Date: October 19, 1996
To begin with, here's a photo:
[When I get a bit more advanced (in WWW, not age), I will make it speak....]
I'm British, graduated in Physics and Mathematics in 1958 from Imperial
College, London, then worked for the UK Atomic Energy Authority and later
in the USA for the Detroit Edison Company on fast breeder reactor development.
I've been at CERN since 1971, after finishing my Ph.D. at Stanford University
in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering.
I'm in the PDP Group of CN Division, responsible for the high-speed Network Services in the CERN Computer Centre supporting our "Centrally Operated RISC Environment" (CORE), a distributed computing system that today performs practically all CERN's offline physics analysis instead of the big IBM and Cray mainframes that used to do this until recently.
Except for a sabbatical in 1977, when I worked at Bell Northern Research in Palo Alto on a PABX development project (and encountered UNIX for the first time), CERN has kept me pretty busy on five main projects, including the coordinated introduction of the Internet Protocols at CERN beginning in 1985 (see: "A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN").
As a member of the Internet Society,
I recently participated in setting up the ISOC Geneva
Chapter and am currently acting as its Chapter Vice-President. I am
also Chairman of its Development
Special Interest Group to assist Developing Country access to the Internet
(Geneva DevSIG). I still find time to teach courses on distributed computing
and Internet protocols in many places outside CERN, both in "developing"
countries (e.g. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Russia, Venezuela) and not-so-developing
ones (Italy, Sweden, UK, etc.).
Contact Information:
Ben M. Segal
Physics Data Processing Group
CERN Computing & Networks Division
1211 Geneva 23
Switzerland
E-mail: b.segal@cern.ch
Fax: +41-22-767 7155
Tel: +41-22-767 4941