Iann Marchant Barron (16 June 1936 – 16 May 2022) was a British computer engineer and entrepreneur. During vacation work in 1956–67 at Elliott Brothers while still at

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...

he designed the

Elliott 803 The Elliott 803 is a small, medium-speed transistor digital computer which was manufactured by the British company Elliott Brothers in the 1960s. About 211 were built. History The 800 series began with the 801, a one-off test machine built in ...

. On leaving University he joined the Civil Service in 1958 as a Scientific Officer on special assignment first to the Army Operational Research Group, and in 1960 to the

Air Ministry The Air Ministry was a department of the Government of the United Kingdom with the responsibility of managing the affairs of the Royal Air Force, that existed from 1918 to 1964. It was under the political authority of the Secretary of State ...

. He returned to the company now called Elliott Automation as a Project Leader for the Elliott 502 computer team, later becoming the company's Head of System Research. In 1965 Barron left Elliott Automation to become Founder and Managing Director of

Computer Technology Limited Computer Technology Limited (CTL) was a British computer company founded in 1965. In 1984 it merged into its holding company and was called Information Technology Limited (ITL). Founder Iann Barron had worked for Elliott Automation but left t ...

, where the Modular One range of computer systems was developed. In the mid-1970s he formed a new company, Microcomputer Analysis Ltd, which offered consultancy on

microprocessors A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

to the semiconductor industry. This brought him into contact with two eminent American semiconductor specialists, Richard Petritz and Paul Schroeder, and in 1978 the triumvirate founded Inmos International PLC, which produced the innovative

transputer The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers. T ...

, and led to the development of

SpaceWire SpaceWire is a spacecraft communication network based in part on the IEEE 1355 standard of communications. It is coordinated by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with international space agencies including NASA, JAXA, and RKA. ...

. Barron was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (DFBCS) in 1986 and was appointed CBE in the

1994 New Year Honours The New Year Honours 1994 were appointments by most of the sixteen Commonwealth realms of Queen Elizabeth II to various orders and honours to reward and highlight good works by citizens of those countries, and honorary ones to citizens of other ...

. Barron died on 16 May 2022, at the age of 85.

References

Bibliography

"The Origins of SpaceWire"
Paul Walker

Dick Selwood, August 2007, inmos.com
"In Barron's Court"
IEE Review, 16 January 1997
Forgotten Futures"">"Transputer-> Forgotten Futures"
1998

USENET Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

discussion in ''comp.sys.transputer'' 1936 births 2022 deaths British computer scientists Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Fellows of the British Computer Society History of computing in the United Kingdom {{Compu-bio-stub