This enabled Babbage’s designs to be visualised in three dimensions for the first time.In May 1985, Bromley fired off a three-page memorandum to the then Director of the Science Museum, Dame Margaret Weston, proposing that the museum should construct Babbage’s Difference Engine Number 2 in time to celebrate the bicentenary of his birth in 1791. The museum rose to the challenge, and for the next five years Doron Swade (now Assistant Director of the museum) led a team of engineers who painstakingly manufactured and assembled the tens of thousands of intricate mechanical parts that made up the engine. Bromley was present in September 1991 when the machine was installed as a major new exhibit.After Babbage’s engines, Bromley moved on to other historical computing artefacts. He made a path-breaking study of the Antikythera Mechanism, originally made famous by the Yale historian Derek de Solla Price in the late 1950s. Price had speculated that the mechanism, dating from 50 BCE, was an astronomical calculating device. Bromley’s background in astrophysics paid dividends, and after several trips to Athens where he obtained radiographs of the inner mechanisms, and with the help of a clockmaker, he produced a working reconstruction.Historians are still pondering the implications – was the Greek civilisation more technologically advanced than we realise, or was the mechanism an isolated invention? Next Bromley moved on to the racetrack Totalisator, an Australian invention of 1913, and brought to light its extraordinary real-time computing power.

A study of mechanical gun-aimers followed, devices that helped win two world wars but had been eclipsed by electronic computers.Bromley cut a distinctive and unmistakeably academic figure – bearded, animated by an infectious enthusiasm and, when in England, usually wearing a canary-yellow, hand-knitted waistcoat. He had a quiet self-confidence that made him refuse to join the academic publishing treadmill. He published relatively few articles, but they were of the highest quality. In December 2000 the Annals of the History of Computing took the unprecedented step of publishing a special edition dedicated to his oeuvre.Bromley was a knowledgeable collector of computing machinery and curiosities, and he combed the London flea markets and scientific instrument dealers for items that he shipped back to Sydney. About 10 years ago he contracted an energy-sapping illness, later diagnosed as Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This made his plans for the definitive book on Babbage’s engines impossible, but with the help of friends and his second wife he organised his computing collections and saw them installed in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.Martin Campbell-Kelly.

Justtin Arundale was at the forefront of changing newspaper libraries from the traditional collections of cuttings and reference books to fully electronic resources able to generate income. He was first a newspaper librarian, then a university lecturer in librarianship, covering particularly the growing connection between information science and the law. Nigel Justin Arundale, newspaper librarian and teacher: born Lagos 3 January 1954; Librarian, Today 1986-87; Chief Librarian and Head of Information Services, The Independent 1987-94; Senior Lecturer, Department of Librarianship, School of Information Sciences, Brighton University 1994-2002; died Findon, West Sussex 12 September 2002. Marketing its products to news agencies and other information-based services created a source of income from an activity which had traditionally been an overhead. He developed these activities at The Independent, which he joined in 1987, the year after the newspaper’s launch. In 1994 he moved into teaching, at the Department of Librarianship at Brighton University.Born in Lagos, in 1954, Arundale was the son of two remarkable individuals, Hugh, who worked in agricultural development in Africa and Asia and was thrown out of Uganda in 1973 by Idi Amin, and Pamela, honoured by the International Red Cross for her work in founding a refugee camp in Uganda for Hutus and Tutsis.His childhood was mostly spent in Uganda. The five-year old’s friendship with the Pokino, the King of the Ugandan Ankole tribe, founded on Justin’s explanation of the principles of animal husbandry then in use on his toy farm, led to his being known as “The Little Pokino”.

The intensity with which he would later talk and listen could at first disconcert, but merely reflected his fascination with people.He made his first public mark in 1962, aged eight, when he was chosen to stand on the dais and read out the Queen’s Independence Day message to the crowd assembled to celebrate the event in the administrative centre of the Ankole District. He did so with great dignity and feeling.From the Leys School in Cambridge, he won an Exhibition to Magdalene College, where he read English. He then took an MSc at Imperial College, London, in History and Philosophy of Science. He spent a year in the Civil Service, at the Department of the Environment, but found it hard to deal with the intellectual sleights and compromises sometimes necessary in officialdom.He realised that as a librarian he could contribute to an intellectual activity of fundamental importance without betraying his personal beliefs. This recognition was the turning point in his career, and the timing of it was opportune: he took a Diploma in Library Studies at Loughborough University in 1981, just as information science came into its own.After four years as Reference Librarian at Hemel Hempstead Public Library, he moved to Today and then, the following year, to The Independent. As the paper’s second librarian he was cast as a reformer not originator, and its founder editor, Andreas Whittam Smith, maintains that never can a newspaper have had a more intelligent or creative librarian.