Michael Norman Tizard Cottell (1931– 10 February 2014) was a British civil engineer. Early life Born at Chandler's Ford in Hampshire in 1931, Cottell studied at Peter Symonds School in Winchester until the age of 16. He then became an assistant in the engineering department of Hampshire County Council and studied civil engineering under a day release scheme at University College, Southampton. He excelled in his studies and achieved top marks in all fields. Cottell carried out his national service obligation with the Royal Engineers and saw service in the Malaya Emergency, working alongside the Gurkhas. He was recalled to serve with the army in the Suez Crisis of 1956. He was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in 1958, upon reaching the then minimum age of 25. During this time he worked for the Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire and Berkshire County Councils, and contracts he was involved with included the Oxford Western Bypass and the M4 motorway between Hanbrook and Tormarton. Computer-aided design pioneer Cottell was an early adopter of computers for engineering design and a paper he wrote on their use was awarded a prize by the Institution of Municipal Engineers. He is regarded as one of the main contributors to the development of computer-aided design. Cottell developed an early highways design computer program, known as VALOR, in 1970 that was used by many local authorities in the UK. VALOR simplified the design of road widening and reconstruction schemes, drawing a number of closely spaced cross sections which showed the proposed road levels and the survey information of the existing road. The program could optimise the design levels of the new road to minimise the cost of the project by utilising existing road make-ups. The implementation of VALOR was not entirely successful due partly to the limited processing power of the computers available to consulting engineers of the time. In 1986 the program was updated and incorporated into the BIPS design package by a consortium of local authorities, with the development team led by Warwickshire County Council, as the new MOSS road design package did not include a similar facility. A Windows compatible version was begun but never completed owing to the general decline of local authority design work and the increased use of consultant engineers. The dominance of the MOSS system for design did not always extend to sites, where older computers were often used,