recurring decimal fractions,
which has intrigued me ever since.
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Born at the Fenwick Cottage Hospital, Lyndhurst.
Meanwhile, among my family,
the following have web pages:
The following are those members of my family
who now have Wikipedia biographies:
- Harold John Fleming (5y2):
Footballer for England and Swindon Town
for whom I am a cousin-thrice-removed (2y5)
- John Baird, 1st Viscount Stonehaven (3x1s1y0):
eighth Governor-General of Australia
my great aunt's father-in-law.
Due to this connection, the Wikitree website has pointed out many subsequent connections, including:
- Ulick de Burgh, 1802-1874 (3x1s1y1s4y0):
1st Marquess of Clanricarden
my (maternal-paternal) great-aunt's brother-in-law's wife's great-great grandfather (female-line),
and Queen Elizabeth II's (paternal) aunt's husband's (paternal-maternal) great-great grandfather
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Not me
Just for the record, this paragraph summarises some of the attributes of
some of my namesakes around the world,
who might be turned up when conducting a web-search on my name.
For instance, I have never lived in the United States of America,
nor written books or given courses on dance or flute music;
and I have never grown my hair into a pony tail.
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