Latest - Organisation: English Electric

Nicholas (Nic) Birtles

Nic Birtles left university after a boring year for more exciting work in the emerging IT industry.  He programmed a LEO machine; successor to the first business computer.  Like many who led the growth of the 20th century industry, he soon moved into sales and thence senior management with some of the iconic names of the early industry, including Burroughs in Canada and then ComShare, selling its computer power over telephone lines.

He was headhunted by Ingres, the innovative relational database competitor to Oracle.  He was in Silicon Valley for the dotcom boom and bust.  Since 2002, Nic has held a portfolio of non-executive roles with growth companies, most recently fundraising for an innovative aircraft design from Aeralis.  Nic is a Past Master of the City of London IT Livery Company (WCIT) , where he actively supports their charitable initiatives.

Professor Cliff Jones

Cliff Jones began working in the computing industry immediately after leaving school in 1961.  Cliff worked at LEO, then at IBM, which he left in 1963 to work for a year each at, first Esso, and then Ford where he began his work in programming and development of compilers.  Unusually, Cliff then moved back to IBM in 1965.  Cliff left industry in 1979 to return to education, completing a DPhil at Oxford University under Turing Award winner, Tony Hoare.   Following this, Cliff took a chair in 1981 at Manchester University and continued work on formal aspects of computing until 1996.  Another brief spell in industry at the small software house, Harlequin, followed.  Cliff came to a professorship at Newcastle University in 1999 where he remained until his retirement in the summer of 2018.

Professor Brian Randell

Brian has had a long and illustrious career in computing, starting work at English Electrics Atomic Power Division in 1957. Brian worked on various programming tasks, including the ALGOL 60 compiler for the KDF9 machine, which was the subject of his book, Algol 60 Implementation, along with Lawford Russell, one of the first books on compilers.  Brian then joined IBM Research at Yorktown Heights in 1964, where he worked on computer and systems design.  After five years at IBM, Brian became Professor of Computing Science at the Department of Computing Science at Newcastle University, where he has remained since.