Steve Vickers (computer scientist)

Steve Vickers
Steve Vickers with a Jupiter ACE
Residence	Birmingham
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Fields	Computer Science Mathematics
Institutions	Imperial College London The Open University University of Birmingham
Alma mater	University of Cambridge University of Leeds
Thesis	Universal strongly regular rings (1979)
Doctoral advisor	Alfred Goldie
Known for	Topology via Logic ZX Spectrum ROM firmware

Steve Vickers (born c. 1953) is a British mathematician and computer scientist. In the early 1980s, he wrote ROM firmware and manuals for three home computers, the Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum and the Jupiter Ace. The latter was produced by Jupiter Cantab, a short-lived company Vickers formed together with Richard Altwasser, after the two had left Sinclair Research. Since the late 1980s, Vickers has been an academic in the field of geometric logic, writing over 30 papers in scholarly journals on mathematical aspects of computer science. His book Topology via Logic has been influential over a range of fields (extending even to theoretical physics, where Christopher Isham of Imperial College London has cited Vickers as an early influence on his work on topoi and quantum gravity). He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham.

Vickers graduated from King's College, Cambridge with a degree in mathematics and completed a PhD at Leeds University, also in mathematics.

In 1980 he started working for Nine Tiles, which had previously written the Sinclair BASIC for the ZX80. He was responsible for the adaptation of the 4K ZX80 ROM into the 8K ROM used in the ZX81 and also wrote the ZX81 manual. He then wrote most of the ZX Spectrum ROM, and assisted with the user documentation.