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For our May meeting Acorn alumni Jim Mitchell will be Zooming in from his home in California. Jim managed the ARM development team and was head of the Acorn Research Centre in Palo Alto. This was where ARX, the originally planned multitasking, multithreaded, multiuser operating system for the Archimedes was being developed.

Very little has ever been heard about what happened there and how far ARX was developed, except from their RISC OS rivals, so this is a unique chance to find out all about it from the person in charge. We are also hoping to be joined by several other members of the development team to help answer questions. (AFAIK other Acorn alumni present were Chris Turner, Joe Dunn, Brian Cockburn, Rob Napier, and Stuart Swales!)

While Jim will mainly be talking about his time at Acorn, before that he worked for 12 years at the legendary Xerox PARC where ethernet, laser printers, file sharing, the WIMP paradigm, and many more computing concepts we now take for granted were first developed. Later he worked for Sun and was responsible for the development of Java. Read his biography on Wikipedia.

He has had an amazing career and we are very excited to have him joining us :-)