I first started working in a public house (The Coach & Horses, Portsmouth) at weekend’s, bottling-up and doing odd jobs. When I was 16, I started to work in the restaurant as a silver service waiter. Later I also worked in the bars. This continued even after I left school and started to work full-time.

Left school in 1978 and joined G B Jackson Associates of Chichester. Started working as a trainee computer operator on a Honeywell 62/60 running GCOS4. The company was a computer bureau and specialized in running payrolls as well as general and purchase ledgers. Later on it also did the billing for companies such as Books for Children  and Grolier's. During my time with this company I progress from trainee to senior operator. While here I taught myself COBOL programming, although at a fairly basic level. Unfortunately the company went into receivership in 1983 and was taken over by SystemSolve of Sunbury-on-Thames. At this point I left to go and work for BT.

Started working for BT in April 1983. This was as a 'Data Processing Officer' or DPO (BT still used the old job titles that it inherited from it's days when it was part of the Civil Service). In the first 18 months I worked in dispatch, putting telephone bills into envelopes. I then moved onto printing bills and other output in the print room. In 1985, I moved in to job assembly. Main responsibility was producing the punch cards for the evening billing runs, getting tapes ready for the billing runs and the receipt and dispatch of tapes to other BT centres. During this time I started working on a pair of IBM 4381's running VM and VSE. This continued until 1988 when I then started working on an IBM 3090 using MVS. REXX, ISPF, CA7, CA1, Control-D and Sysmaster were some of the tools that I used during this time. 

In 1992 work was undertaken to print some of the ICL output on the laser printers which were on the IBM. I was involved in automating the process on the IBM side.  Tapes were used as the method of transfer and details of the volumes to be used were sent by file transfer from ICL to IBM. I automated the process of receiving the tape details and setting up the necessary JCL to process the tapes. Later, the IBM systems moved from Portsmouth and a result of this a new product was installed called NETEX from Network Systems (later to be taken over by StorageTek, then split off again).

Whilst at BT, I also has some exposure to UNISYS and Sequent Unix systems. I have also been involved in several disaster recovery exercises.

In 1997 I decided to leave BT, as the centre was due to be closed and as a result I joined IBM, working on a major internal order and fulfilement system. In my time at IBM I have done a course on ISO9001 and have also gained experience in OPC, DB2, QMF, IMS and CICS.

Interests

My interests are aviation, computing, and classical music. I enjoy going to classical music concerts, traveling (especially in France and Italy) and good food and wine.

Education

1963 - 1967 Elm Road County Infant School, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire.

1967 - 1971 Elm Road County Primary School, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire.

1971 - 1971 Northern Parade Primary School, Hilsea, Portsmouth.

1971 - 1978 City of Portsmouth Technical High School, Hilsea, Portsmouth.

Qualifications obtained

I have also been on the following courses :-