Unsung

I'm cheating here by blipping an old photo of my late friend, Bill Hill, who died suddenly last autumn at his home in Washington State, USA. I'm blipping his photograph because Bill is famous in the US as "the father of the e-book", and yet is virtually unknown and wholly unsung in his home country of Scotland.

I first met Bill when we were cub reporters together on the Paisley Daily Express. We went on to sit opposite each other for five years in the newsroom of The Scotsman in Glasgow and wrote and recorded music together. I went into television and he moved into computers. His work on typefaces for computer screens led to him being head-hunted by Microsoft, and he ended up on their campus at Seattle where he invented "ClearType", the electronic typeface that revolutionised reading on the screen. Your Kindles and Kobes and Sony e-readers were only made possible because of Bill's genius.

You can be privy to his remarkable thinking by watching this US TV documentary here.

Bill was a proud and patriotic Scot, appearing on stage in his kilt in frequent presentations with Bill Gates. He never lost his accent or his pride in his roots - a working class boy from Barlanark in Glasgow who rose to the heights. It would be nice to think that one day he might be recognised in his home country.