Tim Wilmshurst is the author of Designing Embedded Systems with PIC Microcontrollers. He has been designing embedded systems since the early days of microcontrollers. For many years this was for Cambridge University, where he led a development team building original systems for research applications - for example in measurement of bullet speed, wind tunnel control, simulated earthquakes, or seeking a cure to snoring. Now he is Head of Electronic Systems at the University of Derby, where he aims to share his love of engineering design with his students. Keith is a freelance journalist whose whole life (well, apart from the wife, the kids, the music and the mountain bike) is computers. He's been writing about them (computers, that is) for over 18 years, in the meantime working as a teacher, lecturer, engineer, journalist and finally (for the last 12 years) freelance in the computing field. He fondly remembers his first contacts with the Commodore Pet, the various Sinclair oddities, the BBC, PC-DOS, MS-DOS, the Mac, and the various incarnations of Windows. He dreams of new software and hardware, he realises that writing about computers makes little compared to making computers or writing the software for them, he is fully committed to passing his experience along to and making computer-life easier for his readers, yet still enjoys what he's doing.

Which can't be all bad! Ian Sinclair was born in 1932 in Tayport, Fife, and graduated from the University of St. Andrews in 1956. In that year, he joined the English Electric Valve Co. in Chelmsford, Essex, to work on the design of specialised cathode-ray tubes, and later on small transmitting valves and TV transmitting tubes. In 1966, he became an assistant lecturer at Hornchurch Technical College, and in 1967 joined the staff of Braintree College of F.E. as a lecturer. His first book, "Understanding Electronic Components" was published in 1972, and he has been writing ever since, particularly for the novice in Electronics or Computing.

The interest in computing arose after seeing a Tandy TRS80 in San Francisco in 1977, and of his 204 published books, about half have been on computing topics, starting with a guide to Microsoft Basic on the TRS80 in 1979. He left teaching in 1984 to concentrate entirely on writing, and has also gained experience in computer typesetting, particularly for mathematical texts. He has recently visited Seattle to see Microsoft at work, and to remind them that he has been using Microsoft products longer than most Microsoft employees can remember. Ian Sinclair is the author of the following Made Simple books: Lotus 1-2-3- (2.4 DOS version) MS-DOS (up to version 6.22) PagePlus for Windows 3.1 Hard drives He is also the author of many other books published under our Newnes imprint.Visit Ian's website at http://website.

lineone.net/~ian_sinclair.