Steven Ericsson-Zenith

According to Wikipedia, I was born on July 6th, 1966 and raised on the council estates ("projects") of West London until I was sixteen years old [ Hollywell Estate, Watford and the Feltham Railway Estate ]. A rebel, and a truant from school, I accidently gave myself an education by taking refuge from the difficult streets in the free libraries and museums of London.

At the birth of the microprocessor revolution I was a struggling artist and scholar. I began hacking software and the Zilog Z80 microprocessor in 1979. I was a natural. My science and technology career accelerated in 1985 when I came to the attention of the celebrated UK semiconductor company INMOS. After five years of high profile research and development in the semiconductor industry, I was invited to complete my early research at Yale University, the Ecole NS des Mines de Paris and doctorate at the Sorbonne.

Today I am developing a new basic research institute in my field of interest. Since 2003 I have focused upon scientific research and an associated book. Professionally, I am starting something entirely new and long term. I have a clear and well defined purpose in life.

My parents and ancestors are working-class. My maternal grandparents were "in service" (as portrayed in the TV show "Upstairs, Downstairs") and they died before I was born. My grandmother was a maid, and my grandfather a gardener or "grounds man." From what I can tell, they were both unemployed and died within a short time of each other from malnutrition in 1949 - too late to benefit from the new welfare state. My mother was 16.

My father, Eric George Montague Pratt, was a charming "ne'er-do-well," a small-time wannabe villain and "jack-the-lad", a "lady's man." If you have seen Michael Caine as "Alfie" - that's my dad. I have not had contact with my father since I was twenty years old. Despite the reports in my poetry of his occasional violence I do not think that he is or was a violent man by nature. I think of him fondly.

My paternal grandfather “Monty” was, by all accounts, a stern bandsman. He remained in the Army after the Second World War. He died when I was three. My grandmother died a few years later but not before marrying Harold Penny - who became as a grandfather to me. He died some years later, when I was 12.

My mother, Diana Ethel Mary Dance (nee Reed), was a retail worker in Watford and later a typist and secretary, mostly for Data General in Hounslow and EMI in Feltham. My parents divorced when I was thirteen and my mother raised my two younger brothers (David and Raymond) and me alone for awhile. She eventually met her soul mate (there are happy endings here) - Albert Dance, my step-father. 2006 is their thirtieth anniversary. My mother died after several years fighting cancer on March 23rd, 2007.

Politically, in recent times, my mother has been a Conservative. When I was a kid she was a Liberal (Whig). I am not sure that she would see it this way but I believe that this is the influence of her parent's service. Servants often followed the lead of their masters. Despite being raised during a more socialist period in England, I was never convinced of the parity Marx claimed between the cause of the working-class and communism.

I was often told "breeding is everything," to "know your place" and to "not get above yourself." I am unhappy to report that this same language continues in the working-class today. I am happy to report that I, a happy rebel, could accept none of it.

At fifteen I became politically active as a "Young Liberal" during the time Peter Hain (now a labor member of parliament) was the national chairman of the Young Liberals. The Young Liberals were fairly radical, we actively supported gay rights and anti-apartheid. I was the chairman of the Hounslow Borough Young Liberals for short while (I was only 15-16) and campaigned for the referendum concerning the entry of the UK into the European Community, Civil Rights and the Anti-Apartheid movement. I also campaigned for the Liberal Party during one election.

However, I ultimately concluded from my experience that political activism is a waste of time and energy, a view I maintain today. Despite my now radical Libertarian philosophical interests, my vocal anti-monarchism and utopian idealism, I am essential bored by everyday politics. I like to delve into the deeper issues.

I attended some early school but was mostly a truant, preferring to take refuge from the streets in the free libraries and museums of London. This provided an imperfect early education but it was manifestly better than that received by my peers.

I began work at age fifteen as a "junior salesman" for Burton Tailoring in Richmond. I was self-sufficient and living in "bed-sitters" at sixteen.

 

At twenty I moved to Cornwall to follow a career in the artist colonies as an artist and writer. As a performance poet I occasionally performed in the galleries of Cornwall but mostly I made love, read books and along with much of my generation collected "the dole" (unemployment benefit).

