Hardware and technology Archives - Page 10 of 10

Sir Anthony Cleaver

Sir Anthony Cleaver spent his career in IBM UK starting in 1962 and rising to chairman and chief executive until his retirement in 1994. He worked with Lloyds Bank to develop the world’s first variable amount cash dispenser installed in 1972. In the early 1980s he gained international experience with IBM’ Europe, Middle East and Africa operation, moving back to the UK in 1982 when he assured the successful launch in the UK of the IBM PC

4 August 2017

Sir Robin Saxby

Sir Robin Saxby was brought in to run ARM in 1991 after it was spun out from Acorn Computers. He devised the business plan which grew the company from a handful of people into an enterprise sold for £24 billion in 2016. ARM only designed Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) and licences out the manufacture and use of the designs to others. ARM processors power the mobile world.

4 August 2017

Geoff Shingles CBE

Geoff Shingles CBE joined Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) UK when it had three people in 1965. DEC was a Boston-based minicomputer company mostly then serving the technical and scientific communities. In his first year the PDP-8 was launched. It was the first commercially-successful minicomputer with over 50,000 sold worldwide during its life. He was soon MD of the UK and stayed with DEC until he was 55 after which he split his time between IT start-ups.

3 August 2017

Bill Ellis

Bill Ellis started work in the IT industry in BTM, before it merged to form ICT. He supported clients through the adoption of new systems. He worked with insurance companies for ICT and ICL, competing against IBM, the dominant vendor. He moved to the start-up Software Sciences which and helped build it into a £100 million-turnover company with 2,000 people. Bill was on the council of the Computing Services Association for six years.

1 August 2017

Iann Barron

Iann Barron nurtured three generations of computer designers in the UK at Elliott Brothers, Computer Technology (CT) and InMos.

He designed a computer at Elliott’s for the RAF and left to form his own company, CT, in 1965, raising private capital to fund it, one of the first to do so in the world.

He was forced out of CT in 1975 and after a spell as a consultant joined the InMos venture of the National Enterprise Board designing the transputer microprocessor and advising Motorola, Texas Instruments and Fairchild and also telling Intel what was wrong with their microprocessors.

1 August 2017

Ninian Eadie

Ninian Eadie spent most of his career in the IT industry in ICL after working for LEO Computers and the Post Office. He saw the good times and the bad in ICL as it gained traction after he joined it in 1969. He ran ICL’s European business which, at its height, had about 7% of the Europe’s IT market outside the UK. He was in charge of successfully selling off many of the companies ICL disposed of as it shrank.

28 July 2017

Eben Upton CBE

Dr Eben Upton is world renowned for inventing the bare-bones computer named Raspberry Pi which is based upon the ARM processor. One of his fondest memories at school was of programming the BBC Micro, and the Raspberry Pi model numbers follow those of the BBC Microcomputer series.

28 July 2017

Christopher Curry

Chris Curry was a central figure in the Cambridge phenomena which was Sinclair, Acorn and ARM. He started on the production line at PYE, worked for the Royal Radar Establishment and eventually arrived at Sinclair Radionics in 1966. He then helped set up Acorn Computers with its first product the Atom. Acorn was approached by the BBC and devised the BBC Micro, launched in 1980 it sold 3 million.

14 July 2017

David Potter CBE

David Potter CBE successfully straddled the worlds on academia and IT entrepreneurship. He started as an academic and then as an investor before founding Psion, Potter Scientific Instruments, in 1980. Psion became the largest microcomputer software vendor in the UK selling databases, utilities and computer games. By the early 1980s he had built a strong team and Psion was profitable. He decided to launch a mobile personal computer, the Psion organiser