I had the great fortune to work at UCL in the early 1980s, just as SATNET came to an end as a project. I worked on what became ISODE, and related stuff as well as doing operations bits and pieces. I was far too junior to figure in Peter's planning but I will say, he was a very interesting HoD: he didn't suffer fools gladly (and I am one) but at the same time could be quite forgiving, if you were at least entertaining about your foolishness.<p>His most preferred model of funding work was to have 9/10ths of it done or a sure-fure thing, and then use the funding to work on the next idea, so he was guaranteed to have goods to deliver at the end of the project. He didn't always carry it off but when it worked it was superlative. I was on at least one OSI (protocol) project with 6 partners across industry and research in Europe, and the work was very unequal. That said, very fine dinners. I have fond memories of INRIA canteen food having wine and fresh fruit. UCL had baked beans and pies, the staff club had the same baked beans and pies but you could eat them under a superb Stanley Spenser oil painting of the resurrection.<p>The first Cisco Router turned up one day, it had annoyingly noisy fans which blew air a useless direction compared to the rest of the racks. As Mark Handley has pointed out below the basement was full of trash: a fantastic Prism-wedge shaped digital copying stand used with the British Library to photograph rare works, and an unbelievably expensive CCD digital camera attached gathering dust, a BBN Butterfly (it was a heap of crap frankly) running pre-BGP routing, a BLIT terminal and depraz mouse, the first Dec and Sun workstations.<p>We ran a project with the slade school of art doing digital arts design with them, lovely people. I still have some of the reject works.<p>Peter liked inviting people to come and be at UCL. During my time Bob Braden (SATNET) was there, and Mike Lesk (UUCP) -and they were also very nice and approachable. Tiny tea-room, I caused a kurfuffle washing out the most disgustingly stained coffee mug there, the owner of which was bulding the patina both to see how thick it got, and to discourage others from using his cup.<p>Peter had one standing rule you did NOT break: If there was an inter-departmental meeting with the people from ULCC (at that time down at Lambs Conduit St) he expected you to "vote against" any proposal they brought to the table without question: Departmental politics ran deep.<p>Peter was a committed skier, he was hardly young when I got there and he was still avidly visiting the alps as often as possible.<p>UCL ran the gateway from JANET (X.25 based non internet) to the ARPANet which required you to login to a unix jump host and use kermit to connect across, and lodge FTP requests using JANET "grey book" FTP protocol to talk to the FTP client through a conversion script. The gateway got hacked every now and then. Some of us were a bit unkind and said it used Kermit because Peter, who was somewhat small, frog-like and had thick glasses he peered through, appreciated the joke that he was Kermit personified.