Robinson worked at the
University of New South Wales (UNSW) from 1965 to 2012, initially in the Department of Electronic Computation under Professor Murray Allen. During 1987–1989 he was Head of the Department of Computer Science and during 1996–2000 he was Head of the Department of
Software Engineering. He held visiting positions in the United Kingdom at the
University of Southampton (1978–79), the
Programming Research Group at
Oxford University as a visiting fellow at
Wolfson College (1985–86), the
Oxford University Computing Laboratory and B-Core (1999), and
Royal Holloway College (
University of London) and the
University of Surrey (2003). In 1971, Robinson's courses in computer science included
ALGOL W (from
Stanford University),
WATFOR (a student version of
FORTRAN from the
University of Waterloo), Plago (
PL/I for students, from
Brooklyn),
SNOBOL (from
Bell Labs), and
IBM System/360 assembly language. The latter used an
assembler program written by Robinson since the
IBM assembler was too slow for student use. In 1974, the Department of Computer Science at UNSW had a
PDP-11/40 minicomputer from
Digital Equipment Corporation, used for teaching and administration. Ken Robinson wrote to
Dennis Ritchie at
Bell Labs requesting a copy of the
Unix operating system. This arrived in 1975, making UNSW the first university outside the
United States to run Unix regularly. Robinson's later research and teaching was especially centred around
formal methods, particularly the
B-Method,
Event-B, and the
Rodin tool. Robinson designed the initial
BE Software Engineering program at UNSW and with the program coordinator subsequently. He also initiated the BE Computer Engineering program. In 1990, he received the
University of NSW Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence. ==Personal life and death==