I'm originally from Dumfries a sleepy town in the south west of Scotland, nothing much ever happens there although it was at one point home to Robert Burns the infamous Scottish drunkard and philanderer.

I left Dumfries for the "City of Light" aka "The Dear Green Place" (or "Glasgow" to its friends) where I studied Computing Science with Alcohol Consumption at Glasgow University. Four years later I emerged with a massive hangover and somewhat poorer, but with an B.Sc. (hons) in Computing Science.

I then headed down to the "Smoke" (London) where I worked as a Research Assistant in the Distributed Systems Group at Queen Mary and Westfield College. I spent 4 years investigating operating system and language environment support for distributed object oriented systems (see Publications). While there I completed a part-time Advanced M.Sc. in Distributed Systems and Parallel Architectures.

Due to lack of decent funding for interesting research projects I left academia and headed for the real world (sort of), where I joined the ranks of kernel hackers at UNIX System Labs Europe office in Ealing. Here I spent my time fruitfully investigating various bits of microkernel architecture, performance and the use of Object Oriented Interfaces between the various CHORUS/MiX servers.

After USL I headed "Ooop North" to ICL in West Gorton (a delightful suburb of Manchester - more a bomb site really), where I worked on the hugely successful GOLDRUSHMegaSERVER parallel database server (I think they managed to sell 2). I designed the Failover Manager and presented a paper at USENIX in 1996 (see Publications). Manchester is home to several good curry houses including the infamous This'n'Thats which serves up Rice'n'3 for 2 pounds....

I left ICL in June '96 to join SCO in Watford. I worked on things such as kernel debuggers, kernel panic dump generation and analysis tools, Reliant HA and NonStop Clusters for UnixWare.

SCO closed its Watford engineering office in Summer 2000, and several of us were promptly snapped up by VERITAS who opened an office especially for us. I have been working on the filesystem (VxFS), first on AIX now on Linux. In the meantime SCO sold its Operating System business to Caldera who then changed their name to the SCO Group and are now trying to sue IBM and anyone that may have even smelled a Linux box. A sad end to what was once an interesting and innovative company.

If you're really interested my cv is here.

I am training to become a Triathlete and have signed up for the London Triathlon this summer. My eventual goal is to complete an IronMan by the time I'm 40

I have a liking for Progressive Rock, especially for the subgenre known as Pronk (Progressive Punk) as typified by Cardiacs.

I seem to have a company named after me - checkout www.douglassteel.com.