This site will soon be moving to www.john-a-harper.com .
Welcome to
John Harper's Home Page
For my day job I
work for Cisco Systems, running a group developing some
of the IOS software that routes packets around the Internet.
Recently I
learned to fly, getting my Private Pilot's Licence (PPL_ASEL) in
March 2002.
In the last
few years I've done a lot of Valve (Vacuum Tube) Audio...
For a while I started
building a garden railway - the thing that most people have asked me about - but I confess
that since moving to the US it has all stayed packed in cartons. Maybe I'll do something
with it when we find somewhere more permanent to live.
Trains
and transport have been a lifelong interest.
I finally got
round to finishing up a version of Winlife32 that can be distributed. This is (in my
humble opinion) the best Life program available for 32-bit Windows. It includes a powerful
editing and visualisation system, automatic pattern recognition and termination detection,
a rules editor for non-Conway rules, and various other neat features. You can download it
and see for yourself here.
Since there didn't
seem to be another one, I've created the IAS Home Page, for a bit
of PDP-11 nostalgia.
See below
for something about myself.
You can
reach me at jharper@cisco.com.
For
professional stuff, see my CV (or resume
if you prefer). On a more personal note, I grew up in the London suburbs (actually
Romford, Essex). From an early age I was interested in London Transport buses and in
trains. Electronics came along a little later when I bought a copy of Practical
Electronics magazine on my 11th birthday. Computers were added when I discovered that my
school had access to one of the very first school computers in the UK, an Elliott 903, which I learned to
program in assembler and Algol 60. My school (Harold
Hill Grammar School) was a great place, in the tradition of English state grammar
schools, and I had teachers who were really able to fill me with enthusiasm for their
subjects. Special mention must go to my first French teacher, who gave me a lifelong
interest in everything to do with languages.
By the time
I was 16 I had decided that I wanted to make a career in computers, and decided to study
Computer Science at the University of Lancaster, in
the sodden north of England. (In retrospect it seems to me that it never stopped raining
in the three years I was there, although I'm sure there must have been a couple of sunny
days). I learned Algol 68,
and did a lot of work on the compiler for a language called BCPL that would have been forgotten
but for its place in the history of C. Then I discovered J.H. Conway's "Game of Life", and wrote a
program to play it on the PDP-8
together with its KV8/I storage scope. Much later, I wrote WinLife as an exercise in C++ and
Windows programming.
During one
summer, I did some work for a local company which ran a computer bureau on a couple of
PDP-8s (yes, really). But as a bright young undergraduate I was all set to continue my
education with a Ph.D. in something to do with computers and natural language, when I
suddenly realised I could quit the academic life and earn some money. This seemed quite
attractive, so when I graduated I joined Digital
Equipment Corporation, then a minicomputer company little known outside its scientific
and technical market. I moved to Reading, England, which in all fairness was better than
Romford; but not much.
For the
first 18 years I was there, Digital just grew and grew. It was a fantastic place to work.
In the beginning I did various programming jobs, especially on the best and least-known of
the multifarious operating systems Digital created for the PDP-11, IAS. (Rumour has it that the model number came from
counting all the operating systems, but actually there were more than 11). Later I worked
on network products, starting with X.25 and ending up leading the architecture team that
designed DECnet/OSI. Somewhere along the line
I started going along to standards meetings, in the days when we believed that the only
way to stop IBM's SNA from conquering the world was to make OSI happen in the official
world of standards. I ended up chairing one of the big OSI committees, the one that did
the Network Layer, from 1984 to 1991. It taught me a lot about how to get things done when
you have absolutely no official power at all. It was also where I met my wife, who was
chairing another committee at that time.
By 1991,
though, the fun of DECnet was coming to an end. TCP/IP was taking over the world, and it
was time to move on. I took a job in Digital's telecommunications marketing group and
moved to the south of France. This was a great job and was my introduction to the world of
telecom, but in 1992 Ken Olsen was forced to resign as CEO of Digital and Bob Palmer was
appointed in his place. If you compare Digital to the Titanic, this was the point where
the waterlogged hull started to sink dramatically, the stern rising horrifyingly into the
air before the structure broke into pieces. (The iceberg was of course Unix). As staff
were jettisoned over the stern rail by the tens of thousands, in 1995 I took an offer I
couldn't refuse and my career as an independent consultant was launched. That was
lucrative and interesting until I joined Cisco Systems
as Director for IOS Engineering in Europe in 1999, which led to a move to California,
where I now live in Los Altos, in 2001.
Last
revised: 3rd May 1998. Created with Word 97.