History

Until 1983, computers to me, like most people, were deeply disinteresting things responsible for producing electricity bills and such like (I hadn't made the intellectual leap that video games were actually computers).

Then during the summer break the BBC Horizon series showed a documentary about how computer graphics were being used to model things like how new skyscrapers would appear in a city (apparently they would look like a bunch of metal coathangers, but that wasn't the point). I was intrigued.

When school restarted, a non-credit course was offered to learn BASIC. As soon as a wrote my first (working) line of code, I was hooked. After getting to grips with the school's RM-380Z I convinced my parents to buy (me) a BBC Micro which, together with my bud, Greg Trezise, we took to its limits and beyond — adding our own EPROMs to enhance the native O/S.

After high-school I decided to take a year out before University, and snagged a job at the Statistical section of the University of London School Examinations Board. I got to write SPSS and Fortran programs on punched cards, and run them on the IBM mainframe.

During three years at the University of Birmingham, England obtaining an honors degree in Software Engineering, I learned Pascal and C, took a liking to the concepts of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and for my final year project used the Fairlight CMI.

My real career is covered in my resume.