Dr. Charles Forsyth - Technical Director and Co-Founder

Charles Forsyth has more than 30 years of wide computing experience, specialising in the design and implementation of systems software, from low-level drivers through compilers to whole operating systems. He was an early user of Unix outside Bell Labs, developing drivers, protocol stacks, compilers, and system and application software. Charles has a DPhil in Computer Science from the University of York, England, where he was a Senior Software Officer for 16 years. He also has extensive commercial software development experience through his private consultancy work. He later cloned Unix software years before that activity became an ideological growth industry, producing compatible libraries, commands, kernel subsystems, the Minix shell, and a lexical analyser generator later adapted for sale in the MKS toolkit. Not content with cloning others' ideas, he has also done original work. Past projects include an efficient tasking system for Ada; several compilers; a code generator for Ada83; a commercial data storage subsystem; worst-case execution analysis tools for time-critical systems and several operating systems, including small time-critical systems. Charles assisted Michael Jeffrey and John Bates at HCI Ltd. with the construction of distributed auctioneering and game-playing systems. He has considerable expertise with Unix, its successor Plan 9, and its new cousin Inferno. On forming Vita Nuova, he began extending the reach of Inferno to new platforms, and has since been instrumental in deciding Inferno's future.

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