I was educated at Preston Street School and
George Heriot’s School
in Edinburgh, then at
Trinity College, Cambridge.
I emerged with a Ph.D. in 1978.
Since then I’ve worked in industrial research labs: first for 5 years at Xerox PARC (1978-1984), then for 17 years at DEC (then Compaq) SRC (1984-2001), and most recently for 13 years at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley (2001-2014).
My research has been in the general area of operating systems and distributed systems, with occasional excursions into security, and one physical gadget (the Personal Jukebox, or “PJB”). Most recently I've been investigating security or its lack, as exemplified by TLS and the global X.509 public key infrastructure. I sometimes build miscellaneous things with user interfaces (like some of this web site), just for fun.
The work for which I seem to be best known is:
- Grapevine (1981, distributed email, with the first distributed naming system);
- Implementing Remote Procedure Calls (1983, a basic tool for client-server systems);
- Programming with Threads (1989, a tutorial on writing concurrent programs);
- Pachyderm (1996, index-based email “in the cloud” with a web-based client);
- The Personal Jukebox (1998, the first multi-gigabyte portable audio player).
In 1994 I received the ACM Software System Award (jointly with Bruce Nelson) for our work on RPC. In 2007 the “Implementing RPC” paper was added to the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame. In 2008 the Grapevine paper was added to the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame.
I’m married, with two daughters, and I live in Los Altos, California.