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Remembering Charles Lindsey
Mar. 7th, 2023 11:19 amOnly one or two of you will have met my Dad, but like all fathers, he was very special to his family, and to many other people as well.
My sister Gillian wrote the eulogy for his funeral, and I post it here for anyone who would like to know him a little. He was a first generation computer scientist (anyone remember Algol 68) , but there was far more to him than that.
( Read more... )So who is Charles Lindsey?
Oh! I thought you knew that! Why else are you here?
That’s how my Dad’s home page begins, and it’s been the same for over 30
years.
Anyone who has Googled Charles Lindsey will have found the Wikipedia page
for Charles H Lindsey, British computer scientist.
But Wikipedia has an entry for another Charles Lindsey, who emigrated to
Toronto in 1842. That Charles Lindsey married the daughter of a Canadian
politician, who some years earlier had led a rebellion against the government
in Ontario. That Charles Lindsey is this one’s great-grand-uncle. The British and
Canadian cousins stopped writing to each other in 1913, so we lost contact.
However it won’t surprise anyone familiar with Charles’s methodical nature
that when he was in Toronto in 1986, he went through all the Lindseys in the
Toronto phonebook. He had to ring all the Lindseys down to W before he
found what he was looking for, and was put touch with his third and fourth
cousins.
The purpose of that detour was to explain which Charles Lindsey we are talking
about, but it also illustrates Dad’s fascination with his family tree.
I want to start by telling you that at 91, my Dad wasn’t ready to die. He said
several times in the last few months that he still had plenty left he wanted to
do. These projects included ordering 2 more tons of compost for the garden at
Dutton Court, completing the computerized control of the church heating, and
restoring a Meccano model of Hartree’s differential analyser.
The most memorable of these conversations took place in hospital just before
Christmas. Dad had slipped into unconsciousness and wasn’t expected to
survive. Yet he began to rouse the next morning, and one of the first things he
said was "it’s lovely to be alive”.
Page 2 of 5
But he didn’t want to live just to get things done on his to-do list. The main
concern he had in his last 8 weeks was getting well enough to join in
communal life at Dutton Court again – to eat lunch with other residents and sit
in the lounge afterwards for coffee and chat.
It may surprise most of you to learn that he valued community in this way. He
was known for being an introvert. Someone who didn’t join in conversations.
Who would even be so rude as to ignore a cheery “Hello Charles.”
But if he acted like you hadn’t spoken – it was almost certainly because as far
as he could tell, you hadn’t. So I want to thank those of you who understood
just how hard of hearing he was, and made sure to treat Dad not only as an
observer to a social group but as someone who deserved to be listened to.
You may be wondering why we chose Three Ha’pence a Foot as a reading. One
reason is Dad’s love of Stanley Holloway’s monologues. Another reason is that
Dad’s great grandfather was a joiner in Salford. But the main reason is Sam's
persistence in asking for three ha’pence per foot.
It would be an understatement to say that Charles could be a very stubborn
man. And that this could be exasperating.
Often doing something Charles’s way seemed like blind insistence that he was
right. My mother said more than once that at his funeral we should play Frank
Sinatra’s: I did it my way.
Of course, my father wasn’t always right. And sometimes he never understood
why he was wrong – which has caused hurt to some people. But one clue to
understanding his attitude to getting things done his way, is to understand his
engineering mindset. His strong convictions often arose from a logical
approach to problems. He was fond of saying things like: First let us assemble
the facts. Or, Logically speaking, ...what should happen is ....
Which brings me – finally – to his upbringing, and the role of engineering and
computer science in his life.
Charles was born in Manchester in 1931. His middle name – Hodgson – is his
mother’s maiden name and he was named Charles both because it was a
family name passed down the Lindsey family, and also after his uncle Charles
Hodgson who was killed in the first world war.
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His mother Mabel had a degree in medicine.
His grandfather Charles Richard Lindsey had a BSc from the forerunner of
Manchester University and founded a chemical works. His father Gilbert had a
degree in physics and his aunt became a lecturer in geology. Gilbert made
working models of steam engines for a hobby and as a boy had built crystal
radio sets.
So Dad had fantastic role models for science, and inherited from his father the
skills to take something to pieces and put it together again.
At boarding school in Giggleswick, his hobby was radio-controlled model
airplanes. This involved building electronic circuits, which would be useful
experience when it came to building computers later.
