Professor Sidney Michaelson, or "Prof Sid" as he was affectionately called by all and sundry, was one of the Computer Science department's true characters. Infamous for bringing any system he touched to its knees, he was to say the least idiosyncratic in his use of computers. I remember my first exposure to Prof Sid was in the month after our first VMS system arrived, and Sidney was doing his damndest to make it look like the EMAS command line environment, to the extent of abandoning all use of VMS's native RMS file structures, and of linking all his favourite EMAS utilities into one huge binary with its own built-in command dispatcher. Needless to say, after a few weeks of this he was gently encouraged to try the native utilities!

This obituary tells a little of Professor Michaelson's acheivements, but since starting this project I have learned a lot more about his early work and he was indeed a true pioneer. I will add some of the stories about him as we extract the from our email archives.

We now have a later and more complete obituary by Peter Schofield and Roland Ibbett.

See also http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/students/prizes/sidney_michaelson.html

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