Mike is originally from South Wales, but has in fact lived in Sweden longer than he has anywhere else.
 
Way back in the 1960's after working as a Atheistic Missionary in Malawi, Mike went to Cambridge where he learnt a lot about drinking beer and rather less about "Mechanical Sciences". He then moved to Sweden in 1970 (guess why :-) and joined Ericsson as a hardware designer. The price of beer in Sweden being horrendously expensive enabled Mike to concentrate more on other things. He joined with Bjarne Däcker to found the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory 1980. One of the things they did in the Computer Science lab was to "invent" Erlang. Mike's role was to develop the first  Erlang virtual machine  (Joe developed the compiler and machine  architecture). He worked out the primitives for fault handling and  dynamic code replacement
 
In 1990 Mike glided into management by a complete accident and found he rather liked it. Since then he has been in charge of both large and small units within Ericsson which develop software. In 2012 Mike joined Erlang Solutions' Board of Directors.