In 1950 Dad went to Cambridge University (Christ's College) where he gained a
degree in Physics.
Being at Cambridge University in the early 50s Charles was certainly in the right
place at the right time to get involved with the design of early computers. As
an undergraduate he would certainly have visited the Computer Lab, then
called the Mathematical Laboratory.
The Maths Lab contained one of the world's first electronic computers, the
EDSAC. Researchers at the university could apply for machine time on this
computer, using it to perform complex calculations that could otherwise take a
week to do.
After graduating, Charles became a PhD Student at the Maths Lab, receiving a
grant from the Manchester computing firm Ferranti.
Dad’s research included programming the EDSAC but he was mainly doing
hands-on electronic engineering with ferrite cores.
Ferrite cores are tiny rings that can be magnetised in either of two directions
by passing a current through them. This is the basis of magnetic storage of
binary data.
But Dad was working on another use of magnetic cores – as circuit elements
for performing logical operations on the stored digits.
Page 4 of 5
The Maths Lab is also where he met my mother. Sylvia operated the Hollerith
machine – which did mechanical computation using holes punched on rolls of
paper. As Charles’s girlfriend, Sylvia also wound innumerable cores with wires,
to help Dad carry out his experiments. And she not only typed up Charles’ PhD
thesis, but also drew the circuit diagrams for it.
After finishing his PhD in 1957 Charles worked for Ferranti in Manchester. In
1958 he became project leader for a new mainframe computer called Orion.
The Orion was the first commercially available computer to permit several
programs to run simultaneously.
The history of computing shows that while the Orion-1 was innovative, it over-
ran, was over-budget, and a business disaster for Ferranti. There’s a telling
phrase in my Dad’s archives where he says “I don’t hardly recall a time when
anybody from the front office came up to see what we were doing, and we
didn’t go out of our way to tell them.” ...
In 1967 Charles joined the teaching staff of the recently created Department of
Computer Science at Manchester University. He immediately became
interested in the new programming language ALGOL 68.
Charles described himself as an onlooker to the discord that had already
broken out between developers of the language. The only thing that the
protagonists agreed on was that official reports describing the language were
obscure and lacked an informal introduction.
As a relative latecomer to the gang, Charles circulated a document with the
title "ALGOL 68 with fewer tears". And at the next Working Group meeting he
was invited to be co-author of a book intended to provide the much-needed
informal introduction to the language.
This book is perhaps the only book ever published that is organisationally two-
dimensional. So readers are told they can either read the book horizontally or
vertically. Either in the normal way, chapter by chapter, or by reading all the .1
subsections then all the .2 subsections and so on.
While relatively few people ended up using ALGOL-68, many programming
languages were directly influenced by it, the most notable being Pascal, C and
C++.
Page 5 of 5
Working on ALGOL-68 kept Charles fully occupied until about 1983. The period
coincides broadly with the upbringing of his 5 children. In the summer of 1975
the whole family spent three weeks touring round four different European
countries in a camper van. This was all so that Dad could attend an ALGOL-68
meeting in Grenoble.
We also remember visits to Clerewood Avenue by Dad’s Dutch and Canadian
colleagues from the ALGOL-68 working group. These colleagues made Dad
relax and laugh in a way only equalled by his sister Marjorie.
After retiring, Dad continued to apply the laws of physics to as many things as
he could – for example the one-dimensional heat flow equation to the
problem of when the heating should come on in the church hall. After lots of
theory, he designed and built a circuit board connected to a temperature
sensor, to computerise the heating control. And I’m sorry Joe – Dad never did
finish the documentation on how it worked.
In his 70s Charles became a member of the Computer Conservation Society,
North West Branch, and subsequently became part of the team restoring
Douglas Hartree's Differential Analyser at Manchester Museum of Science and
Technology. He had a great sense of fulfilment that he was doing something
useful and worthwhile in the history of computing, and also valued the
companionship provided by his fellow volunteers.
When Dad retired, he added a strapline to his outgoing emails. It said: At
home, doing my own thing.
And even in his last few days, he was doing his own thing. Programming – very
slowly – in postscript. Reading usenet groups. Planning – very slowly – what he
needed to do next to restore the Meccano differential analyser.
And that’s how I remember him best – at home, doing his own thing.
