Brian Randell graduated in Mathematics from Imperial College, London in 1957 and joined the English Electric Company where he led a team that implemented a number of compilers, including the Whetstone KDF9 Algol compiler. From 1964 to 1969 he was with IBM in the United States, mainly at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, working on operating systems, the design of ultra-high speed computers and computing system design methodology. He then became Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University, where in 1971 he set up the project that initiated research into the possibility of software fault tolerance, and introduced the "recovery block" concept. Subsequent major developments included the Newcastle Connection, and the prototype Distributed Secure System. The latter led to the MoD’s first ever IT-Demonstrator Project, a classified full-scale re-implementation at RSRE Malvern over several years of the initial proof-of-concept prototype that was constructed at Newcastle. A subsequent paper "Building Reliable Secure Systems out of Unreliable Insecure Components” (with J. E. Dobson, Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Security and Privacy, Oakland, April 1986, pp.187-193) was viewed as controversial at the time, but helped establish close links between the subjects of reliability and security, and the role that fault tolerance often plays in each - see "Basic Concepts and Taxonomy of Dependable and Secure Computing” (with A. Avizienis, J.C. Laprie, and C. Landwehr, IEEE Trans on Dependable and Secure Computing 1, 1(2004) pp. 11-33 - 5700 citations in Google Scholar.)

He has been Principal Investigator on a succession of research projects in reliability and security funded by EPSRC, MoD, and the EU. Another, continuing, research interest has been the history of computing. He has published over three hundred technical papers and reports, and is co-author or editor of seven books. He is now Emeritus Professor of Computing Science, and Senior Research Investigator, at Newcastle University, working most recently on an EPSRC project on failure analysis of complex evolving systems. He is a Fellow of the BCS and the ACM, and was a Member of the Conseil Scientifique of the CNRS, France (2001-5), Chairman of the IEEE John von Neumann Medal Committee (2003-5), and a Member and then Chairman of the ACM A.M. Turing Award Committee (2005-9). He has received a D.Sc. from the University of London, and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Rennes, and the Institut National Polytechnique of Toulouse, France.