Kim Clohessy was a founding vice president of Dy 4 Systems in Ottawa, where he was recruited from Bell Northern Research. Dy 4 Systems, which was formed in 1979, specialized in the design and manufacture of high-end VMEbus open architecture computer systems for the aerospace and defense industry.

Kim helped Dy 4 Systems grow successfully before leaving in 1992 to move to Scottsdale, Arizona, as a consultant for Ottawa-based Object Technologies and as vice president of Embedded Systems at IBM. In 2000 he transferred to Perth, Australia, where he soon resigned from IBM to form a new company.
During the early 1990s, Kim did much of the heavy lifting in terms of editing the work being done on the second generation of the VMEbus specification. He was an avid sailor and diver who enjoyed sailing and racing on the Swan River and the Indian Ocean.

Kim passed away in 2006 at 52 years of age, after a short battle with melanoma.

Key Contributions

• 1990: Kim joined Doug Patterson as Mil-Spec Study Group co-chair.
• 1991: VME64 (1014 Rev. D) was introduced and submitted to IEEE, raising the theoretical bus speed from 40 MBps to 80 MBps. The IEEE granted project authorization request (PAR) for P1014R (revisions to the VMEbus specification). Kim co-chaired the activity with Ray Alderman, technical director of VITA.
• 1992: Additional enhancements to VMEbus (A40/D32, Locked Cycles, Rescinding DTACK*, Autoslot-ID, Auto System Controller, and enhanced DIN connector mechanicals) required more work to complete this document. The VITA Technical Committee suspended work with the IEEE and sought accreditation as a standards developer organization (SDO) with the American National Standards Institute. The IEEE subsequently withdrew the original IEEE PAR P1014R. The VITA Technical Committee returned to using the public domain VMEbus C.1 specification as its base-level document, to which it added new enhancements. Kim carried out the tremendous undertaking of the document editing with assistance from Frank Hom, who created the mechanical drawings, and with exceptional contributions by each chapter editor.