Early Years
My first career was the Merchant Navy. Travelling around Europe and the Americas and being paid for it was exciting for a teenager.
One day, not long after my seventeenth birthday, I entered the galley to find the cook fighting two Monrovian’s by violently swinging a frying pan between his attackers. After they left he said to me “Grab a weapon and get ready for the next attack”.
Sure enough two minutes later it began. The temperature so hot it was impossible to close the port holes and two heads looked in to make a grab for anything they could find.
“Bang! Bang!” Swiftly the cook gave the intruders reason to remove their hands from our stuff and grab their heads. This led to lots of blood and screaming and shouting and the attackers ran for their lives as fellow shipmates joined us wielding axes and crowbars.
I thought everyone overreacted but news the next day of sailors murdered on a ship birthed a hundred yards from us helped me understand how lucky I was to sail with an experienced crew.
From there we sailed to Lagos Nigeria and the captain would not drop anchor for fear of attack. I was given a shot gun and instructed if anyone tried to board I was to fire one shot over their heads, and if that did not deter them I was to shoot to kill.
Monrovia and Lagos are different today, at least I hope so, but 30 years ago I believed this kind of thing only happened in novels.
After six years of the merchant navy and achieving master mariner certification I took a radical step and quit to start a family. I remember the sea and my adventures with fond nostalgia. Seventeen years later my eldest son persuaded me to join him on an RYA course and we both qualified as Yachtmasters. The family still retains close ties to the sea and sailing. It is a relaxing way to travel, and through first hand knowledge I know where to avoid!
and then…
I returned to investigate further education. A good grade in maths caused family and friends to encourage me to take a course in book keeping and accountancy. I decided I would rather shoot myself.
In 1980 my Dad bought a Sinclair zx80 but as he couldn’t figure it out I took it with me to sea and most evenings, with nothing better to do and no TV, began writing programs. This was a time when people believed you would need a computer the size of a mountain to do anything useful and that “pong” was an elaborate game built to train astronauts how to dock in zero gravity.
I tried to turn my programming skill into cash without success. With a young family and no prospects of further education or training in IT I took the first high paying job I could find, selling photocopiers in London W1. I wasn’t good at that either but I did at least meet interesting people and forge a bond that would lead to something important later in life.
My first self generated income
While working for a fax sales company a client asked if we new anything about a computer called a Psion Organiser. He had bought a bar code reader and needed a program to check stock on arrival. I listened to his specification and although had never come across one before promised to have a look. He entrusted me with the small handheld computer along with it’s manual and the bar-code reader.
A week later he returned, tried the program I wrote and asked how much it would cost him. I flushed as I had not thought about cost, and anyway, he should be asking my boss. I stuttered “It was nothing, please have it and remember us when you next need a new fax machine!”
Fortunately he didn’t see it that way, took out his wallet and wrote a cheque for £100.
Later he told his friends about me and my career as a freelance programmer launched. I began to study and focused on the new IBM PC and DOS operating system from Microsoft, chiefly because a friend gave me a PC.
There was little competition for PC programmers and I was soon working on contracts for city banking institutions. Nat West Centrepoint, BHF, Deutsche Bank, Midland, and Royal Bank of Scotland. Sometimes contracts overlapped but this was not seen as a threat. Banks in the 80′s did not believe PC’s would be a threat to their business!
By 1987 I had my first Internet connection and was writing programs for the typesetting industry. Companies in the UK and USA needed to share postscript files ready for printing. Instead of sending discs by courier they would share files via space on my Unix server. It saved the cost of couriers and meant errors could be corrected with ease.
In 1990 I worked with a typesetting company to create an “eps viewer”. This application enabled a PC to interpret a postscript file and display it on a PC screen. This meant they no longer had to rip data to the printer to check for layout and spelling errors any more. As a page could take up to an hour to print on expensive materials the eps viewer had commercial value potential. If you consider postscript as markup then we developed an early browser. Ironically we got the idea from the “Gofer Browser” a precursor to the modern browser today. The difference was our viewer displayed the correct fonts (as long as they were available on the PC) and a wire frame box where images displayed and the gofer only showed text in a single optional font.
The project owners decided against selling the viewer commercially as they did not wish to help their competitors.
What I do now
I seek new projects and when I find something exciting, promises to be fun and challenging set my heart to see it through to completion. Adeptra is a good example, now one of the most important anti fraud applications implemented by more than 70% of the worlds banking institutions.
For the last seven years I have been considering earth shatterring Internet applications… and rejecting them all. The adventure is in the search as much as it is in the completion. Like a mountaineer who sets off in conquest of Everest reaching the summit is the prize but the achievement is in the clime. We do not necessarily have to reach the summit each time to enjoy what we do.
The next application has arrived
I have now found my next adventure. Still a few months from delivery but progress has been made raising investment already. If you have worked with Eric and I in the past please contact us, we would love to hear from you again!
