Iann Barron
Author: EIS Release Date: Jun 23, 2022
The first time I spoke to Iann Barron, the Inmos co-founder who has died at the age of 85, was on the phone.
“You’re not very nice about my company – you compared it to the Groundnut Scheme,” complained Barron.
He was in London so I suggested we should go to the Wig and Pen that evening to discuss things further.
After a multi-bottle dinner I was not much wiser about Inmos but I liked Barron.
Next morning my notes turned out to be indecipherable and my memory of the conversation skimpy. My disgusted editor told me not to bother claiming the bill on exes.
From then on I had a broadly sympathetic view of Inmos and, as its achievements grew – a 16k NMOS SRAM that knocked Intel off its perch in the SRAM business and the first CMOS DRAM – I became a fan.
The Transputer was a bit of a mystery to me – as it was to others – but I felt that Barron would make a success of the company. He had an affable nature, a taste for fun and a dry sense of humour.
When Lord Arnie Weinstock who had been piqued that the government had given £50 million to Inmos rather than to him, came calling at the Inmos fab in Wales (now the Newport Wafer Fab), Weinstock mocked the fab’s Richard Rogers-designed architecture.
“Ridiculous” said Weinstock.
“Not at all,” riposted Barron, “it saves 25% on the rates.”
He had been a student prodigy – designing computers for Elliott Bros, later Elliott Automation, while still at Cambridge. He joined the company after graduating.
He later built computers at his own company Computer Technology.
The genesis of Inmos came on a dark and stormy night in Toronto.
Barron had been held up by an air traffic controllers’ strike on his way to a computer conference in the city.
He had not slept for 40 hours when he met Dick Petritz, the founder of Mostek, in the conference hotel bar.
“It was all rather hectic,” recalled Barron, “I hadn’t slept for hours but I coped, as chairman, somehow. When it was all over we went to a very dark bar and Petritz came and sat beside me. This was the first chance I’d had to talk to him, he was on one side and his wife on the other and he leant over and said ‘how would you like to start a new semiconductor company?”
“I took absolutely no notice,” remembers Barron, “in fact, I think I went to sleep.”
By chance they met up a day or two later at an airport and Petritz repeated the proposition. Barron went for it immediately.
Whether Inmos was a success or not in its independent lifetime is a matter for debate but there can be no doubt that it left a powerful legacy, especially in the Bristol region, of startups pursuing processors with Inmosy-style parallel architectures: Brooktree, Picochip, PixelFusion, Motion Media, Clearspeed, Xmos, Graphcore, Picocom etc.
Barron recognised that the Transputer was not widely appreciated in his lifetime but believed that, as with many pioneering inventions, its significance would be recognised by future generations.
“People,” he said, “will eventually see what we were talking about.”