David Mitchell

I got to know David when, along with John Tudor, I introduced the SII System/55 to the Hong Kong newsroom in 1983. David and crew had already pioneered the system in New York . The following year I returned to London and headed up the project to introduce S/55 to the London newsrooms - from that time on I worked closely with David and with Tom Guinan and Fred Gray. David was a one-off, full of quirks, but great company and we all admired him. He had a strong line in doom. “Roll on death,” he’d say from time to time, “something to look forward to.” He had other cheery sayings but I can’t remember them (does anyone else, perhaps?).

London Editorial had been badly stung in the past by having technical systems wished upon us by technical staff who did not fully understand our needs (or did not extract our requirements from us!). How we functioned at all with some of the clunky systems is remarkable in itself - quite often, warnings would go out worldwide: stop filing at once, the system can’t cope. David Mitchell was unusual in that he had acquired good understanding of the operational needs of the journalist user, as well as the technical skills to meet them. He was also brave in that he went for a system (SII) that was brand new to Reuters technical depts, using Tandem ‘Non-Stop’ architecture - and the S/55 projects came under fire because they were not using the “Digital” (DEC) architecture they’d all got used to/trained for (“’Non-stop’? I can make it stop, watch me!”).

We tested the London S/55 system to destruction at SII Sacramento - it had significant advances on the NY system - before we’d let them ship a single server or terminal. And it paid off, with the most reliable and relatively user-friendly system Editorial had ever known. Years later we were forced to abandon it after the bean-counters found a cheaper system called Typlan - problem was that they couldn’t get it to handle high-volume message-switching. When Typlan blew up, Editorial went back to SII, but I’d left by then.

David sent a warm message on my retirement - I’d finally managed to return to the newsroom, as Features Editor - and it meant more to me than most. I was very sad to hear of his passing. ■