Tribute to David Seal, 1956 - 2021

David was the most amazingly talented person that I ever worked with – and one of the most generous with his time. I had the privilege of working with him on the FPA, Acorn/Arm’s first floating point unit. He made so many contributions to that design but one in particular sticks in my mind to this day. I was having trouble with the design of the control unit that orchestrated the progression of the four arithmetic pipeline stages – so of course turned to David for help. He came up with the most elegant solution imaginable. It took him a page or more of closely typed text to explain the reasoning behind his design - but the implementation was just a few lines of code. Simply sublime. I still have a copy of that specification – it was a true masterpiece. There were so many other contributions that David made – Arm wouldn’t have been Arm without him, in countless ways. David was such a wonderful human being, who enriched the lives of all who knew him, and he will be sadly missed.