Born in Lancashire, England, I was brought up mainly in Burton on Trent, in the Midlands ("that are sodden and unkind" according to Belloc -- the first adjective particularly appropriate for Burton: then the town at the centre of the British brewing industry, where my father ran the smallest of the six breweries).
Burton Grammar school had a most inspiring Physics teacher - Ezra Somekh - with broad cultural interests outside his subject, and it is almost certainly his encouragement that got me into Oxford.
Drifted a bit further south to read chemistry at Balliol College, Oxford. This was where I got my first contact with computers -- Algol on KDF9 in 1965, and Fortran on IBM 7030 (Stretch) during my "Part II" at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, down the road at Harwell.
Then to Dundee University, where I met Andy Krasun, another Oxford graduate and future IBMer, who was then Union President. I got diverted into computing and business (also becoming Union President), and lost interest in Chemistry.
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After programming, and a period running the Union, shooting X-rays at crystals had lost its appeal, so I decided to seek a job that would combine computing and business, and joined IBM.
This page last updated 13 September 2010 by
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