| Citation | Distinguished for the invention, design and commercial realisation of the transputer and of the parallel programming languages called "occam", David May was personally responsible for turning the word "transputer" into a practical reality. The transputer embodies a novel and cost-effective architectural concept of synchronised communication between disjoint processes, which was researched in May's earlier EPL programming language. Working at Inmos Limited, he designed the first and subsequent devices, incorporating this architecture and many of his other patented inventions, and, simultaneously, designed and developed the requisite associated programming language, "occam". There are now over 5000 members of occam and transputer user-groups in 50 countries and many international collaborations have been initiated, several of these by David May. The floating point transputer, introduced in 1987, involved him in one of the first uses of formal mathematical methods to verify the performance of a microprocessor and he has recently completed the design of a new transputer architecture for products to be launched in 1991. These will have high speed communication systems and be designed for use in general purpose parallel computers. David May's contributions to the improvement and application of Natural Knowledge have spawned a major international industry, involving many companies such as Kodak and IBM, and over 200,000 transputers have been sold by Inmos, most for export. |