My early education was at Preston Street School and George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh, then at Trinity College, Cambridge.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1978, then moved to Xerox PARC and later (1984) to DEC’s Systems Research Center (SRC). In 2001 I became the third member of Microsoft’s Silicon Valley research lab.

My research in the past 30 years or so has centered around operating systems and distributed systems, with an occasional excursion into security work and a few other topics. The works for which I’m best known are probably:

• Grapevine (1981, which included the first distributed naming system);
• my paper with Bruce Nelson about implementing RPC (1983, for which we received the 1994 ACM Software System Award);
• my tutorial paper on programming with threads (1989);
• and that underground classic the Personal Jukebox (1998, the first hard-disk portable audio player, long before iPod).

Currently I’m working on Dryad (middleware for programming clusters that contain thousands of computers), and on AME (a new way of programming mutual exclusion).

When I’m not working or playing with computers, I hike, ski, or play with my family.