Report on Z user meeting (ZUM '94)

the last week of June 1994. In a break with tradition, there was no Z User Meeting in 1993. With an 18 month break between ZUM'92 and ZUM'94, the venue was greatly enhanced by the more clement British summer climate than that which had been endured during the previous Z User Meetings, in the previously regular December slot. (Praxis) was Programme Chair, and Mike Hinchey (University of Cambridge) acted as Tutorial Chair and Local Organizer, with much support from Rosalind Barden (Logica). With 140 delegates from 15 countries attending, the numbers were substantially increased from previous years, and the conference was expanded to fill an entire working week. Half-day and full-day tutorials on introductory Z, B and the B-method, project management issues, dependable real-time systems, and object-oriented specification in Z, were presented on Monday and Tuesday, 27th and 28th June, and proved to be very popular indeed. The main sessions were held on Wednesday and Thursday, 29th and 30th June, and were followed by a half-day session on educational issues of formal methods, held in the 12th century School of Pythagoras on the morning of July 1st. This provided an opportunity for educators and industrialists to discuss their ideas on the teaching of formal methods in general, and Z in particular. Four full papers were presented, and there were a number of poster displays. Fortuitously, the location and timing of the meeting added a historical flavour to the event. Forty-five years previously to the week, the first ever European conference on computer science was held in Cambridge, in which the early EDSAC computer, designed and constructed by Prof. Maurice V. Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge, was discussed. This historic event was commemorated with a highly entertaining after-dinner speech at the ZUM'94 conference dinner by the organizer of the 1949 EDSAC meeting, Prof. Wilkes himself. The London Science Museum and the Whipple Museum of the History of Science very kindly organized a small display of some historical memorabilia, including the core memory of EDSAC-2, and a fragment of Babbage's Difference Engine. During the main meeting, Mr. Robert Worden of Logica Cambridge gave the opening remarks,