Through an association with Archbishop Lefebvre's Society of St. Pius X (then called “the Lefebvre Connection” and still a part of the Catholic Church), I considered becoming a Catholic priest. And I must confess that it was my dearest wish at one time to become a priest. However, I could not reconcile the irrational elements of faith. I began studying Lao Tzu at the age of seventeen and have a long association with the study of his teaching. I have always had a strong autoaesthetic, that is a sense of self with respect to the world. The mysticism of Catholicism and Lao Tzu suited me well but, in the end, science is my true calling.

In 1979 I discovered the Zilog Z80 microprocessor and that one could write poetry in machine code. I wrote and published various software in the early 1980's and came to the attention of INMOS - the celebrated UK semiconductor research establishment.

At INMOS, as senior technologist, I worked for David May in the computer architecture group and became a principal contributor to the parallel processing language OCCAM. I wrote the primary document published in 1987 by Prentice Hall and made related architectural contributions to two microprocessors. I was principal technical editor of all transputer datasheets and manuals. An articulate engineer, I was often pushed to the fore.

As INMOS passed its peak in 1989 I ran a conference at Imperial College, London, entitled "Parallel Processing and Artificial Intelligence." I invited Professor David Gelernter of Yale University to speak at the conference. I had been running a skunk project to implement Dave's Linda paradigm on a network of transputers. One evening, at dinner, I told Dave that I was leaving INMOS and our project would have to come to an end. I had been offered a position as the CTO of Harlequin, a Lisp and AI company interested in parallel processing. He immediately invited me to change my plans and to join his group at Yale University. How could I refuse?

I published a couple of papers at Yale in 1990 on my ideas for a new paradigm to solve efficiency and portability problems on parallel machines and began talking about the affect and effect that engineering language design has on the behavior of engineers, including the subliminal expression of "performance semantics."

I was invited by Pierre Jouvelot, who was at MIT at the time, to move my work to the Ecole NS des Mines de Paris. I agreed, provided that I could also join the doctoral program at the Universite Marie et Pierre Curie - traditionally the science department of the Sorbonne. On the strength of my published work and some overly generous words from Dave Gelernter and other academics at Oxford University, Canterbury University and elsewhere - I was awarded a masters degree equivalence and entered into the doctoral program. I had already completed much of my thesis at Yale and I successfully defended "Process Interaction Models" in July 1992, just eighteen months later. You can find it here . I also personally delivered my son "Freedom" into the world.

Although I had been invited by Professor Hennessy via Vaughan Pratt to apply to Stanford University while I was doing my doctorate I - perhaps foolishly in retrospect - declined the invitation and chose to return to industry.

The parallel processing industry and much of the academic interest in parallel processing came to a dramatic halt in 1993 with the closing of companies such as Thinking Machines and Kendal Square Research, with whom I was associated at the time through Kuck. My last contribution to parallel processing was as a founding member of the MPI committee - though my contribution was minor.

In 1994 I moved myself and my family to Silicon Valley and redirected my skill-set into mainstream distributed computing and human factors. During my time here I have worked for Oracle, where I led the applications architecture for the Network Computer, and I have worked with Microsoft on the development of systems for the character mediation of content through conversational interfaces. I hold a number of patents in relation to my work with them.

I have always been fiercely independent and something of a professional heretic, I believe that I now apply that critical power to my own work.

After ten years in Silicon Valley, and CEO of my own ventures since 1998 - I really have to do my own thing - I have returned to science, art, and a deeper consideration of fundamentals. In recent years I have sought to integrate my artistic, humanitarian and scientific interests, and this has led me to a focus on sentience and semeiotics, the foundations of logic and apprehension.

Fired by my own self-education, I have a strong interest in the philosophy of education. With the exception of my son Freedom who started High School in Los Altos recently, my children have never attended a regular school (Zen [b.1981], Mystical [b.1985], Celestial [b.1987] and Freedom [b.1991]). The principal objective of my educational strategy is the cultivation of intelligent, curious and capable, free-thinking individuals - with an emphasis on individual creativity. These four exceptional individuals are my gift to the world.

Zen is now 24, after Music College in Hollywood he is back in the Bay Area developing new musical projects and is a mentor for young people at the Reikes Center for Human Enhancement. My girls are working it all out. My current educational focus is my son Freedom - who is helping me to understand the development of mind and the beauty of nature.

 

Steven Ericsson-Zenith

Last updated: March 2007.

 

PS. In the pictures to the left are my paternal grandfather (Monty), my mother and paternal grandmother, my paternal grand parents, and my mother and father. Below is a photograph taken in October 2005 in England; my mother, me, my daughter Mystical and my stepfather Al.