computer science is quite a young subject...

 ...but not as young as it was - I joined ucl. for the last 2 decades of the previous century (and millenium) and while I was there, no-one passed away. the department had only just crystallised out of the statistics and computing department (the stats department being I think one of the first in the world).

20 years after I left, my PhD advisor Peter Kirstein passed away. Until then, I think, most the people that had worked in UCL CS were still around.

However, I joined the Computer Lab, a 75 year old department (now with a less unique name), that came out of mathematics, in Cambridge in 2001, and have been there since. But during that time, rather a lot of colleagues there have passed, including (in no particular order), Ross Anderson, John Daugman, Maurice Wilkes, Robin Milner, Mike Gordon, Karen Spärck Jones, David Wheeler, and Roger Needham.

Other stuff I miss that was around in Cambridge the previous time I was here (as an undergraduate in the 1970s) include The Whim, as well as Waffles, Reality Checkpoint, and the rather unusual way of sharing out the cost of a pub, by just putting what you could afford for an evening in a kitty in the middle of the table, and then buying rounds from that - people might contribute as little or as much as they liked or could manage. Then when you ran out, you restart, or leave...

All sadly gone.

At least now we have platform 0 at King's Cross (though platform 11 got rebadged as 10 and 10 had its rails removed, perhaps awaiting the hogwards express on 9 3/4) and the Royal Society now has Sectional Committee 0 to process fellowship nominations for Computer Scientists.

the north london book of the not quite dead

The best kept secret at "5" was how you got a new identity. the north london book of the not quite dead was a list of reliable people who had accumulated decades of mathem and could provide a subset of it to anyone needing a new name/face, collection of postcards, convincing travel brochures, expired passports, driving licenses, theater and museum club membership etc etc

Json Bourne was in need of a new skin - his command line was completely exposed, and if he wanted to retain one iota of quantum supremacy, he needed to stop the supervillain known simply as "The Cloud"without giving away his whole herd of mastodon instances. 

Json checked into the Assembly House where he new he could meet Gold or possibly if he was really lucky, Robert Smith, who could tell a tale or two, and certainly sang from the same hymnsheet.

He was in luck, and minutes later, with the help of ald pay phone, and a desguised vax emulator which really sucked, but still had some cycles left, he was able to bring down the Bad Guy.

SYS$SHUTDOWN had never rang so warmly, as Json, or Robrt as he was now travelling, set off down Kentish Town High St to pick up some of the pigs-in-blankets, who were playing later at the Fiddler's Elbow in support of the Pond Street flood relief fund.