Paul Walker

Email Address paul@4Links.co.uk
Phone Number +44 1908 642001
Website http://www.4Links.co.uk
Transputer links are alive and well, beyond this earth. They have been adopted by the space industry world wide as a standard called SpaceWire. Paul set up a company, 4Links (guess where the name came from!), to promote the link technology and found that most of the customers were in space. They include all the big names such as NASA and the European Space Agency, companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, EADS Astrium, Thales Alenia, ... and plenty of smaller institutions and companies around the world. The industry likes to do things themselves, and so 4links has found a niche in test equipment. Paul was joined some years ago by Barry Cook, not an inmos alumnus, but organizer of two of the transputer conferences. Together, they put on a demo of uncompressed video flowing through a fault tolerant SpaceWire network. We had great fun unplugging cables, plugging them back in somwewhere else, and switching power off boards --- and still the images from the cameras reached the screens, with barely a glitch when something changed. This demo was undoubtedly a major catalyst for the adoption of SpaceWire worldwide. Meanwhile 4Links test equipment has an unrivalled reputation for finding bugs, which is what test equipment is supposed to be there for! updated Oct 07.

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