I've been in the computer business since 1968, when I went to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority to spend a year between grammar school and university. I spent some time in various UK government agencies, did post-graduate work on OS command language design, worked for start-up and established computer companies in the UK and the USA, and joined Sun Microsystems in 1985. Most of my work has involved programming languages, network protocol design, and distributed computing.
I joined Sun Microsystems in
August, 1985, as the first development engineer hired into the
newly-formed East Coast Division.
I was the architect of PC-NFS, and a software engineering manager on
the innovative Sun386i workstation. Over the ensuing years,
I worked mainly on Sun's Network File System (NFS) technology,
particularly the PC networking product line.
I became a recognized authority on PC networking within the Internet
community, and represented Sun in a variety of forums. From 1988 to
1990
I worked within X/Open to develop the X/Open standards for NFS,
including "(PC)NFS" and "XNFS" (Unix NFS).
I was one of the four authors of the Windows Sockets
("WinSock") specification which led to the
explosive growth of PC-based TCP/IP networking.
I became a Sun "Distinguished Engineer" (DE) in January, 1992, and was
involved in the multivendor effort
to design NFS version 3. In 1995 I became Chief Technology Officer for
Sun's networking software products.
In this capacity, I was the technical lead in a number of major
strategic partnerships, and worked closely with companies
such as Tivoli, Apple, and IBM. I was also involved in the definition
of Sun's systems and network
management strategy.
In 1998 I moved into SunLabs,
Sun's advanced research group, where I established a
team to investigate asynchronous software architectures such as
multi-agent systems. As part of this work,
I became a board member of FIPA, the Foundation for Intelligent
Physical Agents, and
I was active in the development of Java standards for agent software.
After 9/11/2001, when my good friend and colleague Phil Rosenzweig was
killed, I volunteered to contribute to
Sun's company-wide systems management program office. Much of this work
evolved into the N1 initiative on network-centric systems
architecture and automated management. During 2002-2003 I also devoted
about 40% of my time to people management within the Labs.
In November, 2003 I decided that it was time to re-invent myself yet
again (or else how could anyone work 18+ years in one place?). I left
the Sun Labs organization to work for Rob Gingell, Sun's Chief
Engineer.
Since he left, I've been working in Greg Papadopoulos's CTO group on
strategic technology planning, in
collaboration with the Software and Network Storage divisions. In
August 2005 I celebrated 20 years with Sun - who would have thought
it?! Most recently, I've
been involved in a number of M&A (merger and acquisition) activities. I'm working
with the engineering organizations of StorageTek, Storability,
SeeBeyond, and Tarantella on ways to integrate them into the
engineering culture of Sun - and also to learn from them to
enhance Sun's engineering practices.
In chronological order, I worked or studied at the following places: