ALUMNI PROFILES PROFESSOR ANDY HOPPER BSc Computer Technology. Class of 1974.
PROFESSOR. CO- FOUNDER OF ACORN COMPUTERS.
I think it’s fair to say that computers have had a big influence on your life. Can you tell us a bit about it ? Swansea put on a course which was amazingly good for me and the other students because at the time it foretold the whole computing thing in the world. The course was called Computer Technology. I fell into it for reasons I will explain, but that course shaped everything else for me. The special thing about the course was that it combined computer science with electronics and also accountancy and economics. During the time I was at Swansea, there was a lot of freedom in education. Swansea was quite pioneering; in a
How did you end up at Swansea ? Three reasons. I am Polish by birth and was brought up Polish. When I was a teenager at school in the UK we had some farming holidays in the summer in Llanybydder, West Wales. Some Polish farmers settled there after the war and I spent some summers there. Secondly, a friend of the family, because I didn’t do very well at school, (the UK is quite different to Poland), suggested that this computing lark might be interesting, and thirdly I applied for places at Manchester and Swansea but I didn’t get the grades for Manchester. I don’t think I got the grades for Swansea either, but Aspinall took me anyway.
good way, and that was down to two people in particular. A Professor of Electrical Engineering called William Gosling who had the idea to put on the course, and a man he recruited from Manchester University called David Aspinall, who became a Professor and was recruited to run the course at Swansea. Gosling was a man who had a lot of connections with industry and he was also a Technical Director of a company called Plessey. He was a person who just through his work, was very familiar with the industrial side of things and of course for me personally that was very inspiring because that is what I have done with my career ever since. I have had a simultaneous career in academia and industry.
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