David May was my PhD supervisor and always spoke very highly of Sir Tony Hoare.
Edit: I’m also lucky enough to have worked with Geoff Barrett, the guy that completed that formal verification (and went on to do numerous other interesting things). Some people may be interested to learn that this work was the very first formal verification of an FPU - and the famous Intel FPU bug could have been avoided had Intel been using the verification methods that the Inmos and University teams pioneered.
Both of them are legitimately wonderful and intelligent humans that I can only use positive adjectives to describe, but the one I was referring to in this was Jim Woodcock [2]. He had many, many nice things to say about Tony Hoare.
[1] Just so I'm not misleading people, I didn't finish my PhD. No fault at all of the advisor or the school.
Source: David loved to tell some of these stories to us as students at Bristol.
Transputer and Occam were, in this sense, too early. A rebuild now combining more recent developments from Effect Algebras would be very interesting technically. (Commercially there are all sorts of barriers).
On specifically the relationship between Occam and Transputer architecture: http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/transputer1984.pdf
Wider reading: http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave