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A (very) full life

Peter Davidson, Information Age

14/10/2003 12:04:03

However hackneyed the phrase “a full life” might be, it’s hard to avoid it in looking at the career of Dr Peter Jones.

Somehow, he seems to have wedged a dozen more “usual” lifetimes into his professional and personal journey over half a century and joining the geographic dots in it soon turns a world map into a spider web.

Like many Australians whose names shine so brightly in the global history of computing, his career at Sydney University flourished under the influence of Harry Messel in the 50s, completing degrees in science and aeronautical engineering. An ambition to continue in aeronautics led him to do a PhD on the bending of thin wings on high-speed aircraft and this brought him into contact with Messel’s SILLIAC computer project.

He wanted to be part of university life but couldn’t afford to stay at one of the normal colleges. On searching around he found a vacancy at Moore Theological College and completed a Diploma in Theology, playing first grade rugby and co-founding the Sydney University Rocket Society along the way.

With an astute ability to recognise an opportunity that has underpinned his considerable entrepreneurial success, after his PhD he worked with John Bennett on helicopter blade design using SILLIAC’s pioneering compute power.

He worked with Bennett for two years in the Basser Department, but decided to forgo a permanent job offer to seek a career in aeronautics overseas.

From a “poor family” and with little in his pocket but a PhD in his knapsack, he set off from his Manly home to hitch to London in the early 60s. “I was living with an aunt who, feeling that she somehow needed to help, insisted on driving me to Penrith to start the journey, for some reason.”

A stint as deputy warden to supplement his income at the International Friendship Centre in Drummoyne had garnered a coterie of friends around the world which provided hospitality stepping stones on his trek to London. When asked about finding his way, he said he “just kept going up and to the left”, eventually landing in London with no money and stayed with a doctor friend at Hammersmith hospital.

“With typical Aussie confidence I hitched to Bristol where BAC’s Concorde project was getting started at Filton, and asked for a job – and they offered me one at 500 pounds a year which just wasn’t enough after nine years at university.”

Further negotiations saw their offer increase by only another 25 quid which still wouldn’t do but Jones happily recalls talking his would-be employers into lending him the bus fare back to London “because by then it was raining”.

Other fruitless searches for an engineering job in aeronautics convinced him to start looking for something in computing instead.

The career switch eventually saw him by chance in Newman Street, London home of Ferranti, the pioneering computer business which had developed the Ferranti Mark 1 as the commercial version of the Manchester Mark 1.

Spawned as the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, the first machine embodying the components comprising a basic computer, the Manchester Mk1 had been proven in scientific research at Manchester University.

“I marched in and asked a very stylish commissionaire about seeing someone for a job and was told politely but firmly to go away and write a letter of application.”

A request to see the CEO brought the same response and while being ushered towards the door, heard an Australian voice from behind saying “G’day Peter, what on earth are you doing here?”

The voice was that of Barry de Ferranti, a cousin to company bosses Sebastian and Basil (scions of the de Ferranti electro-engineering dynasty), and with Brian Swire, builder of the SILLIAC machine in Sydney which had supported his doctorate.

On his way to lunch with company CEO Bernard Swann, they took Jones too, not only heading off malnutrition, but offering a job at three times the BAC pay, to join the Atlas project.

It opened a gate to high-performance computer engineering at a time of huge technological advance.

By the mid-50s, the US had drawn ahead in the design and production of high-performance “calculating machines” and government and academic interests in the UK strove to regain the leadership brought by the Manchester and Ferranti Mk1’s.

In Manchester, Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams had carried their electrical/design engineering partnership from work in radar in WW2 into the development of digital storage in a cathode ray tube (CRT).

The partnership continued past the Mk1 projects, exploiting emerging electronic componentry, particularly transistors, in their quest for instruction speeds in excess of one order every microsecond in a machine with a large number of attached peripherals.

Kilburn’s invention of random access memory, and the later creation of what are now known as spooling, interrupts, supervisory operating systems, time-sharing, virtual memory, compiler of compilers, multiprogramming, job scheduling and more were embodied in Atlas which emerged as a joint Manchester/Ferranti project in 1959.

