Bob Clark, RIP
Bob was the voice behind the Gnome.from http://wiki.tcl.tk/3406
2004-05-27 No more email. Bob died of a heart attack at his home in that most beautiful part of England. A most beautiful man, loving father and husband and a good friend. He will be sorely missed. Goodbye, Bob.
AK May we know who wrote the entry immediately above ?
Yes, sorry. Even now to think about Bob brings tears to my eyes, so this may be short for the time being. I'll update it if necessary. My name is Mel Pullen [16]. I became part of SoftMachinery [17] in about 1980. Once you're part of it, you always are. Bob became a friend; we worked long hours (36 hour sessions) in the shed in his garden creating the terminal handlers for the beebon. The others involved in the eternal golden partlyship at that time were Glyn Philips who did the hardware design for the first auto baud rate sensing modem (yes that was SoftMachinery) and Terry Horridge who implemented the Prestel bulk update protocol on the beebon (previously a program on a GEC mini). I did the hardware and software for Acorn's teletext decoder. With Terry I designed the SoftModem, of which we sold 6. It ran a unix clone inside (OS9). Bob did most of the scary assembler, amused himself with being TG@H, wrote a few games (Farmer Giles and the seagulls). We were the 'uncles' to people like Jez San of Argonaut/JAM infamy.
In later life Bob became a contract programmer for BT, as he says above. He loved to program in TCL.
Just before he died, Bob was working on a Prestel emulation, written in TCL/TK. He'd got the prestel graphics emulator work and was displaying the TG@H pages in a carousel. Anyone want to help put this into a fit state to put on a web site? We have 11Meg of archives. That would be a nice memorial.
Testimonials
2004/5 Mel Pullen, Sam Clark part quoted above.
2006 Sam Clark
More to come...
