Hi, thanks for taking an interest.

I am 43 years old, British, married with no children and currently living in Ferney-Voltaire, France.

Click here if you want to see my CV

I have been playing with computers since I got my first Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. Somewhere I even have a book of handwritten listings for this.

Later on I had an assortment of computers going through a Spectrum 16k, an Atari 800XL, a Commodore 64 and even at one point a Jupiter Ace! (A bizzare machine which, unlike all the rest, spoke Forth instead of BASIC. This moved on to an Atari 520STFM which got progressively hacked until it was living in a 19″ rack case with it’s DRAM replaced by bigger ICs which had the 18 pin sockets piggybacked onto the 16 pin PCB and the extra 2 legs wired by hand. 32 times of course. I also played a lot with computer music – at this time the C64 with it’s 3 voice + noise synthesiser chip (wow!) was by far the best, not counting the Amiga which hardly anyone could afford.

During this time I graduated from college – I studied electronics not computing. I already knew how to program and use computers. I wanted to really understand how they worked. When I started college I really only had the vaguest idea of what “electronics” involved.

Then came the event which changed forever my involvement with these annoying yet wonderful machines. I got hold of an old hard disk – an MFM 40Mb drive. I flirted briefly with the idea of building an adapter for my trusty Atari ST but finally decided to take the plunge and build around this hard disk my very first IBM PC compatible. This machine was very fast for the time – a 25MHz 80286 processor with 1 MByte of RAM. Once I had expansion slots I went rapidly through a series of expansions until I have ended up with a variety of machines including one for my parents (which has since been upgraded again!).

Eventually I worked my way through a variety of hardware & software design jobs until, having reached Product Development Manager at Jiskoot, I made the jump into technical marketing and spent almost a year at Olivetti Personal Computers as Technical Product Manager. This was excellent fun, especially the launch of MMX. I drove round demoing the new cool graphics and sound, and learned respect for Sales people.

During this time I ran a company in my spare time called Quantum Computing Ltd in the UK with my lifelong friend Les Salmon – we only closed it down because our “real” careers were becoming too successful.

After this I was headhunted by Philips to work in the (then) new field of Digital Television. This was in early 1997, before most people had heard of it. I was drafted in to bring some internet and Java expertise to the converging worlds.

These days I am the VP Strategy at ADB, still working in the field of Digital Television, Broadband & Networking. This is a fast-moving industry, and (so far) I never have to run spreadsheets on the target hardware.