earshot of
(the old) Craven Park - first home of Hull K.R. (Rugby League).
Attended Malet Lambert High School there 1944-1949 (same class as the
late Jean Rook, of Fleet Street fame).
earshot of
(the old) Craven Park - first home of Hull K.R. (Rugby League).
Attended Malet Lambert High School there 1944-1949 (same class as the
late Jean Rook, of Fleet Street fame). Lived in Leicester 1959-1964 (where married Bridget - Essex gal), Congleton, Cheshire, 1964-1968. Lived in Hampshire since 1968, now on the Hamsphire/Surrey border since 2006. Three sons: (1) Head Chef in Kent (2) Engineering Manager, (Ph.D in) low-temperature devices (3) Ph.D. in Computer Science. Wife suffered from secondary breast cancer from 10/95; died 7/98.
Worked on software from 1959 - first with English Electric, Whetstone (Leicester) ( See DEUCE web site)
- where I implemented the run-time phase of the Randell-Russell ALGOL-
60 implementation on DEUCE, which was the commercial version of
ACE (the first stored-program (with self-modifying capability) computer whose builders included
Alan
Turing (who designed the programming technique that carried forward
into DEUCE)).
In 1964 I moved to the English Electric branch at
Kidsgrove (N.Staffs), where I joined in the ALGOL-60 implementation on the EELM
KDF9 before leading the team that implemented Compact COBOL on the EELM
system 4-30, later becoming Chief Programmer - Languages.
From 1968-1989 I worked at IBM (Hursley), representing the company
as a member of the European ECMA/TC10 committee standardising PL/I
until 1973, during which time I was also editor of the
draft PL/I standard.
Wrote a demonstration graphics editor for the IBM 3277GA
vector-graphics display. Developed improved approach to facilities on
displays for the right-to-left languages Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew.
For many years used the IBM internal network for E-mail and
conferencing, and authored several internal VM/CMS tools in spare
time - mainly XEDIT macros (e.g. BOXES) & Execs, all written in
REXX.
IBM assignments in France (La Gaude) 1980-1981, and USA 1986-1987 (Kingston NY & Raleigh (RTP) NC). Took early retirement from IBM Hursley 12/89.
Was in the RAF 1951-1953, at the Records Office, Gloucester - where I played cricket for Gloucester Civil Servants, and later on for Leicester Pilgrims, Romsey Town, and IBM Hursley, as fast bowler (latterly spin) and tail-end slogger.
Interests: Cricket, tennis, badminton, snooker, rambling, photography, crosswords, alpha puzzles, Sudoku. Caravanned (especially in France) 1970-1995, latterly with '94 Lunar Clubman 460EK & Citroen Xantia SX 2.0 (now Honda Civic Tourrer, solo). Moderator of the CIX 'caravanning', 'kedit', and 'exibmers' conferences.
In the decade after 1998 I went on walking holidays to such places as the Canaries (Tenerife and La Gomera), Tuscany, Bay of Naples, Andalucia, Picos de Europa, Quatretondeta, Alassio, Les Diablerets, Meyrhofen, Poland (Zakopane, Tatras), Provence (L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue), St.Bonnet, Bagneres de Bigorre, and Tavira (Algarve).
Using: PCSpecialist desktop Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core G4600
(3.60GHz, 3MB Cache) + HD Graphics, ASUS® PRIME Z270-K: ATX, LGA1151,
USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs, 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2133MHz (2 x 8GB),
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 730 - DVI, HDMI, VGA, 2x500GB SATA-III 3.5" HDD,
6GB/s, 7200RPM, 16MB CACHE, 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER
±R/±RW/RAM, HP 5520 USB2 Deskjet, Netgear DG834G broadband
router, Buffalo 1TB USB2 external hard drive).
Since changing from OS/2 'Warp' to Linux in 2004, am now running Mageia-6 (previously
SuSE 9.0 Pro and Mandriva 2007-10), using KDE Plasma
desktop, Firefox browser, Pan newsreader, VirtualBox (under which
run Windows XP guest running AMEOL and Quicken98), etc. Once a
year I use the pre-loaded Windows 7 to make a family DVD, using
Pinnacle Studio 14. Member of the Linux Mageia Quality Assurance team working on building of version 7.
Have been using the CIX 'conferencing' system since August 1991,
and Eurobell as general ISP for several
years – until it closed down on 28/2/2006.
First broadband ISP was Entanet in 7/2007; now with ICUK's ADSLMax
service (from April 2011).
Fellow of the British Computing Society. Registered Linux User #487649
Email address: maurice@bcs.org.uk