Steve Vickers

Steve Vickers is the author of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer ROM firmware. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Education

Vickers graduated from King's College, Cambridge with a degree in mathematics, he then read a Ph.D. at Leeds University also in mathematics.

Sinclair Research

In 1980 he started working for Nine Tiles which had previously written the Sinclair BASIC for the ZX80. He was responsible for the adaptation of the 4K ZX80 ROM into the 8K ROM used in the ZX81 and also wrote the ZX81 manual. He then wrote most of the ZX Spectrum ROM, and assisted with the user documentation.

Vickers left in 1982 to form "Rainbow Computing Co." with Richard Altwasser. The company became Jupiter Cantab and they were together responsible for the development of the largely unsuccessful Jupiter ACE, a competitor to the similar Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Academia

Originally at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, Steve Vickers later joined the Department of Pure Mathematics at the Open University before finally moving to the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. He is currently a Senior Lecturer and the Research Student Tutor of the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham.

Turtle Graphics

Currently, Vickers' uses a java class package called turtle graphics to teach the First Year Java Workshop module for university students. The turtle graphics has a web applet and a java class. This class replicates the LOGO software used by students to teach basic programming.

Research

Vickers' main interest lies within geometric logic and turtles. He has written over 30 papers in scholarly journals on mathematical aspects of computer science, and a book, Topology via Logic (Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 0521576512).

External links

• Steve Vickers' Homepage at the School of Computer Science
• An interview with Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers