Following our 2022 reconfiguration and refit of the C2 corridor, all of our computing labs and staff/student rooms are named after a key figure in computing’s fascinating history.
Below you’ll find summary biographies for each room so you’ll no longer have to wonder just who that person is or was and why they are considered so important!
You can also click the name of each lab to see the current weekly class timetable for that room.
B1-005 – The Lovelace Computing Lab
Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine, and often regarded as the first ever computer programmer.
B2-002 – The Babbage Computing Lab
Charles Babbage, a mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and mechanical engineer, considered by many as the “father” of computing, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.
B2-003 – The Stroustrup Computing Lab
Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish computer scientist, most notable for the creation and development of the industry-standard C++ programming language in 1985, an object-oriented general-purpose programming language that is still used today in the mainstream development of system and application programs and computer and console games on multiple hardware and operating system platforms.
B2-005 – The Sunshine Staff Room
Lecturers: Adam Isherwood, Celestine Iwendi, Shivang Shukla, Pradeep Hewage, Mohammed Benmubarak, Abayomi Arowosegbe, Ibtisam Mogul
Carl Sunshine, one of “the fathers of the Internet”, who along with Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
C2-001 – The Wirth Common Room
Niklaus Wirth, a Swiss computer scientist, is most known for designing several computer programming languages including ALGOL W, Pascal and Modula-2 among others.
C2-003 – The Turing Computing Lab
Alan Turing, was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking center where he devised a number of techniques for “breaking” Germany’s top-secret Enigma code used to send military instructions to German forces, thus shortening the war by many months and saving many thousands of lives on both sides.
C2-004 – The Berners-Lee Computing Lab
Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which ultimately unpins the functioning of all web browsers and apps which work “over the web”. He devised and implemented the first web browser and web server, and helped foster the WWW’s subsequent explosive development.
C2-006 – The Hopper Computing Lab
Admiral Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mk I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. The first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.
C2-007 – The Codd Staff Kitchen
Edgar F. Codd, an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational database management systems. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned, analyzed and celebrated achievement.
C2-007A – The Gosling Staff Room
Lecturers: Anchal Garg, Thaier Hamid, Naveed Islam, Bren Tighe
James Gosling, a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language, an object-oriented platform-agnostic general-purpose programming language, used to build applications for a variety of purposes ranging from back-office bank processing systems to apps on Android mobile phones via the use of a Virtual Machine approach to execution.
C2-008 – The Sinclair Computing Lab
Sir Clive Sinclair, an English entrepreneur and inventor, is best known for being a pioneer in the computing industry, and as the founder of several companies that developed consumer electronics in the 1970s and 1980s, the most significant being Sinclair Research which designed and launched several of the best-selling, truly affordable home computers of the 1980s. These were the ZX80, ZX81 and – most famously – the ZX Spectrum (which became the UK’s best-selling home microcomputer of all time during its 10 years in production), spawning a generation of “bedroom coders” who wrote games and kids who played them and later sought careers in computing or games design as a result. Thus Sinclair’s computers were instrumental in “kick-starting” the UK’s computer software and video games industries, which remain large and important sectors of the UK’s economy to this day.
C2-010A – The Hejlsberg Staff Room
Lecturers: Abdul Razak, Aamir Abbas, Andrew Holland, Helen Martin
Anders Hejlsberg, a Danish software engineer who co-designed several programming languages and development tools. He was the original author and chief architect respectively of Borland Software’s Turbo Pascal and Delphi development tools and then later – having moved to Microsoft – the designer and architect of C# in 2000, an object-oriented platform-agnostic general-purpose programming language, used to build applications for a variety of purposes and platforms ranging from back-office processing systems to console games, from command-line utilities to desktop applications and from web browser applications to cross-platform native applications on mobile phones and tablets.
C2-009 – The von Neumann Project Lab
John von Neumann, an Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. In terms of computing science, von Neumann is notable for his work on landmark early computers during the 1940s such as EDVAC and ENIAC.
C2-010 – The van Rossum Staff Room
Lecturers: William Haddock, Mansoor Ihsan, Andrew Parker
Guido van Rossum, a Dutch programmer, is best known as the creator of the Python programming language and has worked at a number of key players in the modern computing industry during his career, such as Google, Dropbox and Microsoft.
C2-011 – The Kahn Staff Room
Lecturers: Francis Morrissey, Eugen Harinda
Robert Elliot Kahn (born December 23, 1938), an American electrical engineer, who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
C2-012 – The Morris Project Lab
Brian Morris, formerly a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Technologies. He exemplifies the University of Bolton’s belief in the widening participation agenda: he gained a first-class degree at Bolton after previously working in diverse careers such as Engineering and Greater Manchester Police. After graduation, he joined us as a lecturer. His experience led him to lead the development of our Foundation year provision to help many more students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds access higher education. He also played a leading role in developing the Games Design programme.
C2-013 – The Ritchie Computing Lab
Dennis Ritchie was a leading computer scientist at the famous Bell Labs in New Jersey. His notable achievements include the creation of the C programming language. C is actively used 50 years after its original release and is an ancestor of Java, C# and C++.
Together with Ken Thompson, Ritchie developed the Unix operating system using C. Unix has also survived 50 years and is in active use. It also forms the basis of Apple iOS, Android and Linux.
Along with Brian Kernighan he wrote the definitive text book “The C Programming Language” which gave the world the concept of Hello World as a starter program.
C2-017 – The Cerf Networking Lab
Vint Cert, an American Internet pioneer and recognised as one of “the fathers of the Internet”, who along with Bob Kahn and Carl Sunshine, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.