David Barron: Visionary, mentor and friend

(From Professor Dame Wendy Hall)

I owe my career in computing to David

He didn’t really remember me as an undergraduate mathematics student at Southampton. He taught me computing – Fortran programming to be exact. I hated it. Not because of his teaching – he was an excellent teacher – but because I couldn’t see the point of hanging around the computing laboratory for hours to get the results of a three line programme. At the time I really loved the abstract thinking required for pure mathematics and went on to do a PhD in algebraic topology. I got to know David then as one of the professors in the maths department at Southampton. But I didn’t really socialise with the computer scientists and never dreamt the subject would come to mean so much to me.

I left Southampton in 1977 looking for a career in academia but I couldn’t get a job as a pure maths lecturer. I managed to get a job lecturing in maths but it was maths for engineers and then maths for trainee teachers.  During this time the first personal computers started to emerge. I was asked to set up a course to teach teachers BASIC programming. I taught myself BASIC one summer holiday and never looked back, although I was of course mentally mutilated for life as described by Dijkstra  – I never really mastered the art of programming! But I got more and more interested in the use of computers in education. I took a part-time MSc at City University in computer science and applied for a job as a lecturer in computer science back at Southampton.

I had little experience teaching computer science and even less research experience. I didn’t think I stood a chance at the interview panel but for some reason best known to him David decided to take a bet on me. After all I had a PhD from Southampton, so I had shown I could do research – just not in computing!

At that time the CS Group, which David lead at Southampton, had just become a Department and had taken its first intake of BSc Computer Science students. We’ve included some of the early CSD photos in this blog. It is amazing to think how small we were then.

Pascal was the first teaching language in those days.  We taught it to our own students and as a service course across the University. It was a baptism of fire for me but David was so incredibly supportive.

He encouraged us to use new technology in our teaching – Gillian Lovegrove and I were reminiscing at David’s funeral about the videotape programme we used to teach first year Pascal – and dictated in the mid-80’s that email would be used as the main method of communication in the Department from that point on. I remember thinking – surely we’re not going to send emails to people in the office next door – but of course David with his amazing ability to see into the future when it came to computing technology was right. We all took to it like ducks to water, as did the rest of the research community and eventually the rest of the world.

I was still very interested in the use of computers in education and began exploring the possibility of using the latest interactive videodiscs for teaching programming and other subject disciplines instead of videotape. David enthusiastically encouraged me to do this and even bought me a videodisc player to experiment with. It cost about £1K, which in those days was a large chunk of the Department’s equipment budget. He also paid for me to go to multimedia conferences in the US, which I could never have funded on my own. Others in the Department were not so happy. Was this real computer science? David stood his ground. This was the future and he was encouraging me to be a pioneer. If he hadn’t done this things would have been very different. I would never have had the career I had in computer science and I might even have left the subject behind all together as the negative comments about the direction my research was taking me were very hard to deal with.

The rest as they say is history. We became the first group in the UK to develop videodisc drivers for the Apple Mac. We pioneered the development of multimedia and hypermedia information management systems and we became one of the few computer science research groups to take Web research seriously. I would argue David’s hunch paid off and I think so would he.

He introduced my inaugural lecture. “Watch my lips” he said. “When I first knew Wendy she was shy and retiring”. With his help I had become so much more confident. I secured an EPSRC Research Fellowship and a personal chair. David was so proud and I loved him for that.

He had of course had the foresight to lead us into the merger of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton in 1987.  He became the second Head of ECS and the meteoric climb of CS at Southampton began – from a small group that did virtually no research to the world-class research group it is today. When he stepped down as Head of ECS he was a bit lost as to where he belonged. I was so pleased when he agreed to join the Multimedia research group and spend the last years of his working life associated with our research effort.

At his father’s funeral, Nick talked about David’s approach to diversity. When David was asked what he was doing about women in computing at Southampton he replied “We employ them as academics”. I will be forever grateful that included me.