Launched in 1962, Atlas was the most powerful computer in the world, 2400 times more so than the Mk1 it replaced. While not a major seller for Ferranti in unit terms, it nonetheless brought a wealth of new ideas and techniques to sustain development momentum in the UK.

It was into this maelstrom of innovation that the Ferranti organisation threw Peter Jones with his engineering skills.

“It was a great time; these were world pioneers. Kilburn had written and run the world’s first program in ’47 and had produced compiler technology not seen before. He and Williams were using the new languages – and surrounded themselves with a team including Aussies and Kiwis.

“I was fortunate to be involved at a time of such significant development, pioneering in the truest sense.”

But selling Atlas in to the US market brought problems: potential customers were impressed but demanded local manufacturing and support. Kilburn led the charge, lecturing on its innovations whenever he could – except when his beloved Manchester United was playing at home.

“I was the young bachelor engineer in the team, so he sent me off instead.” This took Jones to the US and elsewhere to spruik its benefits while negotiations for Univac to build Atlas progressed but finally failed.

“It was a sad thing. The UK in the early years had led the world in computing research and the formation of innovative, computer companies that supported risk-taking entrepreneurs, but most failed or were taken over. The premier UK computer company ICL was ultimately bought out by Fujitsu.”

But his career door swung open again. Trevor Robinson, who had set up CDC’s (Control Data Corporation) first agency in Australia, renewed his acquaintance with Jones during his Atlas travels and recommended him to CDC. They recruited him out of Manchester to join the legendary Seymour Cray to work on the CDC 6600 development in Minneapolis.

“I was the only Aussie I knew to obtain a top secret clearance, working on the defence projects in which Cray’s machines were crucial at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Fort Meade.

“It was a case of Livermore researching nuclear bombs, Los Alamos building them and Fort Meade trying to figure out what the Russians knew about them.”

Working as a systems engineer and on operating system software development for two years, he became a confidant and personal friend of Cray who, after working on the 7600 and 8600, fell out with CDC over development philosophies and set out alone to found Cray Research.

“He was the brightest bloke I ever met, but had some funny work habits, starting at 10, lunch at 1130, do a few things through the afternoon and then the real toil between 8pm and 3am, working often with just pencil and paper.

“It was a time of rapid change to which Cray had a totally black and white approach. He wanted things to be simple, and his view that the 8600 should be scrapped in favour of a completely new start got him off-side with CDC.

“We became good friends and he and his wife often spent time with us in Colorado skiing over the years.”

(It was soon after one such sojourn that Cray was severely injured in a freeway collision and died a week later in 1996, aged 71.)

After each super computer project Jones returned to Australia, on one occasion to get married (“it was on my task list”) and help with the installation of CDC 3600 computers at the CSIRO and Bureau of Census and Statistics.

On another, he worked as Associate Professor of Computing at the University of NSW, leading a team, mostly of PhD students, to redesign and write an operating system for the university’s new IBM 360/50. Later he spent a year as a Research Fellow at the ANU (Australian National University).

The opportunity to work with Jim Thornton (Cray’s second in command on the 6600 project) on the world’s first super vector computer took him back to the USA from the UNSW. The STAR string array processor grew out of CDC’s defence work; Jones later arranged for luminary Trevor Pearcey to join the project for six months.

“Trevor had been one of my lecturers and we discussed STAR on a trip back to Australia. When I picked him up at Minneapolis airport he announced that he would stay with us. We had a small house, two kids and two students staying with us but we made room and had a great, albeit crowded time.

Ironically perhaps, Jones was the inaugural recipient of the Pearcey Medal in 1998.

STAR conscripted his engineering and system design talents; working again with totally different instruction sets, new computer architecture, software and peripherals systems – and some manual labour: “I’d get home with cut hands and the knees out of my strides from dragging cables which my wife said was stupid – she just plugged things into the wall.”

