My friend and colleague George Coulouris, who has died aged 87, was a visionary researcher of personal computers and a cycling campaigner.
In 1965, as a lecturer at Imperial College London, he started work on ICL’s content-addressable file store, which sped up BT’s directory inquiries. He then moved in 1971 to Queen Mary and Westfield College (now Queen Mary, University of London), progressing from lecturer to reader to professor in the department of computer science. There, he worked to show that the hardware guru John Iliffe’s designs had real advantages over mainframes of the day.
In the mid-1970s he pivoted towards interactive computing. In a converted cinema he made a computer systems lab. In 1975 the lab was first in the UK to import Unix, now the basis of the internet. He wrote “em”, a very early interactive editor, which became the basis of “vi”, used by hackers.
The lab had desks with low dividers, fast terminals to support a display editor, free coffee with bean bags to sit on and no staff hierarchy. There were hardware geeks, programming-language evangelists and philosophers of interaction. George encouraged cooperation with a shy smile. A spin-off company, Whitechapel Workstations, briefly tussled with US groups.
From 1999 to 2004, George was a part-time senior research fellow in the department of engineering at Cambridge University. He then became a senior research fellow, then a visiting professor in residence at the computer laboratory. He retired in 2016.
George was born in New York, to Louise Franklin, an artist, and George Coulouris, an English actor. In 1939 the family moved to Los Angeles then, in 1949, to London, where George Jr attended Westminster school. He learned to program during a gap year at IBM (1956-57), where he met Iliffe.
After graduating from University College London with a physics degree in 1960, he worked briefly at the Central Electricity and Gas Board before moving to London University. In 1963, he started work on the first compiler for the programming language CPL, at the Institute of Computer Science (ICS).
George met Jean Dollimore in the early 60s, when they were both at ICS, and they married in 2001. They lived part-time on a canal boat during the 80s, in Regent’s Park, then in Cambridge, where George worked part-time at Harlequin software company. Together they wrote the textbook Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (1988), now in its fifth edition.
From the 60s George cycled, commuting to work, and travelled long distances on holidays with Jean, eventually on a converted Moulton tandem of his own design. He campaigned for better cycle provision and built data-visualisation apps, showing traffic interventions on readable maps. George was also a competent amateur cellist, latterly with the Aeolian Sinfonia.
He is survived by Jean, two children, Sue and Anna, from his first marriage, to Christine Tinson, which ended in divorce, three stepchildren, Rachel, Julian and Jason, from Jean’s previous relationship, and 11 grandchildren. George’s sister, Mary Louise, died in 2011.
