Computer Science Colloquium

The talk begins with the early days of UNIX from the speaker's own experience at Bell Labs and discusses some of the key advances made including the shell. Some of the shell innovations will be discussed including some of the challenges faced introducing it to the user community.

The second part of the talk is devoted more to the speaker's recent experience at El Dorado Ventures where he is currently CTO. This part will discuss the role of Venture Capital, what makes a good VC presentation and why some things get funded and others do not. It wraps up with the elements of a good business plan and some anecdotes on companies that have failed.

Over the last 20 years Steve has held senior engineering management positions at Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment and Silicon Graphics. At present he is Chief Technical Officer at El Dorado Ventures in Menlo Park, California.

Prior to this Steve spent nine years at Bell Laboratories as a member of the Seventh Edition UNIX team. He designed the UNIX Command Language or "Bourne Shell" which is used for scripting in the UNIX programming environment and he wrote the ADB debugger tool.

After receiving his formal education, Steve worked as Assistant Director of Research at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge England. During that time he wrote a portable complier for ALGOL 68. The intermediate language for this compiler was the basis for the instruction set of the Cambridge Capability Machine.

Steve is Past President of the ACM and is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from King's College London, a Diploma (or M.Sc.) in Computer Science from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Trinity College in Cambridge, England.