1939-1999
It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Mike Sendall on Thursday 15 July in London, after a decade of illness. He would have been 60 in October.
Mike obtained his Ph.D. in the Cavendish Laboratory under Otto Frisch, and came to CERN in 1968 to work in the Montanet group on bubble chamber studies of K0 decays. In 1972 he became a staff member, moving to DD in 1976 to take charge of the PDP-11 data acquisition-computing group. Over many years Mike counselled experiments of all shapes and sizes on the design and implementation of data acquisition and made many important technical contributions in this field. He was group leader of the DD Online Computing group from 1985 until it was transferred to ECP in 1990.
Mike was an enthusiastic supporter of Tim Berners-Lee when Tim's ideas on the World Wide Web were beginning to take shape. More recently, he was active in defining and implementing CERN's overall Web policy. Since 1992 he was Secretary to the LHCC, in which role he transformed very complex scientific and technical discussions into clear and concise minutes with impeccable style.
Everyone who came into contact with Mike quickly appreciated his great intelligence, his complete devotion to duty, his broad understanding of both computing and physics, and his unassuming nature. You had to know him slightly better to appreciate how deeply cultured he was. Mike had a profound knowledge and love of music, art and literature, and was quite simply one of the most accomplished and amusing raconteurs that most of us will ever meet. His friends and colleagues will miss him, and they all send their best wishes at this very painful time to his wife Peggie Rimmer.
An occasion for people to remember Mike will be held at CERN in the near future. An account has been opened at for anyone wishing to contribute, in Mike's memory, to research and treatment of multiple myeloma, bone marrow cancer.