Mike studied electronic engineering to PhD level, where he worked with David Wheeler, the first student to do a PhD in computing. He worked on PDP-11 computers, and after a student internship with DEC, Mike was offered a job at DEC Research Labs in Palo Alto.
Mike worked on various projects, including Autonet, A and B networks, and the Alpha Development Unit. His most productive project optimized the RPC system for the Firefly workstation, achieving a factor of two improvement in performance. He also collaborated with Roger Needham and Martina Bardi on a formalism for describing authentication protocols, which led to another well-regarded paper.
Mike was involved in the development of AltaVista, a web search engine launched in December 1995, which quickly became the most popular search engine on the web. The project was initially proposed to showcase DEC’s hardware capabilities, using an Alpha server 8400 as the machine to serve the index. The workload increased rapidly, and Michael had to optimize the software weekly to keep up with the growing demand.
After DEC was acquired by Compaq, he stayed until its acquisition by HP, when he left. Mike joined Microsoft’s new lab in Mountain View, where he worked on various projects, including a web search engine. He eventually moved to Google, where he continued to apply his expertise in distributed systems and search engines.