| Pete has now (quite unexpectedly) retired from being retired yet again.
The long and tedious story: After university,Pete started his computing career Ferranti. After Ferranti, ICL. And then: Inmos Bristol! And then, because he was so deeply loved, and appreciated so deeply, over to Colorado Springs for Inmos Corp.
Alas, an opportunity arose, and he joined a startup - Prisma, in Colorado Springs - where he was to help with a GaSs, embedded supercomputer; which lasted two years before the money disappeared.
He went on to Groupe Bull in Boston, where he had to wear a suit. From thence, went to Texas to look after Bull's interest in PowerPC. And then, in January 1997, bailed out of Bull and joined Motorola, keeping same office, phone number etc. Did a number of things for PowerPC (concentrating on embedded). Motorola became Freescale, and Pete continued in his role up until December 2 2005, when he was informed that although Freescale loved him dearly, his position had been eliminated. But wait, there's more!
Freescale called him up, because they had need of someone desperate for money who had long industry experience and an appropriately cynical outlook to help them right wrongs caused by other companies using Freescale's valuable intellectual property. That lasted a while, and then a new CEO created a small but perfectly formed research lab, where Pete was lucky enough to spend a few years researching how to make what you might think of as a modern transputer. Then NXP bought Freescale and the lab closed, and Pete was allowed yet again to leave and retire. This time retirement lasted a bit longer, but he eventually found employment at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, working on a supercomputer design for the future, in which transputers and their ilk play no part whatsoever.
Pete currently lives near Austin, Texas, and (for less time per year) in Normandy, France.
[September 2022] |
