Professor Steve Furber, the brains behind the BBC Micro and ARM architecture, was this week awarded a top engineering industry gong.The former Acorn design manager received the Faraday medal, the most prestigious achievement award from the Institute of Engineering and Technology. It is given once a year for notable accomplishments in engineering and the professor joins a long list of distinguished names going back as far as 1922.
Upon winning the award, Prof Steve said: "It is a great honour to receive this. I have been very fortunate to work with many outstanding colleagues both at Acorn and at Manchester, and to find myself in the right place at the right time to work on projects that turned out to have an impact.
"The first half-century of computing has been extraordinarily exciting, but watch out, because the next half-century promises even bigger changes and more rapid development."
The professor is no stranger to success, however. Apart from being the ICL professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, he is vice-president of the British Computer Society, the chair of the UK Computing Research Committee, a holder of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and has been awarded both a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal and the Queen's Award for Technology. The latter of these two awards was for the technological innovations that he made whilst at Acorn.
Links
Prof Steve Furber's Wikipedia page