Steve Furber Interviewed by Thomas Lean
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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor Steve Furber Interviewed by Thomas Lean C1379/78 1 IMPORTANT © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. 2 British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/78 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s Furber Title: Prof surname: Interviewee’s Stephen Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Computer scientist Date and place of birth: March 21st 1953, Withington, Manchester. Mother’s occupation: Physiotherapist; Maths Father’s occupation: Mechanical engineer in Teacher the nuclear power industry Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 11 June 2012 (1), 20 August 2012 (2), 22 October 2012 (3), 9 November 2012 (4), 18 December 2012 (5). Location of interview: Interviewee's office, University of Manchester Name of interviewer: Thomas Lean Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48 kHz Total no. of tracks 5 Mono or stereo Stereo Total Duration: 8:56:49 (HH:MM:SS) Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: Open; © The British Library Interviewer’s comments: 3 Steve Furber Page 4 C1979/78 Track 1 Track 1 To start off with I’d like you to very briefly introduce yourself, who you are, what you’ve done. I’m Steve Furber. I’m Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester in the School of Computer Science. And I’ve done various things. Do you want a potted life history at this point? I think it would be a good place to perhaps put a short one in. So I was born and brought up in Manchester. My parents moved to Marple when I was eighteen months old and lived there ever since until their recent deaths. I went to Rosehill County Primary School in Marple and from there I went on to Manchester Grammar School and then Cambridge. I spent ten years in the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate, part three maths, PhD and then as a research fellow at Emanuel College. And then joined Acorn Computers in 1981 and had a hand in the development of the BBC micro and the ARM microprocessor. I moved to Manchester in August 1990 and I’ve been here ever since. [01:25] Thank you, that’s ideal. When were you actually born? I was born on March 21 st 1953. Whereabouts? I was – I believe I was born in Withington Hospital but at that time my parents lived in Old Trafford, in Lyndham Avenue, if I have got that right. What did your parents actually do? 4 Steve Furber Page 5 C1979/78 Track 1 My father was an engineer in heat transfer and when I was born he was actually on the staff at Manchester College of Science and Technology, which later became UMIST. He was on the staff at UMIST until the late ‘50s when he joined the nascent nuclear power industry and worked for The Nuclear Power Group for the rest of his career. TNPG later on merged with other components of the nuclear industry and became the National Nuclear Corporation but he was there until he retired in the early ‘80s. My mother trained as a physiotherapist and indeed it was in her role as a physiotherapist that she met my father. He had a dickey knee from some sports injury, which she treated, and I guess I’m the result of a dodgy knee. She later in my teens retrained as a maths teacher and spent her later working life teaching maths in a local secondary school. [03:20] Could we talk about each of them in a little more detail, perhaps starting with your father? What was his name? My father was christened Benjamin Neil Furber. And to my great confusion in my early years, he was known to all his immediate family as Neil, his second name, but for some reason my mother had never liked this and he was known to my mother and to all his professional colleagues as Ben. And so whenever we met up with relatives on his side of the family and they called him Neil, I found this very confusing. He was born into a family, many of whom were Cheshire farmers in the dairy industry. His father was a cheese factor, which is a sort of cheese middleman who would buy cheese from the manufacturers and sell it onto the shops. And as far as I can tell, a reasonably comfortably off middle class activity. And my father, as a professional engineer throughout his working life, likewise was always, you know, not rich but comfortably off. And as with many people who grew up during the Second World War, they knew how to be careful with money and so he was never in a particularly difficult financial position that I was aware of. If I were to meet him what sort of chap would he be? 5 Steve Furber Page 6 C1979/78 Track 1 Well, the first thing is physically he’s quite like me, okay, so many of his colleagues recognise me without having met me before because there’s more than a passing physical resemblance, although I have to say at the point of his death, which was last year, he had more hair than I have now [laughs]. So he was about the same height as me, just around six foot or slightly under, with a fairly large head, so my hat size is at the higher end of the distribution. What else? How else would one describe him? What was his personality like? Personality? Erm … he was – as an engineer he was very practical, so he liked making things. In his earlier years he’d done a lot of work on rebuilding cars and he did his own car maintenance until – for quite a long time. And he built furniture at home. In fact when he retired he took up woodcarving and turning as a hobby and he produced very large amounts of woodwork until he’d – which he sold, mainly for charity through the local church fair - until he’d saturated the local market, as he put it [laughs] with his wood products. He was I think a fairly typical father for the post war years in that he went off to work early and arrived home quite late and so as children we didn’t see a great deal of him during the working week. And so, you know, we had far more dealings with my mother than with my father, but I guess that was fairly typical of those times. He was reasonably strict, I would say, in terms of his approach. And certainly he liked his authority to be respected, I think it’s fair to say. But he also had a good sense of fun and when he was at home at weekends, or particularly on holiday, he would play with us energetically when we were very young. He was very keen that we participate in sport. He was a tennis player through to his early eighties. I’m afraid I never quite equalled his sporting stamina. And generally highly supportive. I think my parents were very, erm, supportive of the way I proceeded through school and university. They never – they never applied undue influence in terms of my decisions as to what I wanted to do, so they saw it as my decision. So for example, when I decided to stay on at Cambridge and take a PhD, my father, who himself had a PhD from Manchester Tech, did point out to me that, you know, if I was thinking of an industrial career then a PhD was probably not a good investment because you had to live on next to nothing during the PhD and it didn’t necessarily advance your position if you then moved to industry afterwards. 6 Steve Furber Page 7 C1979/78 Track 1 But on the other hand when I’d decided I wanted to do one anyway he was not unhappy. It would have been a bit difficult for him to have objected since he’d done one himself. So I think in terms of the decisions we took progressing through life, they were – they were happy to give advice but not too forceful. How much did you know about your father’s work when you were a child? Hmm … I don’t think we knew a great deal about what he did. I got to know more of it later in life. In fact I spent a couple of periods of time with temporary jobs at TNPG, working with some of his colleagues. And of course working with your father’s colleagues is always interesting because you pick up gossip that somehow never finds its way home. So I remember, I worked with Jim Davidson, who was one of Dad’s closer friends at TNPG, who led a maths group and one of Jim’s comments about my father – Jim really liked his food.