After a 50+ year career its hard to remember what you’ve done;
but I thought it worth reflecting on some projects I’ve been involved in. Some were my own projects but many involve collaboration with others and I will try to acknowledge them as I go along. I have been amazingly privileged to live when I have – and to have been a small cog in the engine of progress. The first semiconductor chips I worked on had a few hundred transistors on them and perhaps a maximum of ten thousand. Now the MAC book I’m typing on has a computer containing over a billion transistors, and it runs for 10 hours on a battery! The first computer I worked on, the Marconi Myriad also ran off a ‘mains fail battery’, but only for about 5 minutes – and it weight tons and took up a whole room which was air-conditioned to remove the heat. It had about 1/10,000th of the computing power of my MAC and cost about 1,000 times as much to buy.
So the constant theme of my life has been continuous change and the development of techniques to explore and improve new technologies and design new products and tools to use them effectively and reliably.
So in the table below I have started to list the projects I’ve been a part of. They are in more or less chronological order – however sometimes nature takes tortuous routes and projects we once thought were finished suddenly flare up again with new life.
A List of Projects (work in progress …)
Just click on Link to go to the Project’s Page(s)
| When | Project Description |
|---|---|
| 1995 to 2016 | Wrestling with Oberon – Adventures and Results |
| 1992 to now | Enumerations – One Step Back, Next Step Rust |
| 1995 to 1997 | Project POW! Programmer’s Oberon Workbench |
| 2003 | Zonnon Language Report (edited by Brian Kirk & David Lightfoot) |
| 2003 | Systems = Components + Languages B Kirk, S Doyle m ???, ??? |