Text updated 200303, 200603, 201302
The Name Skirrow - My Skirrow Genealogy site
Peter J Skirrow
BSc Hons MAES MIET
Born in Nottingham, England, I grew up in Leeds and Derby, attending
Rykneld School, and then Derby School before doing a BSc in Electronics at
UCNW Bangor (University College of North Wales). From
the age of ten I was interested in electronics and especially audio, so that I spent
much time building tape recorders and amateur radio transmitters while
still at school, and University .
I then worked for ten years
at the Post Office Research Centre, starting
at Dollis Hill, London before moving to the newly built BT Labs
at Martlesham, Suffolk where I would help develop an OCR (Optical
Character Recognition) machine that
read Postcodes at high speed. The machine was a great success, and
used some of the very first CCD arrays that were later to become refined for use in
video cameras, and important visitors came from far and wide, and even
from Japan, to see what was then probably the best OCR reader in the
world. But the machine threatened mens jobs, in what was then Britain's
biggest single area of employment - the Post Office, and at a time when
Trades Unions were still very powerful. There was a PO strike, with
new technology introduction strongly opposed; the division (R14) was
disbanded, and the machine forgotten; though OCR was to resurface in the
Post Office many years later, with machines purchased, I think, from
Japan!.
Disillusioned, I left BT in 1979, met Tricia, and we
actually lived off the land for a year, as per 'The Good Life' before I
came up with and idea for an all-in one Audio Test Set. I founded Lindos
Electronics (named after the bungalow I live in, which in turn was named
after the holiday destination on the Greek island of Rhodes by the
previous owner) and designed the LA1 Audio Test set. Though based on my
vision
of the ideal test set for tape recorder alignment and testing, formed
during those early
years of tape recorder construction, the LA1 rapidly became standard
equipment in the newly opening Local Radio stations, enabling engineers to do
all the tests needed to ensure that they would pass the stringent IBA
'Code of Practice' checkups.
Sales rose to levels we could barely keep up with and Tricia was to help
run the business for many years, initially from a bedroom and garage, in
the tradition of all famous startup companies, and then, after our sons
Chris and Neil were born, from a delightful old building in the (five
acre) grounds of our home, known to us as 'The Cottage'. Together with my
(much younger) brother Paul, who brought software skills to Lindos
even before he had left school, and went on to do a BSc Degree in
Computing and Electronics, I developed the LA100 microprocessor-based
Audio Analyser which was launched in 1984 and continues to sell worldwide to
broadcasters and studios. We purchased a (huge by our standards)
factory in Melton, just a mile away from home, and the business went from
from strength to strength. Unfortunately, the partnership formed with
Tricia, which had initially been so successful, and was formalised by contract in
1985 ended when, mentally exhausted, I reluctantly sold my share to her
and ceased all involvement with Lindos Electronics in 1994, since
when I have run
Lindos Developments, with the aim of keeping up my design effort as
well as expanding my skills in other areas like Video Editing (on my Avid
Media Composer).
Over the last few years, my long standing
interests in Genetics, Evolution,
Society, Neuroscience, and Psychology have gained intensity, and
I see these subjects merging more and more with the whole field of information technology,
so that electronics engineers have a big part to play in these
rapidly developing areas. I now have lots of time to read, from
Nineteenth Century novels to recent paperbacks, as well as science books,
and I've long been a reader of 'New Scientist' and more recently 'Nature'.
I am pleased to see that the Neural Networks I tried to play with at BT
have now taken off. I was
told that "emulating nature, was not the way to go", but I wasn't
convinced, and it's now a huge field with speach and pattern
recognition now breaking through into consumer products!
Meanwhile, Chris and Neil, my two sons who were born in the fury of
the
'Lindos' days, and both developed a keen interest in computers as
teenagers, have grown up, with Chris receiving his Honours Degree in
Computer Science in 2002. Neil has left school and started his own
business writing and selling cgi scripts for use by dot-com companies
on the Web.
A recent development is Chris's return to Suffolk (Spring 2003) to run
Lindos Electronics with a little help promised from me. We share an
interest in music, he being keen on drums and guitar while I have
recently taken up Recorder Ensemble playing, which is proving a very
interesting challenge many years on from my early stage performances at
School! I wish someone back then had told us that Recorders can actually
sound very nice indeed, and I wish they'd shown us more than just the
descant version which puts so many people off!
In 2005 I discovered Wikipedia, and became hooked on writing and editing pages on many topics. A key page that I wrote early on was 'A-Weighting', along with 'ITU-R-468 Noise Weighting' in an attempt to clear up many misconceptions on the subject of noise measurement.
contact me: pete(at)skirrow(dot)co(dot)uk (substitute bracketed with the obvious)
YouTube: 'Lindosland' channel Facebook: 'Peter Skirrow' Lindos Electronics: www.lindos.co.uk