The Flex Computer System was developed by Michael Foster and Ian Currie of Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE)[1] in Malvern, England, during the late 1970s and 1980s.
This immediately precluded a whole class of errors arising from the misuse (deliberate or accidental) of pointers.
This allowed arbitrary code and data structures to be written and retrieved transparently, without recourse to external encodings.
Another notable feature of Flex was the notion of shaky pointers, more recently often called weak references, which points to blocks of memory that could be freed at the next garbage collection.
[5] COMFLEX, a packet switching network capable of transmitting data at magnetic-disc speed, was developed alongside Flex.