Education: BS, Seattle Pacific College, 1971; MS, University of Illinois, 1975; PhD, University of Illinois, 1975. At SPU since 1980.
Before coming to Seattle Pacific, Mike Tindall was at Colorado State University, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses, supervised eight master’s thesis students, and researched developments in high-level language computer machine architectures, compiler error detection, and emerging areas related to microprocessor computer systems with new tech companies such as Microsoft and Apple. To improve his ability to stay up to date in computing technologies and professional software development, he also began ongoing consulting work as a real-time operating system and programming languages expert for computer-based industrial control systems.
In 1980, Dr. Tindall responded to a call for a career in Christian higher education, and returned to Seattle Pacific University as the first chairperson of the newly created Department of Computer Science. His first effort was to design and implement the initial SPU undergraduate computer science curriculum, based upon national standards.
Over the years, he has been involved in all subsequent curricular revisions and related instructional computing lab and equipment planning necessary to keep SPU programs up to date with the evolving and fast-changing computer science field. Dr. Tindall has taught nearly all courses offered in the Computer Science curriculum, and has created or introduced many new courses in a variety of computer science topics, including operating systems programming, Windows GUI programming, object-oriented programming, Pascal, C, C++, Java, C#, PHP, JavaScript, and Python programming languages, network socket programming, and client-server web programming. His current teaching specializations are in programming languages, operating systems, algorithm analysis, and the interactive web client-server programming environment.
Please see Dr. Tindall’s CV (PDF) for more information.
Selected Publications
- Wilcox, Davis and Tindall, “The Design and Implementation of a Table-Driven Interactive Diagnostic Programming System.” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 19, No. 11, Nov. 1976, pp. 609–16.
- Oldehoeft and Tindall, “An Interactive Manager for Pascal Software.” Software Practice and Experience, Vol 11, 1981, pp. 867–73.
Selected Industrial Software Development Achievements
- 1983 — Designed and implemented a proprietary programming language customized for programming multi-threaded industrial real-time control systems.
- 1984 — Designed and implemented a proprietary coder/compiler system for a block-oriented industrial control system programming environment.
- 1984 — Designed and implemented a proprietary soft real-time operating system customized for soft real-time industrial control system environments. This included working as lead designer on a novel rate-group scheduler component for multi-threaded task scheduling and critical-section data synchronization.
- 1990 — Designed and implemented a multi-format fixed-point math package, suitable for control system usage on small microprocessor platforms without floating-point instructions.
- 1996 — Designed and implemented a proprietary embedded control system for small engine environments with limited computing resources.
- 2008 — Redesigned a GUI-based ladder-logic programming system for industrial control systems using Microsoft .NET technologies.