Tribute to David Fletcher, 1942 - 2021
Fifty years with David
George
5 December 2021
David and I have worked together for 50 years. We recently realised that we had known each other longer than almost anyone else!
He was an ace systems programmer who was the main force in converting the Xerox BTM time-sharing operating system into something more robust and appropriate for commercial use.
His "New File Management" transformed the reliability of the systems and also exposed the unreliability of the hardware error checking done by disc drives.
He was also an ace at solving the technical puzzles that endlessly confronted us. These ranged from analysing the exact reason for every computer systems crash to decoding undocumented data formats. This latter skill would launch us into the world of electronic printing when one of the first laser printers became available to us. But he had an ulterior motive as he saw the potential for electronic typesetting of music, and music was of course another of his great passions.
I first encountered his world of Early Music when he kindly helped Heather and I while we were looking to buy a house in the Wokingham area where he lived at that time. He showed me his collection of early instruments, many of which he had actually made himself. His craftsmanship was truly amazing and he also played this wide range of instruments so well.
After I had introduced him to modern digital electronics he again amazed me by reverse engineering the circuit boards of some Cossor-Raytheon PTS100s which we had been given as scrap, in order to then build a bootstrap system that would allow these strange mini-computers to be programmed for use. He went on to write games software for them!
When the BBC Micro computer came out he made one into a digitising workstation and this became the foundation of a logo and font digitising service for laser printers, which had become smaller and cheaper and thus more widely used.
By now (mid 80's) the mainframe computers had been owned by three different companies and this world came to an end as everything was split up and we briefly ended up working for different companies. But David was not happy with his new situation and asked if I would meet him, secretly, in Finsbury Park. At this meeting we decided that we were fed up working for other people, and so it was that with the help and support of our colleagues Alex and Peter that RedTitan started trading from Alex's front room running a laser-printer digitisation service.
Over the years we evolved from a service bureau to selling computer software, always connected with electronic printing. His font editor was so good that we even sold it to Xerox themselves! David's puzzle-solving abilities kept us able to deal with undocumented font formats used by laser printers through to supporting a huge range of strange types of printer.
His print stream reprocessing product (which he named EscapeE after the PCL5 reset command) remains RedTitan's flagship product and is now widely recognised as the best of its kind.
What is less well known is that it has a number of apparently strange features that turn out to be very useful for manipulating and reprocessing sheet music - and the earlier the better of course!
His untimely passing was so unexpected as he was the fittest person I knew.
I will miss him so much.
George Bichard.
He was an ace systems programmer who was the main force in converting the Xerox BTM time-sharing operating system into something more robust and appropriate for commercial use.
His "New File Management" transformed the reliability of the systems and also exposed the unreliability of the hardware error checking done by disc drives.
He was also an ace at solving the technical puzzles that endlessly confronted us. These ranged from analysing the exact reason for every computer systems crash to decoding undocumented data formats. This latter skill would launch us into the world of electronic printing when one of the first laser printers became available to us. But he had an ulterior motive as he saw the potential for electronic typesetting of music, and music was of course another of his great passions.
I first encountered his world of Early Music when he kindly helped Heather and I while we were looking to buy a house in the Wokingham area where he lived at that time. He showed me his collection of early instruments, many of which he had actually made himself. His craftsmanship was truly amazing and he also played this wide range of instruments so well.
After I had introduced him to modern digital electronics he again amazed me by reverse engineering the circuit boards of some Cossor-Raytheon PTS100s which we had been given as scrap, in order to then build a bootstrap system that would allow these strange mini-computers to be programmed for use. He went on to write games software for them!
When the BBC Micro computer came out he made one into a digitising workstation and this became the foundation of a logo and font digitising service for laser printers, which had become smaller and cheaper and thus more widely used.
By now (mid 80's) the mainframe computers had been owned by three different companies and this world came to an end as everything was split up and we briefly ended up working for different companies. But David was not happy with his new situation and asked if I would meet him, secretly, in Finsbury Park. At this meeting we decided that we were fed up working for other people, and so it was that with the help and support of our colleagues Alex and Peter that RedTitan started trading from Alex's front room running a laser-printer digitisation service.
Over the years we evolved from a service bureau to selling computer software, always connected with electronic printing. His font editor was so good that we even sold it to Xerox themselves! David's puzzle-solving abilities kept us able to deal with undocumented font formats used by laser printers through to supporting a huge range of strange types of printer.
His print stream reprocessing product (which he named EscapeE after the PCL5 reset command) remains RedTitan's flagship product and is now widely recognised as the best of its kind.
What is less well known is that it has a number of apparently strange features that turn out to be very useful for manipulating and reprocessing sheet music - and the earlier the better of course!
His untimely passing was so unexpected as he was the fittest person I knew.
I will miss him so much.
George Bichard.
