Soup of the Day

In loving memory

Bob Clark
25th June 1952 to 26th May 2004Today marks the second anniversary of my fathers death. Bob, died from a heart attack due to an aneurysm on 26th May 2004 during the early hours of the morning. At the time I had just completed my degree at Teesside and had just got home from University four days earlier. Needless to say it was a very unwelcome shock.

My father was working as a BT contractor at the Adastral Park research labratories outside of Ipswich in Suffolk, amongst other things. At BT, he worked on a project called Network Fault Management / Trouble Handling, a system that is responsible for ensuring BT’s backbone network keeps running through good and bad. At the end of his life Bob was getting into Tcl/Tk and within a year of his death I even managed to convert him to the Macintosh platform - a feat I thought impossible for many years.

For a relatively unasuming guy, Bob achieved a lot in his life, although I feel to this day he had much more to offer. A real advocate of computers since he discovered his first one at The Unversity of Essex in the 70’s. Bob went to Essex to study Physics, but quickly changed to Electronic Engineering so that he could use these new wonderful machines. Unfortunately two groups of people across the pond (Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak; Bill Gates, Paul Allen) were miles ahead of Bob in writing software for computers, but then Bob wasn’t so interested in Operating Systems. During the late seventies and early eighties Bob joined forces with a few of his friends to create SoftMachinery (named after the electro-psychadellic group Soft Machine). SoftMachinery would go onto create many first’s while Bob was involved, the Software Modem being one of their triumps (Mell Pullen and Terry Horridge). Bob was particularly interested in the Gnome At Home which ran on the Prestel Platform (also invented at Adastral Park, then called the Post Office, then BT Labs). During the SoftMachinery years Bob claimed that they were responsible for putting ‘red’ function keys on the Acorn BBC Micro. Bob was a regular on the first multiuser online game called ‘MUD‘ (Multi-user dungeon), a precursor to SecondLife. Remember this was the early 80’s, HTTP hadn’t even been invented and yet there Bob was playing games online with people all over the world. Sadly Bob’s own game, ‘Farmer Giles and the Seagulls‘ goes to the grave with him.

I feel that Bob in many ways was born too early, or rather lived too short a life. Some of the technological advances we are now seeing he would have loved. He certainly knew the direction the web was going in. Although computers interested him, a lot of other technological advances didn’t really appeal to Bob. Multi-channel television he considered a waste of time, far better to spend the time shooting other Battle Tanks or reading a good book. But new uses of Web technology would have really interested him. Google Earth is a good example of what I know he would have loved to use.

In the year leading up to his death, Bob joined forces with a local pressure group to get broadband into the little village of Higham. At the time BT weren’t interested in upgrading the exchange and so Bob was investigating starting a company called, GnomeGnet (appropriately) to supply local villages with broadband wirelessly across 802.11x networks. He died before this could ever get off the drawing board, but Sue continued to pressure local authorities long after Bob’s death and in October 2005, BT finally provided a 2MBit service to Higham. Needless to say I miss him more than words could possibly express. He never got to meet my partner Siân, which is a shame as I think he would have found her as adorable as I do. He never knew that both my sister and I graduated Univeristy with a first class and second class upper degree honours respectively, although I think he did know we would both do well.So, to honour my father on this day, I am dedicating PDnH Server to him. He was an advocate of Open Source software and I think he would be proud that I am working on a piece of free software for the world to use.

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Anyone is welcome to add their thoughts, wishes, comments or anything else to this post.