Computer Science History: 1980s

Professor Harry Whitfield joined the Computing Laboratory as its new Director. He was previously at the universities of Edinburgh and Groningen. He was a major contributor to the development of the Edinburgh Multi-Access System.

The Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) was launched in 1984. Its Director was Professor Tom Anderson. CSR aims to transfer to industry the understanding developed through the reliability project and its successors.

CSR ran many seminars. These led to the establishment of the Software Reliability and Metrics Club. This later became the Safety Critical Systems Club (SCSC). The SCSC still runs major national and international technology transfer events.

A major part of this activity was a 17-year research project between the universities of Newcastle and York, and BAE Systems. The UNITE industry forum and its newsletter encouraged wider industrial involvement.

In 1985 the Laboratory received a $1m equipment gift of advanced personal workstations from Xerox. The machines had a megabyte of memory, a million pixels and a processor speed of a million instructions per second.

Combined with one of the first Ethernet installations in the UK, it provided an early experience of the type of computing interface that was to become the hallmark of Apple computers in the following decades.

Following national recognition of the importance of computing science, many senior academic posts were created. Lecturers Tom Anderson and Santosh Shrivastava both became professors.

In 1986 Pete Lee returned to the Laboratory from the USA as a professor. He had been a researcher on the reliability project in the 1970s. He brought knowledge of shared-memory multiprocessor systems from the Encore Corporation.

In 1987 the Labratory installed an Encore Multimax 120. The Multimax 120 provided support for parallel processing research. It was then upgraded to support student teaching and an Encore Multimax 520 was installed to further the research.

The Laboratory played an influential role in the establishment of the Microelectronic Applications Research Institute (MARI). Dr Brian Randell was particularly influential in its establishment.

It was a joint venture between Computer Analysts and Programmers (now CAP-Gemini), Newcastle University and Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University).

The company was successful for many years. It took on specialist contract computing research and participated, often as co-ordinator, in a large number of EU-funded projects.

MARI also established a training division based in Gateshead. It provided what would now be termed 'modern apprenticeships'. The apprenticeships were in an emerging high technology field at many centres across the UK.

The Joint honours in Computing and Electronic Engineering was revised in response to an initiative from British Telecom (now BT). It became a four-year Master of Engineering degree in Microelectronics and Software Engineering.