Christopher Turner

Areas of Interest

Science and Technology

Honorary Award

Honorary Doctor of Science

Citation

Vice-Chancellor, it is my pleasure to read the citation for Christopher Turner for the award of Honorary Doctor of Science.

Chris Turner is a pioneering engineer who was at the forefront of the home computing boom of the 20th century. During a career that spanned over five decades, Chris played an integral role in one of the UK’s most important technological innovations, the BBC Micro. A graduate of one of our founding institutions, Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, he is nothing short of a standard-bearer for the impact that our engineering and technology education has had upon the industry in which he served.

Chris’ life began in Cambridgeshire, where, from the age of 10, it was clear Chris was a prodigiously talented engineer. He liked nothing more than to "dismember radios” and repurpose their components and chassis into new forms, as well as building other audio devices from magazine kits. So it was perhaps no surprise that, having passed his O Levels at grammar school and with university unaffordable in the harsh postwar financial climate, Chris went straight into work at the University of Cambridge’s renowned Cavendish Laboratory in 1967.

Employed as a technician in the crystallography department, Chris thrived in his new role and was soon building logic boards for a PDP-11 computer. In time, he moved into the main electronics workshop, where he met an Austrian PhD candidate named Hermann Hauser. Though he would not know it at that time, it was a serendipitous encounter that would redefine his career.

A decade later – a timespan that saw Chris pass the Council of Engineering Institutions’ Part II course at CCAT and then move into industry, first at Pye Unicam and then at Pye TVT – he received a phone call. Hauser had been tasked with finding an engineer capable of developing a computer for Sir Clive Sinclair’s new company, Science of Cambridge. He thought of Chris, who agreed to take on the project, working in his evenings and weekends to develop the MK-14 microprocessor kit.

By now it was 1978. At the end of that year Hauser co-founded a new electronics and computing consulting business called CPU Ltd and appointed Chris as its first employee and Chief Engineer. This quickly transitioned into Acorn Computers and over the next decade, they became key players in the ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’, where a generation of engineers, including fellow Acorn alumni Professor Steve Furber CBE, Sir Andy Hopper and Dr Sophie Wilson CBE, transformed the city into a centre of excellence for microelectronics and computer development. Together they developed the Acorn Atom microcomputer and the legendary BBC Micro, which not only won a Queen’s Award for Technology, but helped usher in a generation of computer-literate children.

Following Acorn’s acquisition by Olivetti in the mid-1980s, Chris became Operations Manager at Olivetti Research Laboratory, where the team’s work on Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches – ATM for short – led to the spin-out of Virata Corporation in 1993. For the next seven years, Chris served as Vice-President of Operations and IT, during which Virata successfully floated on the NASDAQ.

At the turn of the millennium, Chris moved into consultancy, employing his vast experience with several tech companies. In 2010 he embarked on the final stage of his career, joining ARM, the microprocessor giant born from his original employer, Acorn. As Director of Product Marketing and Emerging Technologies, Chris helped define the safety-critical Cortex-R series processors used in modern autonomous vehicles, robotics, and aerospace systems.

Chris retired in 2018, his place secure among the luminaries who had fixed the foundations of the modern computing age. And with a career connecting ARU’s engineering roots with global innovation, he is a truly compelling role model for our students. We are delighted to welcome him into our ARU community.

Vice-Chancellor, it is my pleasure to present Christopher Turner for the award of Doctor of Science, honoris causa.