It was an idea which suggested opportunity, and Jones with four others founded Network Systems Corporation in Minneapolis, the world’s first LAN company, delivering data at 50Mbytes by coax to addressed connections. Jones provided the early finance for NSC through the sale of a farm outside Canberra (the Australian dollar at the time worth around $US1.50.

A later decision to return to Australia for family reasons proved to be “professional suicide”.

“I thought Australia might be 20 years behind the US, but in some areas it was more like 20 light years. There was often no critical mass or clustering among high-tech start-ups, many just seemed to do their own thing, and big business on the whole was risk-averse to working with small, entrepreneurial Australian companies”.

But with typical energy founded on an astute understanding of the convergence between technology and business, his entrepreneurial instincts led to the foundation of some 15 companies, including Techway a venture capital and facilitation business, since his return in the early 80s, to explore emerging technology opportunities.

There were varying degrees of success among the companies (he was big on global alliances and instrumental in setting up Oracle, Cray Research and Network Systems in Australia). None went into liquidation.

According to his contemporaries these companies provided a vehicle for a quiet determination to share his business and technical skills with young companies and professionals to enjoy the opportunities he’d had.

A foray into farming to satisfy a need “to be close to nature” rather than profit saw him at one stage with three dairy farms, wheat and fine wool operations dotted around NSW. They have gone but he still has part ownership of a large cattle ranch at Barrington Tops plus a house at Bluey’s Beach to service his body surfing needs.

Sailing and skiing get shoe-horned among his consultancy work from his waterside offices in Kirribilli and continuing involvement in academia and industry. He was President of the Science Foundation for Physics at the University of Sydney from 93 to 96, member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on Science and Technology 84-90, in 1991 was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and in 2001 was made an Honorary Fellow of University of Sydney. In 2003 he received the Centenary Medal for services to Australian society in Information Technology.

These days, opportunities in wireless broadband offer the same excitement for major development that nurtured him through his early years: “People in regional areas have to be given access to join the global community in high-performance computing and broadband wireless can do that.”

While working to facilitate that, he deplores a lack of support from business leaders generally to hasten local industrial development of emerging, entrepreneurial companies through joint projects.

“We need something like an Australian Institute of Sport for technology to help coordinate development. We work in a hybrid environment of multinationals, and locals striving for success. We need to bring things together to get critical mass if only to solve our trade deficit problems.”

There’s still an innate larrikinism that shines through a conversation leavened with blokey humour. His career highlight? One of two things: being able to stay in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s Dayton home, courtesy of NCR and Tony Benson, and with permission to use their personally designed shower.

Second, having lunch in Maui with Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, and after sharing experiences and common interests, his saying “well Peter if you’d been born in the USA you might well have taken my place”.

He has a ready admission to give credit to others like John Bennett “who has stayed in touch right through my career, always ready to help with the right advice at the right time”.

“I’m an ordinary bloke from Granville who moved to Manly where I went to Manly High, played football and swam every day, and was brought up by two aunts. Right through my life I’ve been blessed with the support of so many wonderful people and that plus my Christian faith has made the difference.

“Also, they say timing is everything; well I missed the romantic period of aircraft design but lived through the unique pioneering era of computing and communications with its profound effect on society and business. My message to young folk is keep your headlights on high beam, take risks, be a team player, travel and seek out new and creative opportunities for your talents.’

*Footnote: In recalling the episode, Barry de Ferranti describes being in London to prepare for Ferranti’s entry into the Australian market when the commissionaire stealthily rang him to say there was “a persistent Orstralian downstairs looking for a job” and would he sort him out.

“There sat Peter, fidgeting, in shorts, open neck shirt and sandals, complaining that he’d been to every engineering outfit on a list that John Bennett had given him, and was at end of the line. It took us all of 45 minutes to hire what became an enormously valuable team member at a critical time.”

Among a bouquet of tributes he pays to Jones, he describes him as the “most altruistically generous man” he knows, particularly during the Techway period. He also seems to have spent his life bumping into him:

“I went to a seminar at Princeton on some subject, and Jones pops up, talking about STAR.” Years later in a café after a visit to the Word Trade Centre, “the voice at the next table is Jones’ – and it’s happened all over the place over the years.”