Honorary degree for pioneer of computing revolution

Computer engineer Christopher Turner after receiving his honorary degree in Cambridge

Pioneering engineer Christopher Turner, who was at the forefront of the home computing boom of the 20^th Century, has been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science by his alma mater, Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) during a graduation ceremony in Cambridge.

During a career that spanned over five decades, Christopher played an integral role in one of the UK’s most important technological innovations, the BBC Micro.

Christopher grew up in Cambridgeshire, where, from the age of 10, 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. Christopher went straight into work at the University of Cambridge’s renowned Cavendish Laboratory in 1967. 

Employed as a technician in the crystallography department, Christopher 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.

A decade later, a timespan that saw Chris pass the Council of Engineering Institutions’ Part II course at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology – one of ARU’s predecessor institutions – and then move into industry, 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 Christopher, 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 Christopher 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, Christopher 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, he served as its Vice-President of Operations and IT.

In 2010, Christopher 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, Christopher helped define the safety-critical Cortex-R series processors used in modern autonomous vehicles, robotics, and aerospace systems.

Addressing the 237 students that graduated during the ceremony at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge, he added: “Many of you will find the same through your careers, as projects you work on will be invisible to the public eye. But you will see things that you have done and take satisfaction from knowing ‘I did that’.

“It is my hope that all of you graduating today will enjoy rich and fulfilling careers as I have done. It is my belief that there are exciting times ahead for all of you.”